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PHOTOGRAPHY RIGHTS AND PRICING – Gary Cole

Posted on: 05-11-2015 Posted in: Photography

One could probably write an entire book on the various combinations of rights and pricing that most any photographer could face in his career. However, if you’ll allow me another fishing analogy, it’s not necessary to know everything about fly fishing in order to catch a fish. If you have a firm grasp on the realities of your market place and a realistic view of the quality of your images, pricing, which always has a relationship to rights, becomes a much simpler equation.

iPad--ad-290As I’ve mentioned previously, at Playboy our basic instruction from Hefner was to buy all rights whenever possible. Of course, that meant we needed to not only buy all rights from the photographer but also make certain we had a solid all rights release from the model. In both cases, photographer and model, the agreements become legally valid if there is value received…a shooting fee, a model fee. It could be as little as a dollar or, as in the case of Bruce Weber shooting for Victoria’s Secret, it could be $75,000 a day.

Playboy bought all rights because Hefner knew he didn’t want the images to appear anywhere else and that there was significant reuse value in the images. In order to accomplish that goal, we made employees of the majority of photographers who did work for us. Or sometimes we put them on contracts that specified they were doing our assignments on a “work for hire” basis which meant we owned all rights to the shooting.

Even with freelancers, we always attempted to assign them on a work for hire agreement and had them sign an assignment sheet to that effect. Playboy paid premium rates plus the glamour and prestige of being published in Playboy helped us convince photographers to go along with our practice of buying all rights.

photography_comics_568When Playboy initiated its International Editions Division, it wasn’t necessary for us to pay additional fees for our all rights purchases because the agreements covered worldwide usage. However, in an effort to be fair to photographers, we initiated a per page bonus program. If a photographer’s image was published in one of the international editions, he received a small bonus payment. That didn’t seem like much at first but as the editions expanded into more and more countries, the bonuses could be sizeable by the end of the year.

Sometimes circumstances required us to make an assignment on some other basis: one-time world rights; one-time North American rights; one-time rights with the codicil that the image could be published a second time in an anthology or retrospective context. There were at least a dozen variations on the theme.

Zienna-Hat-Freckles568There was a time when US Playboy paid photographers on a per page rate. When I first started there in the 70’s, that rate was $1,000 per published page with a smaller minimum guarantee if the shooting was not published. That formula ceased to work in later years as there was simply too much variation in the marketplace between photographers and assignments. So our rate for photographers such as Herb Ritts or Helmut Newton were quite different than for someone we might hire to shoot a Playmate test which then got published. Also, if we fed a photographer a steady stream of assignments, we typically settled on a rate that worked for both parties over the long haul.

The ASMP has some very good information about rights and pricing on their site at Licensing Guide | American Society of Media Photographers.

Finally, when you are trying to land a new client, it is important to be flexible until you establish yourself as a reliable source of photography.

One of my favorite sayings is “make sure what you’re trying to sell is worth at least as much or more than the price you’re asking.”

~ Gary Cole

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  • (2) Comments
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  1. Bill05-11-15

    How would you guys that shot for Hefner denote which era where the ladies were spot on the target and really made the magazine a success. Hence, I probably should buy one of those DVD’s with all the back issues a bit like how Model Railroader Magazine sells all their issues from 1934-2010 for $200. Though, I do have to wonder if Playboy is still selling their content in that format or do they want people to subscribe to a monthly fee based system since Apple will stop using the USB and probably the cd drive. Do you guys ever get the feeling Apple is killing industries and just build their monopoly.

    (reply)
  2. gary cole05-19-15

    Difficult to pick one year or even a decade. Beautiful Playmates were scattered throughout Playboy’s history. You can subscribe online ($60 annual) which will give you each new monthly magazine plus access to all past issues. Not a bad deal.

    (reply)

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