"We are the eyes of the public…"

I’ve been to a mystical land! It’s a land where press photographers are loved and feted. They are considered professionals whose role is vital to the nation. They are not abused on the streets and the Head Of State, the President,  joins them for dinner when they have their annual awards ceremony, the winner of which is whisked away in a limo’ for a live prime time television interview. They are interviewed again for breakfast television and their winning photograph is plastered all over the national newspapers. One previous winner told me how he and a colleague were given a civic reception in their home town the year they won. To get there you just head north, turn left at Birmingham and keep on going.  You’ll probably need a boat or a plane, but it’s not as far as you think.
If you think I’m talking about the U.S.A then you are wrong! This land of dreams, where our profession is so loved is in fact the Republic Of  Ireland.
I’ve just returned from Dublin, after three days of judging the Press Photographer’s Association of Ireland ‘AIB Photojournalism Awards 2012’, along with my colleague photographer Peter Macdiarmid from Getty Images and legendary former picture editor of The Irish Times, Dermot O’Shea. We spent a fantastic weekend going through the cream of Irish press photography. The decisions were hard to make, but we were happy to spend the hours in a darkened room because the photography was just amazing. The results are almost a state secret, only to be revealed in February at the gala black tie dinner attended by non other than the Irish President Michael Higgins himself! Peter and myself were treated like visiting dignitaries and taken to the best restaurants and bars in Dublin, where the reception was never anything other than fiercely friendly. We are both looking forward to returning for the main event.

The thing that struck us both during the visit and which spurred me on to writing this, my first ever blog post, was how different the atmosphere was around the subject of press photography in Ireland. It really is respected, all the things I mentioned at the start of this post are true. On the final day of judging we were visited in the hotel, where the judging was taking place, by six photographers from the Irish national press for a photocall and on the following day the readers were put off their breakfast by our (mine and Pete’s) ugly mugs staring back at them. These national papers will also run massive spreads after the winners have been announced. The winner, as I said earlier, is taken to be interviewed on ‘The Late Late Show’, Ireland’s highest rated and most prestigious television show on RTE. This is fantastic support and publicity for the world of photojournalism and it is quite obviously paying dividends evident in the Irish public’s attitude to our job. The sponsor, Allied Irish Bank (AIB) must take a great deal of the credit too. They tour the exhibition to their branches around the country bringing this high quality work to the grassroots. Small communities getting the chance to see the work of the country’s finest. AIB also marry the tour to local festivals, so the photography becomes part of community events. It’s a simple idea but brilliantly effective because it makes people feel part of our job. It’s there for them to see in their high street.
Bearing all this in mind makes you wonder. Could we TheBPPA do the same !? Maybe we would need a fairy godmother sponsor? The work involved in touring any exhibition is daunting and probably beyond a volunteer lead organisation at the moment, but the publicity in other areas of the media must be achievable. We’ve got friends in television, why can’t we get them onside!? We all mostly work for newspapers and magazines, why can’t we get them to do spreads of member’s work when we have a completed project? I used to do ‘vox pops’ with Boris Johnson, surely City Hall is a prime exhibition space?We need ideas and we need everyone to get behind the cause…….
Whatever we do we’d better do it fast! The Leveson Inquiry set up following the phone hacking scandal, was very quick to turn it’s guns on press photographers. It’s easy to see why….we are ‘low hanging fruit’. The visible face of journalism. We stand on the street, we don’t hide in an office. We come face to face with the public and from experience I can tell you they are not big fans. We need to win them over. We need them to understand that we are there to serve them. We are there to show them what’s going on.
Andrew Wiard, a fellow TheBPPA board member and respected photojournalist, coined this brilliant phrase at a recent meeting when he said, “We are the eyes of the public..”
All we have to do now is work to get them to see it!

The BPPA’s second submission to the Leveson Inquiry

When the Leveson Inquiry first opened we had little or no idea that press photographers would come in for so much criticism and abuse from the witnesses. At the association’s AGM in November we formed a plan to do what we could to counter this and put our side of the story. Shortly afterwards we sent an initial submission in the form of an open letter to Lord Justice Leveson and his team to see if we could be added as a “core participant’ at The Inquiry.
We were refused that status on the grounds that we were, apparently, both adequately represented and because press photography wasn’t a specific topic for the inquiry. We had expected to be refused and so the job of drafting the second, longer, submission began. The BPPA’s Board approved it at the end of last week and it was submitted ahead of the resumption of The Inquiry on Monday 9th January. The full document is 18 pages long and almost impossible to summarise in a blog posting so here are some key parts of the INTRODUCTION, our four-part STRATEGY and the CONCLUSION in full:
OUTLINE
The association is in a position to make a unique and positive contribution to the debate by providing a more accurate, up-to-date and informed assessment than any other organisation on the specific topics where we have expertise. In this written submission The BPPA will offer The Inquiry our views on:

  • The culture and practices of professional press photographers
  • The market place for news pictures and how it affects those cultures and practices
  • The problems that the market for celebrity images are causing
  • Privacy laws vs public interest

As well as our proposals for

  • Cooperation between all parts of the media to establish clear and enforceable ethical guidelines and codes of behaviour and etiquette
  • The reduction and elimination of the problems of unethical photographers, the so-called ‘stalkerazzi’
STRATEGY
The current international and multi-platform market is, however, no place for voluntary codes to function in isolation. The BPPA’s Board is of the opinion that we need a four-pronged strategy:
  • Make the publishers of websites, blogs, magazines and newspapers and their editors financially and professionally responsible for any lack of due diligence in checking how, where and why pictures that they are publishing were taken. Photographs acquired from citizen journalists, CCTV systems and inexperienced photographers should have a clear and strict series of tests applied before publication to verify their provenance
  • Images purchased from holders of UK Press Cards or from reputable agencies that are members of a United Kingdom Press Card Authority member body would require a lower standard of checking and proof because the photographer holding the press card would, according to the new ethical code, already have performed tests as they were shot. Should the images turn out to have been acquired irresponsibly, that would constitute a breach of the code of ethics that they sign up to when receiving their new UK Press Card
  • Strengthening of the UK Press Card scheme with an enforceable code of conduct including the suspensions and cancellations of cards. This obviously will not stop the cowboys who don’t have genuine press cards but it will provide a framework within which to work
  • Agree a simple outline about exactly which laws apply to photographers when they are going about their legitimate business: trespass, assault, intimidation, harassment and so on. It would also be advisable to clarify where and when the various elements of the Human Rights Act and the UN Convention on the Rights of The Child become applicable without allowing rich and powerful vested interests to slip a de-facto privacy law in by the back door

CONCLUSION
The British Press Photographers’ Association is very keen to be a partner to The Inquiry when solutions are discussed and when recommendations are made. We believe that it is in the long-term interests of our profession to contribute to the discussion and to help to shape the future of the industry. The association has an excellent track record in negotiating, agreeing and publicising codes of conduct. The BPPA and other photographer groups got together with the Metropolitan Police and then with the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) to agree the guidelines by which we work alongside each other. These guidelines have been in place for several years and have been very successful.
We would recommend the four-pronged strategy outline previously because we believe that adopting it would provide the following outcomes:

  • To provide assurances to the general public that professional journalists exist and that our work is ethical, legal and trustworthy
  • To create clear and unambiguous rules for the conduct of media workers
  • To establish systems within all publications, whether they are print, on-line or broadcast to check where and how material was sourced
  • To use the market place and existing legislation to control the so-called ‘stalkerazzi’

Anyone with the money can buy a camera and call themselves photographers and, as things stand, all of us have to contend with the actions of the relatively small number of unethical operators out there on a daily basis. Several times in this submission we have referred to press photographers as the very visible face of the media and all of our colleagues can relate stories of being shouted at, abused and even assaulted because of a general perception that all news photographers stalk celebrities for a living. This is just not true and The BPPA wishes to make that clear.
There are a large number of genuine and well-behaved entertainment and celebrity specialists who never cross the line, break the law or act outside any new rules that we might develop whose careers could be greatly assisted if we get this process right.
The introduction of a French style privacy law would be the archetypal ‘sledgehammer to crack a walnut’ combined with a textbook case of ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’. We support the clarification of existing laws and the establishment of a meaningful, clear, enforceable and unambiguous ethical framework as the correct path along which to proceed.
WHAT TO DO NEXT…
We achieved significant impact with our social media campaign when we published our initial submission and we need to at least match that effort with this document IF we are going to achieve our next objective, which is to get a seat at the table if and when The Inquiry starts to make reccomendations about the future and press photography.

Education, education, education…

Back in 1997 Tony Blair made his famous “education, education,education” speech. Well… he made at least three speeches where he used that line but that doesn’t stop it being an important landmark in British political history. Don’t worry, The BPPA isn’t going to get all party-political on you but we are very interested in education and we are currently looking into what we can do to promote press photography through education.
The first idea is to start very close to home and see if there is any way we can get some proper investment into continuing professional development (CPD) for working professionals. In these tight times, could there be something that our government could do to help with the costs of training and uprating our skills? How about a decent tax break for training? What if, instead of deducting the cost of training off of your marginal rate of taxation, you could deduct 50% or even 100% of the costs from your tax bill up to £2,000 in any given tax year? At the moment a £500 training session would still cost you £500 before you submit your tax return and then you would effectively get between £100 and £200 back off of your tax bill depending on whether you pay the Inland Revenue (above the basic amounts) at 20% or 40%. Wouldn’t it be a good idea if you could have the first £2,000 of training at 50%, 60% or even 100%?
At a point in the economic cycle where experts, pundits and commentators are all saying that the economy needs some proper stimulus measures, wouldn’t investing in CPD and training be a very good start? Professional organisations need to put this to MPs and our MPs need to put this to Ministers.
The second part of the association’s look towards education is a small pilot scheme for mentoring new photographers and students on industry specific courses using a Facebook Group where willing mentors – professionals with loads of relevant experience – can give some to give advice, criticism and answer questions from menthes. It’s in its very early stages but the willingness of some amazing photographers to take part shows just how much the profession wants to help channel the energies of new photographers in the right direction.
The third area we are looking at has come in response to an enquiry from a small company who want to encourage UK schools to get involved in publishing their own newspapers and to do it properly. The BPPA has offered some help and in return we want to get lots of messages out to schools, their teachers and their pupils:

  • Copyright – every creative work has a copyright owner and students producing even the smallest newspapers need to be careful using other people’s work
  • Ethics – based on the PCC Editor’s Code and various other codes of practice students should realise that journalistic ethics is NOT an oxymoron
  • Economics – producing newspapers costs money and the older age groups involved in the project need to know just how much

The project hasn’t got enough funding yet and we have offered our support if they get it going and are prepared to emphasise these key points. In the USA almost every high school has a newspaper and the dream is that we can achieve that here too. It is no coincidence that Americans have a greater respect for the media than we do and maybe that could in some part be due to many more citizens having been involved in publishing early on in their education.
Whether or not you believe that Tony Blair and David Blunkett achieved anything with their big election issue of the ’97 election, there can be few people who don’t think that education in its widest sense is a good thing. It doesn’t matter whether you are at primary school or whether you have been in the industry for 25 years or more we could all benefit from knowing more about the press.

Roy Greenslade's article

Former Daily Mirror Editor turned academic Roy Greenslade wrote a column for the London Evening Standard yesterday entitled “Editors must curbs excesses of stalkerazzi” and a lot of it made a lot of sense:

  • He agreed that the majority of press photographers do behave ethically all of the time
  • He said that “we have to rely on editors to stick to the current code of practice, which prohibits photographic harassment. Given that it hasn’t worked thus far, perhaps we need to create a new clause to deal specifically with the blight of the stalking snappers”
  • He concluded that “editors have to take responsibility for researching the provenance of the pictures they publish. They provide the market and they need to buy from accredited sources or, at least, make sure the photograph was obtained without needless intrusion and bad behaviour”
  • He has introduced the term “stalkerazzi” into the debate

We aren’t looking to excuse the behaviour of those with cameras who behave badly. We are looking to bring a bit of balance to the Leveson Inquiry, to point out where we think the issues are and to bring hundreds of years of collective experience into the equation when a plan of action is made.
The trouble is that, despite being a Professor of Journalism, he has allowed himself to muddy the waters with personal anecdotes – one from Los Angeles where the stalkerazzi problem makes London look like a Gentlemens’ club and another from back when Princess Diana was the principal target for the paparazzi. The BPPA has spoken to photographers who ran with the ‘Diana Pack’ and none of them remember the abuse and provocation that the Professor mentions.
It’s a shame that his list of anecdotes didn’t include being a guest at a dinner held by The BPPA in 1990 where the association gave him a platform to launch the Ian Parry Scholarship – a fund in memory of a brave young press photographer who lost his life doing what press photographers do best; a fund that The BPPA still supports to this day and a charity whose name is written into the association’s constitution.
We don’t want to get into any more of a point by point discussion of Roy Greenslade’s article because that would be missing the point.
There is a problem, several celebrity and industry witnesses have given their point of view and it’s time that the inquiry heard from a profession that has been blamed for the actions of a tiny number of people, most of whom are not either British or professionals.

Current affairs…

A group of photographers that I am teaching have got exams next week and there is a good chance that they will get one question on “current affairs” in the world of photography. Drawing up a list of potential topics I suddenly realised that there have been a lot of issues that affect us over the last year or so and I wondered how many working photographers will be totally up to date on all of them.
That got me thinking again (it’s turning into a bad habit) and I started to realise that anyone who bothers to take part in or even lurk around the countless web and email based discussion forums will probably be OK but that anyone who just gets up, does their job, sends in the invoice and then gets on with their life probably won’t be OK. These days, you have to work very hard to keep up to date but for those of you who are interested, here is the list that I came up with:

  • The Leveson Inquiry into the ethics, culture and practices of the press
  • Privacy laws
  • Photographers and the coverage of the recent riots
  • How the media deals with the repatriation of the bodies of dead servicemen and women
  • The Royal wedding(s)
  • What is a paparazzi and how does the public perception of the affect how we work
  • Real world health and safety for photographers at home and overseas
  • Citizen journalism and how to deal with it positively
  • The UK Press Card: its history and its place in the industry of today
  • What the 2012 Olympics will mean for all of us
  • Sports and entertainment licensing
  • Section 43, clause 44 and the current moves towards collective licensing

Not a bad list and I’m sure that there are other current topics that we all need to know about to do our jobs properly. We all know that the laws around police/media relations, copyright and human rights are having huge effects on our daily working lives. Has there ever been a time in the history of news photography where so much has to be known about so many things by so few?

The Social Media Photo Conundrum

So, fellow professionals… answer me this… why should The BPPA be faced with a blank screen when visitors try to look at the photos on our Facebook page? 

The answer is, sadly, that there don’t seem to be any services out there who treat images with respect. If they aren’t stripping the metadata, they are selling your work. If they aren’t asking you to hand over your copyright they are making pictures far too easy to grab. Plus – once your work has been stolen/sold/borrowed we all know that getting it taken down or paid for requires a lot of effort and a not inconsiderable amount of resources.
Our work is very desirable if you are a penniless blogger or a corporate that ‘has no budget for pictures’ and a lot of our members work for agencies who have a ‘no pictures on social media’ policy. We want to show off our members’ work and we know that our pages, blogs and tweets would be far stronger with some of those superb pictures but do we want to take that risk? That is what you call a conundrum!
So what should we do? Should The BPPA remain in the mildly odd position of having to keep its Facebook page picture free or is there another way…

What press photographers do…

Every time you open a newspaper, click on a news website or check out what is happening in the world there is a very high chance that you will be looking at the work of a professional press photographer. From Tiananman Square to Old Trafford and from the red carpet at the latest film premiere to protests on the streets of our cities those iconic images were almost certainly produced by us and our colleagues.
It can be fun, it’s often exciting and it is regularly very dangerous. Press photographers go into situations where very few people apart from the emergency services and armed forces go because we take the job of recording the news and creating a historical record very seriously and because we believe in a free press. Our work sometimes has a very short ‘shelf-life’ but in that newspaper, that magazine or on that website and on that day it has real importance and our world would be poorer without it.
Next time you see a stunning news picture please think about what the photographer must have done to get it. The chances are that they got up early, travelled a fair way, used the skills that they have learned over several years and made full use of the latest technology to deliver it to their editors.
We often hear that these days “anyone can take a good picture” but that isn’t the point. Sure, most people take the odd good picture three or four times a year but professional press photographers do it 99.9% of the time, under pressure and to impossible deadlines and they have a damned good excuse for the 0.1% of occasions when their pictures might be considered less than good.
If that isn’t enough, press photographers do all of this within the law, within codes of conduct and under the watchful eye of a critical public. A public who often mistake badly behaved people with posh cameras – citizen journalists and citizen paparazzi – for the genuine professionals and tar us all with the same dirty brush.

Initial submission to The Leveson Inquiry by The BPPA.

The BPPA today wrote to the Leveson Inquiry and asked to be added to the list of those giving evidence. We did this because of the one-way traffic from witnesses criticising photographers and because of the dreadfully lazy television journalism that has painted each and every one of us as the worst kind of citizen paparazzi. This is what we said:
Initial submission to The Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practice & ethics of the press by The British Press Photographers’ Association
Introduction
The British Press Photographers’ Association (The BPPA) has amongst its membership a large percentage of the country’s front line news photographers. Founded in 1984 to ‘promote and inspire the highest ethical, technical and creative standards from within the profession’, The BPPA has a unique perspective on the current practices and market place for press photographs in the United Kingdom. Press photographers led the way when it came to establishing the guidelines by which all UK Police forces (via ACPO) work alongside the media in the field and we would endeavour to bring a similar problem solving approach to the Inquiry.
Request to be added to the list of Core Participants
In the light of the nature of the evidence being given to The Inquiry by various celebrity witnesses, the association’s board took the decision that we needed to make a submission and to seek to give evidence in person. In reading the list of persons and organisations that may be considered as Core Participants, the association believes that the weight of commentary during the opening weeks of the Inquiry makes press photographers “subject to explicit or significant criticism during the inquiry proceedings or in its report.” In the light of this, we would contend that The BPPA is able to give evidence on the issues of culture, practices and ethics, which the Inquiry might not otherwise be able to obtain.
The BPPA can speak for press photographers who, because of the highly fragmented nature of our employment may well speak to the BPPA when they would not speak to the Inquiry. The Inquiry should know that our membership breaks down as follows:
• Directly employed – 24%
• Employed on fixed or rolling contracts 12%
• Working through agencies as freelance photographers 18%
• Entirely freelance 46%
As a profession attracting a great deal of criticism we would further contend that such a diverse group will not be represented in an equitable and fair way at an inquiry where such representation is both vital for a large and key group of professionals, and for the Inquiry’s ability to hear and consider the widest range of informed opinions.
Press photographers are, for various reasons, the very visible face of the UK print media. Because of this we are regularly subjected to false attribution and accusations as well as verbal abuse from members of the public and from a significant number of people who work in the celebrity, entertainment and even law and order industries. The continuous use of pejorative terms such as ‘paparazzi’ about the widest spectrum of news photographers harms our collective reputations.
Our Evidence
The BPPA would seek to provide evidence on the following:
• The culture and practices of professional press photographers
• The market place for news pictures and how it affects those cultures and practices
• The problems that the market for celebrity images is causing
• The dangers of introducing French style privacy laws
• The need for cooperation between all parts of the media to establish clear and enforceable ethical guidelines and codes of behaviour and etiquette
• Our proposals to help control the problems of unethical photographers and citizen journalists with cameras
The association believes that it would be able to make a very positive contribution to The Inquiry by providing a more accurate, up-to-date and informed assessment than any other organisation on the specific topics where we have expertise.

Check your insurance if you are covering civil disorder stories

©Michael Graae

Yesterday morning I received a renewal reminder from the company that insures my camera gear. Twenty minutes later I read a posting on a photographers’ discussion forum warning that some of the companies who offer specialist cover for press photographers equipment were saying that they were not going to pay out for equipment stolen, lost or damaged during the recent civil disturbances in London. I put on my “Vice Chairman of The BPPA” hat and got straight on the phone to the company that the association recommends to it’s members.
I had a long conversation with one of the directors of this major camera and public liabilities insurance brokerage regarding their position on claims from photographers who had equipment damaged or stolen during the recent violence.
He explained that they placed business with three separate insurance underwriters and that they were attempting to get a statement agreed by all three so that they could let us know what the definitive position was. As this was being negotiated, the Prime Minister was speaking during the emergency debate in the House of Commons. David Cameron mention the word ‘riot’ and said that there would be payments made under the 1886 Riot (Damages) Act. This led two of the underwriters to pull back from agreeing the statement until they could get clarification about the limitations of where and how the 1886 Act would be applied.
The insurance broker’s own interpretation of the Act says that at no time was a ‘riot’ declared and therefore they couldn’t see how payments under it could be expected. This left them having to make the decision to press the underwriters for their interpretations of the situation but the Association of British Insurers have not issued their guidance yet and therefore none of the insurance companies are prepared to stick their necks out either.
We mentioned that one of the other brokers had told a photographer that their claim would be paid. He was surprised by this given that none of the London underwriters had made a decision yet.
We went on to talk about the cost of policies where full riot cover would be included and his estimate was that the current policies costing between 2% and 3% of the value of the kit insured would rise to between 15% and 20% and possibly more. He said that they would be happy to find any deals out there but that the existence of the 1886 Riot Act would remain a complicating factor.
To sum up, we don’t know whether their underwriters will pay out themselves or whether they will pass the costs onto the Government. The worst case scenario would be if the 1886 Act does not come into play but that the underwriters take a very strict line on their policy wording and not pay out if you, as a photographer, went to cover the disturbances in full knowledge of the dangers involved.
The best advice for those affected on the first night in Tottenham would be to say that you went to cover a protest demo and it developed into civil disorder whilst you were there and that you were not able to avoid remaining. The other nights are more difficult because few people went to shoot those events ‘by accident’.
If there are pictures of you wearing helmets or body armour anywhere you should consider removing them. Blog posts, tweets and Facebook entries could prove that you knew what you were letting yourself in for as well. We are not advocating committing insurance fraud but you need to decide before submitting a claim what your position at the time was. If you are claiming with any of the major insurance brokers I would suggest that you get a crime number and hold back, if you can, until we get a definitive statement.