By DAVID JOLLY


PARIS - When photojournalists and their admirers gather in southern France at the end of the month for Visa pour l’Image, the annual celebration of their craft, many practitioners may well be wondering how much longer they can hang on.

Newspapers and magazines are slashing picture budgets or going out of business altogether, and television stations have cut back on news coverage in favor of less costly fare. Pictures and video shot by amateurs on cellphones are posted to Web sites minutes after events occur. Photographers trying to make a living from shooting the news are calling it a crisis.

In the latest sign of distress, the company that owns the photo agency Gamma sought protection from creditors on July 28 after a loss of $4.2 million in the first half of the year as sales fell by nearly a third.

Gamma was founded in 1966 by the photographers Raymond Depardon and Gilles Caron. Along with the agencies Sygma, Sipa and, earlier, Magnum, it helped make Paris a world capital for photojournalism.

A Paris court gave Gamma’s owner, Eyedea Presse, six months to reorganize itself. “We held out as long as we could, but this business model just isn’t viable anymore,” said Stephane Ledoux, the company’s chief executive.

Olivia Riant, a spokeswoman for Eyedea Presse, said jobs would be cut. “The problem is that news photography is finished,” she said. “Gamma wants to go back to magazines and newsmagazines. We will stop covering daily news events to more deeply cover issues.”

Gamma was acquired in 1999 by Hachette Filipacchi Medias, a unit of Lagardere, which combined it with other operations to provide photos for its magazines. But the business did not prosper, and it was sold in 2007 to Green Recovery, an investment fund. Gamma’s rivals have fared little better: Sygma was acquired by Corbis in 1999, and Sipa by Sud Communication in 2001.

Photojournalism experienced a golden age from before World War II through the 1970s. Magazines like Time, Life and Paris Match - and virtually all of the world’s major newspapers - had the budgets to employ legions of shooters.

But today, at a time of shrinking advertising revenue and layoffs, photo editors at many publications have to think hard about sending a photographer into the field at a cost of $250 a day or more and expenses. The major newswires - The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters, along with regional powerhouses like Kyodo in Japan and Xinhua in China - dominate news photography. But the business of marketing and selling digitized pictures is led by two global companies: Getty Images, founded in 1995, and Corbis, founded in 1989 by the Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates.

The stock photo companies rose to prominence by buying up hundreds of image archives and making them available for sale online. While they continue to sponsor photojournalism, the companies are, in effect, services for managing digital property rights.

At Getty, 70 percent of revenue is generated by the sale of stock images, said its chief executive, Jonathan Klein. “Photojournalism means the photographers can tell the story themselves in pictures, and there were places where they could publish those photos,” he said. “In the print world, many, if not most, of those places have since disappeared.”

Still, he added, there are reasons to be optimistic, because “thanks to the Web, there are now billions of pages for photographers to show their work.”

Jean-Francois Leroy, organizer of the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival, which runs in Perpignan, France, for two weeks beginning August 29, pointed to a declining emphasis in the media on serious subjects as another problem.

“Photographers are producing plenty of great stuff, but now the media seem interested only in celebrities,” he said. “When Michael Jackson died, it wasn’t part of the news, it was the news. How many photographs of his funeral did we really need?”


Stephane Ledoux, head of Gamma, said the agency’s business is no longer viable.