Historical photos auctioned – a new news agency business!
AFP is launching its first-ever auction with some 200 photos from its analogue photography collection, offering a rare opportunity to buy unique prints capturing important historic moments.
National news agencies, once the gatekeepers of news and a thriving business model, have been for more than a decade now under severe pressure: traditional media transformed to free digital distribution channels, clients evolved to competitors and the big IT putting everyone in a corner.
Diversification has been one of the strategies implemented in order to survive and activities once unheard of or not closely related to news agencies (like press release distribution, video crew leasing, print-ready pages, to name some of a few…)
AFP is the French news agency, but considered as an international one, in the sense that its coverage caliber, its reach and size place it in the same range as Reuters and Bloomberg. AFP has a high editorial reputation and its journalists have received numerous awards, especially in photojournalism and its production is used by media worldwide.
It is obvious that AFP decided to use this photographic archive and reputation in a wider, innovative way and started a B2C experiment, by putting up for auction some for its analogue, historic photos from its archive. AFP’s photographic collection includes more than 15 million photos. The ‘‘analogue’’ collection consists of six million images (from the 1920s to 1997), including 350,000 glass plate negatives.
‘‘Some of the photos on sale are real photographic ‘surprises’, while others are symbolic moments that made international news in the last century. Several have become cult classics,’’ says Marielle Eudes, AFP’s director of photography. ‘‘They bear witness not only to the richness of the Agency’s documents from a historical perspective, but also to an exceptional photographic quality that is little known to the general public.’’
The selection on sale is made up of photographs illustrating current events from 1944 – the founding year of AFP – up to 1998, when the Agency started rolling out digital photography.
Photos for sale at ‘‘The Analogue Years’’ include:
- News photos, including from the Liberation of Paris to the release of Mandela
- Scoops like the photographs of Che Guevara’s death
- Spot news pictures, including from the robbery of the Crédit de la Bourse
- Scenes from daily life
- Celebrity photos, from Salvador Dali to James Baldwin
- Signature images with a focus on the photographs of Eric Schwab, one of the first photographers to work for AFP after the agency’s founding in 1944
Each photograph, in black and white or colour, will be offered as a unique ‘‘special edition’’ copy and will be signed and stamped by AFP, accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
The live auction will take place on October 3, with two weeks of open bidding, and until then, some of the photos are exhibited in several physical locations in Paris.
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