| |
 |
| © Martin Schoeller / Vaughan Hannigan |
| Click image to see more photos from these emerging agencies. |
While the photo industry has seen unprecedented consolidation in recent years, a small number of creative professionals have emerged from the pepper mill of Corbis and Getty armed with intimate knowledge of how the big agencies work and new ideas to improve on their models.
Vaughan Hannigan/August
In a recently renovated office in Manhattan's East Village, just across from Grace Church on Broadway and 10th Street, Bill Hannigan and Thea Vaughan are building a business that should make the giants of the photo industry quite nervous.
Their two new ventures -- the artist representation agency that bears their names and August, a celebrity-portraiture syndication business -- utilize the skills they gained while working for top agencies Corbis and MediaVast, but add a new twist.
While the demise of Getty and Corbis is certainly a long way off, a bit of unraveling has already begun. Corbis recently decided to shut down the rep business Vaughan started, and in June Getty shook up the management of Orchard, its boutique assignment division.
"It doesn't seem like the big companies have been able to get their hands around the representation side [of the business]," Vaughan says. "They're also less patient with letting things grow and develop." It's true that artist representation is a relationship-based business, and one built on customer service. Big guys like Getty and Corbis sometimes seem better equipped for the mass-distribution game.
Vaughan and Hannigan aren't doing anything revolutionary, just providing good customer service in a timely manner. Vaughan Hannigan launched with just four photographers: Martin Schoeller, Jill Greenberg, Brad Harris, and Giles Revell. The photographer-to-agent ratio is an unusually high two to one, and Vaughan says she wants to cap it at six to eight photographers to keep the emphasis on quality. August, meanwhile, should be syndicating around 25 celebrity-portrait photographers within the next year. Both Vaughan and Hannigan plan to be in the business for the long haul, so they want to attract photographers with career longevity.
"I think clients really latch on to photographers who are constantly evolving and pursuing personal work, constantly bringing new ideas to the table," Vaughan says. "Money jobs come and go but that longevity is going to come from what they're doing on their own time."
The main thing Hannigan learned from his tenure at Corbis was the importance of a strong technology foundation, and on a recent office visit he proudly showed off the state-of-the-art digital asset management system used to power August. Built to their specifications in less than three weeks by Los Angeles firm DigitalFusion, the system is 100 percent Web-based and built for speed. Hannigan says the institution of a Web-based publicist approval process has sped up the turn-around time on images considerably, so the process from capture to posting to the Website can now take less than a week.
"This would have been so cost-prohibitive, five years ago, we could never have done it," says Hannigan, who is confident August's technology-fueled speed will give it an advantage in today's media-driven climate.
Both Vaughan and Hannigan studied photography at art school, so to be executives at a major company took them awhile to get used to. Now that they're out of the corporate world, both say they're spending more time doing what they love. "I don't think I've launched my PowerPoint once since we started this," Hannigan jokes.
|
