Dear Lira

Re: Changes to Contributor Commission Structure – Effective 1 September 2026

I am writing to you as the Secretary of The British Press Photographers’ Association who also happens to be a contributor to Alamy as part of my day job as an editorial and news photographer with forty years of experience in the industry.

Within hours of Alamy’s email to contributors inviting them to look at the new structure and to read your blog we had received a number of messages from members who were asking the association to have a look at what it would mean for them and their large number of colleagues who have collections of images available for licensing through yourselves. We have taken some time and investigated what it would mean for our members and used a few members of our Board who, like me, license images through Alamy as examples of what it would mean.

Having to go between three different pieces of information to calculate where each contributor sat in your new payment structure was unnecessarily painful. Once we had overcome that hurdle it became clear that the vast majority of those who have pictures and who are making sales will have their percentage of those sales halved or worse.

Being paid twenty or even fifteen percent of the total amount of money achieved for already low licensing deals was, when we reported back, totally unacceptable to the vast majority of those we were working with. Many of us stuck with Alamy when the percentage paid to the copyright owner went down to forty percent but to have that halved, and more than halved, in many cases is unacceptable.

We are aware that Alamy needs to invest in technology constantly to remain competitive in a difficult marketplace. What we cannot accept is that contributors who have been loyal to your platform and who do not cause you any problems should bear the cost of it.

We would ask you, therefore, to do the following:

1. Rethink your proposals and keep the contributors’ minimum share at 40%
2. Introduce a way for those who wish to withdraw their copyright material to do so without the current six month plus period and unacceptable bureaucracy

The BPPA raised questions about, and objections to, the Getty Images and Shutterstock deal. We did it because of the harm it could have done to the market for news and archive photographs. Alamy’s latest move does nothing to help with that battle and many of our members who are contributors won’t want to have their work licensed for a percentage deal that makes it not worth their time or energy.

Thank you for your time and kind regards

Neil Turner
Secretary, The BPPA

]]> https://thebppa.com/the-bppas-submission-to-the-competition-and-market-authoritys-review-in-to-getty-images-purchase-of-shutterstock/ Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:54:24 +0000 https://thebppa.com/?p=113692 As part of the Competition and Market Authority’s (CMA) review in to the proposed purchase of Shutterstock by Getty Images, The BPPA was invited to submit evidence, informed by our members’ knowledge and experience within the industry.

Following a review of submissions, the CMA have provisionally ruled that the purchase cannot be approved unless Shutterstock first sells off its editorial business.

The CMA said the merger could result in a “substantial lessening of competition” within the UK’s editorial image market, in which Getty Images and Shutterstock currently provide separate and competing news-gathering operations.

In words that closely mirrored parts of the BPPA’s submission, the Financial Times quoted Margot Daly, chair of the independent inquiry group leading the CMA investigation as saying: “We provisionally found that a loss of competition could lead to UK media outlets, large and small, facing a loss of choice or getting a more expensive service, with knock-on effects for consumers that rely on high-quality content to stay up to date.”

The BPPA specifically represents the interests of photojournalists delivering high-quality editorial photography and, in our submission, represents the broadest interests of both our freelance and staff members, and of the wider public who consume our member’s work.

Read the full submission (pdf)

Brian was a founding member of The Press Photographers’ Association, which became The British Press Photographers’ Association, when its first meeting was held in a pub off Fleet Street in 1984. He was the youngest staff photographer at The Times when he was just 24 and went on to be the first staff photographer when The Independent launched in 1986. During his 55 year career he covered the famine in Ethiopia, the civil war in Rhodesia, the aftermath of the Falklands war and the fall of the Berlin Wall which was documented in his book “…and then the Prime Minister hit me”, published in 2016.

Brian was due to speak about his life’s work at ‘Assignments LIVE: An evening with Brian Harris’ on Wednesday 8th October. The event will go ahead in his memory and be presented by friends and colleagues, we look forward to raising a glass to him in the bar afterwards.

Brian passed away peacefully surrounded by his family at home in Thaxted on Saturday 4th October at the age of 73 after a short battle with cancer. Our thoughts and condolences are with his family and friends at this sad time.

Photograph courtesy of Steve Raymer

The BPPA’s Press Photographer of the Year for 2024 – Danny Lawson

Category winners

Arts & Entertainment – Danny Lawson

Business – Danny Lawson

Essay – Stefan Rousseau

News – Danny Lawson

Portrait – Danny Lawson

Royal – Aaron Chown

Sport (action) – Clive Mason

Sport (away from the action) – Adrian Dennis

Sport (major events) – (joint winners) Marc Aspland & Julian Finney

Young Photographer – Jake Lindley

Highly Commended

Arts & Entertainment – David Parry

Business – Tony Johnson

Essay – Dan Kitwood

News – Chris Furlong

Portrait – Fabio De Paolo

Royal – Kelvin Bruce

Sport (action) – Julian Finney & Kirsty Wigglesworth

Sport (away from the action) – Michael Steele

Young Photographer – Ryan Jenkinson

Over 1400 photographs taken throughout the year were entered into ten categories by photographers working in the UK and abroad. Members of the association were then invited to vote for their favourite entries in each category with members of the board then choosing the overall winning portfolio from the category winners. A competition for press photographers, judged by press photographers.

You can view all the Winning and Highly Commended entries in our gallery HERE.

Comment from the Chair:

We see the work of British press photographers every day in our newspapers and on news websites and it’s all too easy to take it for granted. Putting this much quality work together from such a wide range of photographers makes it clear that photography is still a premier medium when it comes to communicating what’s happening in the news.

2024 was a stand-out year for sports, we had a general election, civil unrest, extreme weather, a difficult year for the Royal Family and much more. Seeing our photographers respond not only to these big jobs but also finding new and visually compelling ways of approaching typical diary jobs is what sets this year’s winners apart from the crowd.

Once again, the Young Photographer category has delivered a very high standard of work and we look forward to watching them as they continue to progress their careers over the next few years.

I’d like to thank everyone for entering, judging and to the team at The BPPA for their hard work running this competition on behalf of press photographers.

Jamie Lorriman, Chair, The BPPA

This consultation sought views on proposals to deliver against the government’s objectives for this area, which are:

• Boosting trust and transparency between sectors, by ensuring AI developers provide right holders with greater clarity about how they use their material.
• Enhancing right holders’ control over whether or not their works are used to train AI models, and their ability to be paid for its use where they so wish.
• Ensuring AI developers have access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK and support innovation across the UK AI sector.

Thanks to a great deal of hard work from Board Member Andrew Wiard we have made a submission to the consultation which makes it clear that we, as photographers, have a lot to lose if the Government introduce an opt-out system for those wishing to not have their work used for creating AI models. We have pointed out that the current copyright laws, if enhanced and properly supported, offer rights holders the best chance of protection against widespread copyright theft that these AI models are employing.

If you’d like to read it, you can find The BPPA’s submission here

Unlike many competitions out there where the judging takes place behind closed doors, with ours you see everything, every picture submitted is here for members to vote on. The BPPA exists to promote press photography and this competition is run by photographers for photographers, showcasing the very best out there.

CLICK HERE TO SEE ENTRIES

(we recommend looking on a computer rather than a phone)

All fully paid up members are entitled to vote for each category winner using the voting form which was been sent by email at 9am this morning (Monday 24th February 2025).

Please vote by 23:59 on Sunday 2nd March as we will not be extending the deadline this year. Please vote early to avoid missing the deadline.

The British Press Photographers’ Association are bringing their annual exhibition, ‘Assignments 2024 – The BPPA Exhibition’, to the beautiful Bridge Cottage within historic Port Sunlight. It is the first time the exhibition has been presented in Merseyside and follows a successful showcase in London’s Southbank.

The exhibition is a showcase of the best 100 photographs from members of The BPPA, celebrating the best of press photography. Over the summer, a changing display of 50 photographs will take over Bridge Cottage, one of Port Sunlight’s most distinctive Arts and Crafts-style houses. The exhibition is presented in partnership with Port Sunlight Village Trust, the independent charity responsible for preserving and promoting the village.

Curated by five leading industry figures, this year’s exhibition covers stories from March 2023 through to the spring of 2024 and will feature everything from sports and entertainment through to politics and protest with royals, celebrities, and global events as seen through the eyes of the association’s photographers.

Founded in the mid-1980s, The BPPA has sought to promote and inspire the highest ethical, technical, and creative standards from within the industry, and once again is set to deliver an exhibition of photographs from the cutting edge of journalism.

Thanks to the support of Canon UK, Assignments 2024 is FREE to attend, with donations to Port Sunlight Village Trust welcome.

This year’s curators were photojournalist David Burnett, Reuters UK and Ireland Chief Photographer Suzanne Plunkett, photojournalist Steve Back, Press Association photographer Jane Barlow, and Getty Images sports photographer Justin Setterfield.

• Assignments 2024 is FREE to attend.
• The address is 10 Bridge St, Birkenhead, Wirral CH62 4UP
• It’s open between Wednesday and Sunday from 10am to 4pm, between 8th June and 1st September 2024.

Curated by five leading industry figures, this year’s exhibition covers stories from March 2023 through to the spring of 2024 and will feature everything from sports and entertainment to politics and protests with royals, celebrities, and global events as seen through the eyes of the association’s photographers.

Founded in the mid-1980s, The BPPA has sought to promote and inspire the highest ethical, technical, and creative standards from within the industry and once again is set to deliver an exhibition of photographs from the cutting edge of journalism.

• Assignments 2024 is FREE to attend.
• Open from 11am to 6pm daily between 24th May and 2nd June 2024.
• Covers 5 floors of The Bargehouse on London’s Southbank, part of Oxo Tower Wharf.
• Once again the BPPA bookshop will return during the exhibition.

The Bargehouse can be found on Google Maps here , you can use the post code SE1 9PH or on What3Words the location is lovely.spirit.voted

David Burnett

David Burnett (born Salt Lake City, Utah 1946) learned photography at the Olympus High School yearbook, and later shot pictures for the yearbook (mostly sports) at Colorado College (BA Poli Sci ’68.)  His career as a rocket scientist was thwarted by a not-to-be-named math professor who mumbled during Calculus class.   He began working as a freelancer for Time, and later LIFE magazine in the late 1960s, spending two years covering the war in Vietnam.   Following the demise of LIFE Magazine weekly in 1972, he joined the French photo agency Gamma and traveled the world for them before subsequently founding Contact Press Images, in New York in 1975.  His work for news magazines in Europe and the US has included politics, sports, and portraiture as well as the news.  He has covered every Summer Olympic Games since 1984, as well as the 2002, 2014, and 2018 Winter Games, and photographed every American President since John F Kennedy. His awards include ‘Magazine Photographer of the Year’ from the Pictures of the Year Competition, the ‘World Press Photo of the Year’, and the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club. He has produced photographic essays for Time, Fortune, GEO, Paris-Match and ESPN Magazine.  He served on the World Press Photo Jury in 1997, 1999, and chaired the Jury in 2011. In 2018 he was awarded the Sprague Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Press Photographers Association.   He is the author of three photographic books: “Soul Rebel – An Intimate Portrait of Bob Marley”,   “44 Days : Iran and the Remaking of the World,” pictures taken during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the recently published “l’Homme Sans Gravité”  (“Man Without Gravity”)  a collection of five decades of sports pictures.

Suzanne Plunkett

Suzanne Plunkett is a veteran photojournalist who has worked as a staff photographer for the Associated Press in New York where she took one of the iconic photographs of the attacks at the U.S. World Trade on September 11, 2001. From 2003-2005, as Chief Photographer for the AP in Indonesia, Suzanne managed a team of five Jakarta-based photographers and a large network of freelancers following the Bali Bombings and during the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. Suzanne worked as Bloomberg’s UK senior photographer before joining Reuters as a staff photographer in London for seven years, where she covered the 2012 Olympics, the Wimbledon Tennis Championships, London Fashion Week, one royal wedding (Will and Kate), two royal births (George and Charlotte) and spent many rainy days outside Downing Street and rainy evenings covering Premier League matches. Suzanne left Reuters in 2015 to teach and to freelance in London for clients that included the New York Times and CNN. She founded the UK chapter of Women Photograph – an organization that works to mentor and support the work of women and nonbinary visual journalists. Suzanne returned to Reuters last year and took on the role of chief photographer for the UK and Ireland.

Steve Back

Steve Back has spent 54 years in the business, including 30 years as a staff and freelance photographer on the Daily Mail. He can now be found most weeks on Downing Street covering politics. Steve said “It’s been an amazing journey which thankfully is still not over! Best job in the world.”

Jane Barlow

Jane Barlow has been a professional press photographer for over 20 years. After working for local papers and agencies including seven years with The Scotsman, Jane joined the Press Association in 2016 as a staff photographer covering news, politics, sport and features across Scotland and sometimes beyond.

Justin Setterfield

Justin Setterfield is a sports photographer for Getty Images covering events around the world with a focus on Football. He recently won the SJA Sports Photographer of the Year and SJA 2023 Football Portfolio awards.

• Entries are open NOW until midnight on Friday 5th April 2024.
• Each member can enter up to 10 photographs taken between 11th March 2023 and 5th April 2024 (inclusive).
• You must be a full member of The BPPA to enter – if you aren’t you can join now.
• Thanks to our generous sponsors at Canon UK it is FREE to enter although entrants whose work is selected will be asked to pay a fee of £50 per picture towards the cost of framing (capped at £100 max). Once the exhibition tour is complete, if you wish to keep your framed print there will be an opportunity to collect it.
• Entries will be selected anonymously by a panel of curators drawn from across the industry.