The Pope Opposed

Pope Benedict XVI, flanked by his security team,crossing Lambeth Bridge © Justin Tallis

Pope Benedict XVI supporters, London © Jess Hurd

Pope Benedict XVI supporters, London © Jess Hurd

Pope Benedict XVI crossing Lambeth Bridge in the popemobile © Justin Tallis

Given the Catholic Church’s broadminded attitudes to the sexual education of children (especially young boys), liberal view of sexuality and its farsighted promotion of condom use (not to mention blessing of the Third Reich, the Lateran Treaty with Mussolini or the subsequent assistance with war criminals’ travel plans), much of the protests against the Pope inevitably were about child abuse by priests.. However, the protests seem to have received coverage in inverse proportion to their importance from a supine and sycophantic media happy to pour praise on the pontificator and his conservative allies.

Gaydar angels join protests against the visit of Pope Benedict XVI © Jess Hurd

Protests against the visit of Pope Benedict XVI. London © Jess Hurd

Protests against the visit of Pope © Jess Hurd

Peter Tachell, Outrage joins protests against the visit of Pope © Jess Hurd

The TUC debates opposition to the ConDem austerity measures

The media and talked up the threat from the unions: The Daily Mail warned, “Unions vow to halt UK with strikes”, Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun claimed, “Union leaders are meeting to draw up plans for the biggest strike action the country has seen in decades, in protest at public spending cuts… Britain is teetering on the brink of an Autumn of Discontent”.

Delegates protest against the ConDem cuts as Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England speaks. © Jess Hurd

In fact, whilst delegates showed their opposition to what they widely regard as disastrous and unnecessary cuts in social spending during the speech by Mervyn King (governor of the Bank of England), congress in fact agreed to a “lobby of delegates and fringe meetings at the Liberal Democrat and Conservative conferences” in September and a rally in Westminster on 19 October, on the eve of the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review. In March of next year, 11 months after the ConDems first came to office, there may be a “national demonstration” and a national campaign including local communities.

Brendan Barber and TUC delegates launch the campaign against the cuts. © Jess Hurd

Not quite the militant mass strike action predicted by the media: “At present it is a theoretical debate and the government can point to poll ratings showing public support,” TUC’s Brendan Barber told the Guardian, “but once people begin to see the impact, and reality dawns, I think there will be a real reaction”.

Richard Balfe Conservatives envoy to the Trade Union movement. TUC conference © John Harris

Selling Stock

Anyone seriously interested in “The State of the Industry” should subscribe to Jim Pickerell’s Selling Stock website. He reports faithfully on the picture library and agency world as a whole and uses his extensive expertise and knowledge to fillet through the figures to present much of the facts of the matter, albeit with a US bias, and has been doing so since the very inception of the digital revolution.

Like many, however, he tends to present economic processes and technological change as wholly determinate, immutable manifestations of “natural” capitalist forces that admit no contravention. “The Market” and those who, prior to the crash, were seen as “Masters of the Universe”, are thus mythologised as Joseph Schumpeter’s “Creative Destruction” is invoked:

“Innovation by entrepreneurs is the force that sustains long-term economic growth, even as it destroys the value of established companies and laborers that enjoy some degree of monopoly power derived from previous technological, organizational, regulatory, and economic paradigms.”

It is a common enough prognosis these days. “There is no alternative” to the depreciation. As photographers no longer piss about with smelly chemicals in the dark getting dermatitis and listening to Women’s Hour or tediously attaching labels to trannies and poking them into plastic sheets prior to shipping,  we have lost our “monopolisable skills” and must accept ever decreasing prices for a product that we’re told almost anybody can now produce. Those who question this wisdom or think otherwise are typically dismissed as foolishly idealistic, wanting a return to some previous pre-digital (and equally mythological as I recall) “golden age” of restrictive practices. We’re sort of Pre-Raphaelites of the Photo-industry – though not as good looking, “Wheel Tappers” as one railway trade union editor put it – oh alright then “Luddites” (although popularly they are done a great disservice). In short, dissenters are characterised as wishful thinkers failing to comprehend the harsh commercial realities to which they must inevitably bend and submit or break.

Firstly, I feel this blinds us to understanding the development of the dominant business model and to the contradictions that it has and continues to develop – for example the divergence of the interest of between the supplier and the distributor or to put it another way, the business model undermines the content. Their fatalism demoralises us into giving up the possibility of competing on something other than price.

Secondly, these assertions divert us from the qualitative, ethical and ideational aspects of photography (and its delivery) – that which distinguishes great pictures. At one end of the industry “stock photography” is a “commodity” in the sense of being ubiquitous and generalizable. Typically a positivistic reaffirmation of the status quo and displaying a useful a tendency towards replicating “Fake pictures of Fake People”, it is like a machine rotating on the same spot. By contrast the best photography is limited only by history. It is specific, embodies something of the difficulties and complexities of real human experience, encapsulates contradictions or even denies the easy dominant social narratives. Intuition, intellect and events synthesise into inspiration or what Philip Jones Griffiths called “The upward spiral towards enlightenment…… The more you see, the more you understand, and the more you understand the more you see”. Ideas are also a material force in the world. New businesses and modus operandi will continue to emerge as these dynamics unfold.

Finally, and forgive me for stepping back, but we should contemplate the fact that as the 70th anniversaries come around, at the time of Joseph Schumpeter’s writing the long years of the last Great Depression were finally ended when capitalism’s “creative destruction” was unleashed in the form of Hitler’s devastating rampage across Europe and the “Final Solution”.

Selling a Lie

“The education industry represents the largest market opportunity for private sector involvement…. In the USA spending on 5-12 education is as large as the domestic auto industry. It is the largest segment of the education and the one almost entirely in the public sector. Clearly education offers new and lucrative opportunities…” Merrill Lynch Annual Report – 1999

In keeping with the US style of a philanthropic capitalism so de rigueur these days, 5 years after hurricane Katrina Getty Images “supports New Orleans” with Coming Back: New Orleans Resurgent Featuring work by award-winning Getty Images photographer Mario Tama, Getty is donating the proceeds from a largely uninformative smooth jazz coffee table book of images of destruction verses rebuild, to the educational provider ‘New Schools for New Orleans’.

“New Orleans children deserve great schools. Five years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has redefined for the nation how a system of schools can meet the needs of every child” gushes Sarah Newell Usdin of New Schools for New Orleans, “Coming Back highlights the power of hope in a time of crisis, and we are grateful to Getty Images for its continued generous support of our cause.”

Plausible, even laudable, education goes to the heart of any parent, and “free schools” sound, well, rather groovy…. but sadly, I’m afraid not. Milton Friedman’s last kick before leaving us in 2006 was to push, successfully, for the privatisation of New Orleans public schools. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu referred to the city as the country’s “laboratory for innovation and change”. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, 107 schools were taken over by the Recovery School District in order to fast-track the transformation of the public school system into a patchwork of privately-run facilities. Today, three-quarters of New Orleans public schools have been handed over to charter operations and 70 percent of students attend charter schools. Predictably, advocates of privatizing education have touted test score improvements between 2005—when students had their lives utterly uprooted and many did not even attend school for long periods in the state—and 2009. However, The U.S. Department of Education study in five states last year found that in those states 79 percent of the charter schools met state standards in student testing, compared with 94 percent of public schools. The replacement of public schools by charters has splintered oversight of quality, conditions at facilities, curriculum, and fair-enrollment standards. Charters are managed by independent boards and operate outside of many of the regulations public schools must follow. New Orleans’ charter schools are managed by more than 30 separate operators.

Ten months after Hurricane Katrina © Howard Davies/reportdigital.co.uk

The large companies in America and now so powerful they can determine educational provision. This has been accomplished primarily through apparently philanthropic pump priming by the likes of The Walton family Foundation of Wal-Mart, and by a group around The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The trick is to pour money into the charters whilst leaving the remaining public provision underfunded, which in turn engenders further calls for more charter provision. Once played, the usual reduction in quality to maximize profits inevitably commences. The stakes are high — education spend is more than $800 billion per annum (almost the size of US trade deficit with China). Their aims include: eliminating any local democratic control, getting rid of union representation, a standardized curriculum, merit pay for teachers based on pupil results (an idea Obama advocates). And of course, whilst fronted by socially acceptable “not-for-profit” as necessary, all servicing and purchasing will be made from “for-profit” companies.

Young people create a community garden, New Orleans © Jim West/reportdigital.co.uk

Having scrapped state school refurbishments the ConDems are hoping to do something similar here through Academy status. The necessary legislation was passed on July 27. The potential profits are obvious and the vultures are circling, though the pickings have yet to be beefed up and most schools seem reluctant with only 153 out of a potential 24,000 applying to become Academies to date. But what of the social aim? “The Coalition” have not billed themselves as hardline Thatcherites – we are “All in this Together” after all in “The Big Society”.  Gove points to the “free schools” in Sweden, talks of “raising standards” and “closing the attainment gap”.  According to NUT Exec member Alex Kenny “Gove’s free schools and academies will exacerbate these differences and create division, inequality, and failure. They will neither raise standards nor close the achievement gap. All the evidence from Sweden, the principal model for Gove’s free schools, points to this; the evidence is the exact opposite of politicians’ claims.” Since the introduction of 1000 free schools, they have slipped down the international league table for pupil performance.  According to the Director general of the Swedish National Agency for Education:  “The students and the new schools have, in general, better standards, but it has to do with their parents and backgrounds. They come from well educated families. We have had increasing segregation and decreasing results so we can’t say that increased competition between schools has led to better results”.

So we must assume, putting the profits of and ideological commitment to privatisation aside, Gove’s aim is to recreate the stratified education system of the 1950s to match our modern “austerity” (dovetailing with the NHS replacement, a pre 1948 National Health Market). It is the increased differentiation, the removal of any comprehensive system –  where standards will drop, where education will promote rather than reduce social differentiation, educate to regiment and demoralise rather than enlighten, where the middle classes can buy their way to success (and health) and where working-class children will “know their place”.

Dilapidated school buildings, Coventry © John Harris/reportdigital.co.uk

Getty cuts Istock contributors earnings

Despite the over saturation and stagnation of microstock markets Getty raised Istock prices at the beginning of the year as have other microstock producers (from bugger all to not a lot). Having purchased Istock in 2006 Getty itself was taken over by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman in a deal which whilst fantastically lucrative for Klein and Getty steeped Getty Images in $1 billion worth of debt. Ceasing creative production infavour of cherry picking pictures from Flickr (Yahoo were thought to be about to licence) in an interview with The Times in October last year Klien made the position clear- they would not be selling pictures at “the kind of price that will pay a professional photographer’s mortgage”.

However, Getty has now decided they no longer need “the little guys” and want to reduce their overheads in dealing with them to help the balance sheet. Indeed Getty is apparently very concerned that Istock gross profits may be dropping as low as 70% rather than the preferred 80%.

iStockphoto COO Kelly Thompson: “Since roughly 2005 we’ve been aware of a basic problem with how our business works. As the company grows, the overall percentage we pay out to contributing artists increases. In the most basic terms that means that iStock becomes less profitable with increased success. As a business model, it’s simply unsustainable: businesses should get more profitable as they grow. This is a long-term problem that needs to be addressed.”

Arrangements for contributor remuneration are fiendishly complex, with six levels of royalty- the experience for Istockers must be verging on the Kafkaesque- Getty has changed the retrospective evaluation that determines the percentage paid from a figure determined by “lifetime” of sales to those of the previous year. This is thought to discipline exclusive contributors to “feed the beast” whilst getting rid of the less profitable amateurs. Overall earnings are expected to decline by up to 25% depending on the schema. Contributors are complaining they thought IStock would always take care of its exclusives: “Boy, was I wrong. Greed has taken over IStock. I fear there will be no going back with Getty calling the shots.” They will have to work harder and harder for diminishing returns, one likened it to being in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else- if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Few are born with Mr Getty’s wealth. Alice’s experience is being mirrored in workplaces across America as The Dream turns into a nightmare of speedups, wage reductions, benefit cuts, and job losses. The outcome in the US, with 70 percent of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index reporting their earnings, profits are running 42 percent higher than a year ago, even though sales are up only 9 percent.