Shutterbug Service Still Has Magazines Covered

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This month’s Vanity Fair has its share of splashy photos, such as recent portraits of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as well as Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian stuntman who jumped from space to Earth last year.

But the magazine’s editors chose a more timeless image for the magazine’s cover – a shot of Audrey Hepburn that came from a Van Nuys photo agency, Motion Picture and Television Photo Archive.

The Vanity Fair cover is quite a calling card for the small shop, which has just a handful of employees but a vast library of archival Hollywood images. MPTV beat out hundreds of other photo sources to get the gig; it competes with international photo giants such as Getty Images and Bill Gates’ Corbis.

But competition from similar agencies isn’t the only challenge. Increasingly, celebrity-focused magazines such as People are likely to buy photos of today’s stars out on the town taken by paparazzi.

So the company a few years ago added a line of business by publishing its images in books. The books sell for a premium price and also serve to promote the agency’s collection of photos. And now, MPTV is accelerating its publishing strategy.

“We made a conscious decision to move with the market,” said Beth Jacques, photo editor at MPTV.

The new tack began after a client started his own publishing house in London, Reel Art Press. MPTV pitched him on the concept of a book.

The books aren’t just your typical coffee-table fare. For example, a limited edition of the first one, “The Rat Pack,” features MPTV’s images of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and their crew, and costs $950. It came out in 2010. Others are more modestly priced, such as “The Kennedys,” which sells for $75, as well as a collection of photos by MPTV’s founder, the late Sid Avery.

Avery’s son, MPTV owner Ron Avery, said the new line of business has helped offset declines in the licensing of images to weekly magazines.

“Book publishing has come up quite a bit,” Avery said.

“When we see collections of images that go together, that’s when we say maybe this will work,” Jacques said.

The agency was started as a non-profit in the mid-1980s. The idea was to preserve images taken by Sid Avery and his friends while enabling the photographers and their descendants to make money. He switched to a for-profit model in 1989 seeking returns on the substantial investment he had made in the company.

The company works with the estates of deceased photographers as well as estates of actors and actresses who own archival images, such as Hepburn, Sinatra, Steve McQueen and Marlon Brando.

MPTV contracts for the right to use the images for certain periods of time, which can range from a few years to perpetuity. The agency also works with living photographers, who shoot red-carpet events, for example.

Avery said the firm has always tried to keep with his father’s way of doing things, which includes taking photos with celebrities’ consent rather than bowing to a public hunger for more unflattering photos.

“We do red carpets but we don’t represent people who chase (celebrities) down and invade their privacy,” Ron Avery said. “That’s not something that we want to get into.”

Digital scans

That might be partly because the agency has enough archival photos to keep busy, with more than 200,000 images in the vault. MPTV began digitally scanning the images in the late 1990s but hasn’t finished the catalog yet. The photos are displayed on the company’s website for photo editors to choose from. The cost of each photo is separately negotiated – the company wouldn’t provide a range – but they generally are lower than the cost of commissioning a photo shoot with one of today’s stars.

In the case of this month’s Vanity Fair cover, the Hepburn shot was licensed in order to illustrate the subject of the story, which focuses on Hepburn’s time in Italy, said Ann Schneider, Vanity Fair senior photo research editor. The magazine did an extensive search before settling on the MPTV shot.

Schneider said the deceased star can still sell magazines en masse.

Now, MPTV is looking forward to the release of two forthcoming book projects that it took to publishers, Avery said, including a collection of work by Mario Casselli, who was known for shooting for TV Guide and Playboy.

Getting more into book publishing provides another avenue for the company’s work to be preserved. It could also spur future licensing deals.

“They could do well with that,” Schneider said. “The value of history changes based on pop culture. Sid Avery might not have known that photos of somebody would mean something later, but they might now.”

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