By JASON BOOTH
Staff Reporter
In the age of television and the Internet, many believe that pictures are displacing words as the primary source of information for today’s children. And that’s good news for PhotoEdit, a Long Beach stock-photo agency that specializes in providing textbook publishers with photographs of subjects ranging from newborn babies to science experiments.
Since its inception in 1987, the firm’s revenues have increased by an average of 30 percent a year growth that’s been fueled by a strong demand from schools to use more and more pictures to supplement the words in educational texts.
“When we started, there was typically one photo for every three pages in a textbook,” said company co-founder Leslye Borden. “Then there was a little photo on each page. Now there is just a little bit of text and lots of photos and charts. The images, not the reading material, are carrying the information.”
When PhotoEdit’s clients are creating a new textbook, they make a list of the types of photographs required. Company staffers then search their library of almost 600,000 slides and come up with a selection of images.
PhotoEdit works with roughly 50 freelance photographers, who supply the library of pictures. While the firm markets the images, they remain the property of the photographers.
Once the images are assembled, they are sent to the publisher, who decides which ones to use. The publisher pays a fee for the one-time use of each image, usually around $200, which is split between PhotoEdit and the photographer who took the picture.
PhotoEdit is far from the only stock-photo agency supplying the textbook industry, but it has carved a niche by building a library of images that highlight America’s ethnic diversity. Borden estimates that around 75 percent of the people featured in its library depict ethnic minorities.
“Different agencies have different subjects,” said Jan Seidel, editor at West Educational Publishing in Agoura Hills. “If you need nature shots you wouldn’t go to PhotoEdit. But if you want pictures of a specific ethnic group, you would go to them.”
Such images are in demand in an era when publishers try to make schoolbooks more appealing to minority students.
“It doesn’t seem that with the backlash against affirmative action, that trend is changing,” said Borden. “In textbooks, diversity is a good educational tool.”
The company was founded on a shoestring budget in Borden’s home in Tarzana, using the bedroom left behind by her college-bound daughter. Borden and co-founder Liz Ely had met in the early 1980s when they were both working as photography researchers for Atlantic Richfield Corp. They later worked as freelance photography researchers for a number of years before setting up their own stock agency.
The company got its start after longtime photographer Alan Oddie retired to the French countryside, leaving his collection of 30,000 slides to Borden and Ely.
Armed with this library, the partners each put up $500, with which they bought a couple of file cabinets and a box of stationery. With another $5 investment, they incorporated in 1988.
“It took us about six months to figure out how to run a business,” Ely said.
After a slow start, the company saw revenues of $30,000 in its second year, growing to an estimated $1.6 million and $1.8 million this year. They moved to their Long Beach location in 1995.
The company has had its share of bumps. In 1997, revenues fell 13 percent from the previous year to $1.3 million, thanks to larger players in the industry that drove down prices.
PhotoEdit responded by lowering its own costs and boosting its sales volume. It has been aided by the use of a newly introduced bar-coding system that allows the firm to track the location and sales history of each of its slides. This enables slides to be shipped more quickly.
“They have an excellent reputation in the industry,” said Judy Feldman, president of Chicago-based photo research firm Feldman & Associates Inc., which tracks photographs for publishing houses such as McGraw-Hill and Harper Collins. “I have been able to count on them to shoot pictures for us on a very tight deadline. They have made my job a lot easier.”
The entire industry, including PhotoEdit, is in the midst of a technological transition from the use of slides to digitized images. Storing images on computers has the advantage of allowing publishers to browse a stock agency’s pictures via the Internet and electronically download the picture they want to use.
PhotoEdit currently has around 6,000 images stored on computer. It recently took out a bank loan (the first in the company’s history) in order to cover the cost of digitizing the rest of its library.
The challenge of changing technology has prompted some companies to drop out of the business altogether. For example, Santa Monica-based Westlight was bought by Corbis Corp. a digital imaging company owned by Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates.
Westlight President Craig Aurness is a fan of PhotoEdit. “It’s a brilliant idea to focus on ethnic diversity. They have developed a niche that other agencies haven’t figured out yet,” Aurness said.
