2014 UK Picture Editor Guild Awards winners announced

Joanne Davidson, The Picture Library Ltd

 
Congratulations to all of the winners at the 2014 Picture Editor Guild Awards. 

  • BT Sports Photographer of the Year: Simon Stacpoole, Offside
  • Getty Royal Photographer of the Year: Andrew Parsons, i-Images
  • News Photographer of the Year: Jeff Mitchell, Getty Images
  • Christie’s Arts & Entertainments Photographer of the Year: Joanne Davidson, The Picture Library Ltd
  • Bloomberg Business Photographer of the Year: Leon Neal, Agence France Presse
  • Fixation Young Photographer of the Year: Henry Nicholls, Newsteam/SWNS
  • Genesis Regional Photographer of the Year: Charles McQuillan, Getty Images
  • Photo Essay of the Year: Jeff Mitchell, Getty Images
  • Citizen Photographer of the Year: Vinesh Raipul


For the full list of winners go to The Picture Editor Guild website

An open letter to Time Inc UK

 
When several photographers started getting letters from Hamish Dawson, Publishing Director  of  Time Inc.(UK) Ltd, Specialist Sport and Leisure with a new rights grab which asked them to agree to sign away all rights in any work that they carried out for the magazines and websites in the group we decided to write to him. Below is that letter and below that is his reply.
We are pretty sure that few people will bother to go down and read what he said in reply but it is worth noting that in the final paragraph he says:
“If an individual contributor does not wish to enter into an All Rights agreement, it may be possible for that individual to negotiate a different arrangement, for example, a Qualified Rights agreement. Each case continues to be considered on its own merits, and that decision remains with the senior team on the brand concerned.”
This is a long way from being the response that we would be looking for but it is a course of action that is open to individual photographers to follow if they are offered work by one of the Time Inc UK titles and they don’t want to sign the new contract.

Dear Mr Dawson

What would make a photographer with well over twenty years experience, a mortgage and a family tell one of his key clients to “get lost” – using language that we couldn’t and wouldn’t want to post on a public facing website?

The answer is your new rights-grabbing contract which includes a not-so-subtle line giving them a choice between signing what appears to be a massively unfair deal or losing any and all chance of supplying you ever again. Sadly, you aren’t the first major publisher and buyer of photography to decide that you want to tear up long-standing agreements which saw you buying licenses to use the photographs whilst the copyright remained with the photographer. Sadly, you probably won’t be the last either.

The reason that the old one was a ‘long-lasting agreement’ was because it was fair – the word ‘equitable’ even comes to mind. The fees paid were OK but the ability to re-sell the work after an initial period of exclusivity made the jobs worth doing. Had you, the publisher, substantially increased the fees payable to the photographers to redress this balance then that sense of fairness may have been saved from what most of those photographers feel will be a sad, painful and untimely death.

Receiving these letters just before Christmas has been causing anger, resentment and pain for a large number of photographers who can be excused for assuming that the calculation within the Time Inc UK management must be that enough existing people with no real option to do otherwise will sign and enough struggling photographers who don’t yet work for you will grasp their opportunity to get more work and keep their heads above water.

Make no mistake, this is not a small adjustment to the terms and conditions under which so many photographers supply work to you. This is moving the goalposts, repainting them and renaming them as ‘scoring portals’.

We would like to give you the opportunity to explain why this is being done. We probably know the obvious answers about maximising shareholder returns and the less obvious ones about protecting the brands but what about the relationship that you had with talented, creative and dedicated suppliers?

Does a rights-grab of this magnitude make it worthwhile destroying relationships that have stood the test of time and that have worked well?

Any explanation that you can provide will be shared with photographers because many of our members are struggling with your decision.

Kind regards

Neil Turner

[email protected]

Dear Mr Turner,

Thank you for your e-mail.

As you correctly observe, we are not the first publisher to re-evaluate our rights purchasing position, and a number of our agreements are indeed long-standing.

Unfortunately, while the agreements may not have changed, the markets, media and commercial circumstances in which we all operate have changed quite dramatically over the last few years, and we now operate in quite a different publishing and media landscape to the one which pertained  when many of our existing rights agreements were first set up.

I would first make the point that most of our existing agreements are between IPC Media and the contributor concerned. Since becoming Time Inc. (UK) Ltd., we have viewed it as necessary to bring these agreements up to date. Secondly, many of our agreements do not acknowledge the fact that the company now has significant and rapidly growing, digital publishing platforms and the new agreements reflect this development.

We have also been encouraging our specialist editorial staff to improve the clarity of their commissioning and written communication, and have set out some standards which we expect to be followed, and which we believe are in the interests of both contributors and the brands alike.

Regarding the All Rights agreement that is being sent to Time Inc. (UK) specialist contributors, it has been our practice for a number of years to ask many of our freelance contributors to enter into either an All Rights or Qualified Rights agreement when we purchase content from them. In many instances we’ve asked contributors to sign on-going agreements to cover all the material that they sell to Time Inc. called ‘Core Rights Agreements’. So the agreements that are now being dispatched, while they have been updated and re-worded, are not a new innovation and having a Core Rights Agreement in place ensures that payments can be made to contributors much more speedily than might be the case if individual contracts had to be sent out and agreed on a job-by-job basis.

If an individual contributor does not wish to enter into an All Rights agreement, it may be possible for that individual to negotiate a different arrangement, for example, a Qualified Rights agreement. Each case continues to be considered on its own merits, and that decision remains with the senior team on the brand concerned. Contributors should, however, bear in mind that commercial realities dictate that we will be using the content that we purchase in many different ways, both now and in the future and quite clearly, unless both parties are willing to enter an agreement that suits them both, there is no viable basis on which work can be commissioned or accepted.

I hope that this clarifies our position.

Kind regards

Hamish Dawson
Publishing Director 

Time Inc.(UK) Ltd. Specialist Sport and Leisure

Golf Monthly; Rugby World; World Soccer; The Field; Shooting Times; Sporting Gun; Shooting Gazette; Shootinguk.co.uk; Angler’s Mail; Amateur Gardening

If you know any photographers who are affected by this or who might be affected by it in the future, please share this with them. The terms and conditions under which many of us work are being steadily eroded by publishers who seem to opt for the ‘nuclear’ all-rights option rather than consult with their previously loyal contributors and explore the more equitable route of agreeing licenses that suit the current world of publishing. It is also interesting to note that Time Inc haven’t tried to do this to their US photographers… YET!

The one on the left is a snapper…

Mikael Buck

On the left we have a Snapper, it’s a type of fish, on the right we have a photographer – please learn the difference.
Would you like to demean everything I have achieved in my career with one word? Great! Then just call me a snapper – you won’t be the first or the last person to do it.
With few exceptions, the term snapper is used as a description for photographers by almost everyone we work with – from journalists, to PR professionals, picture editors and other press photographers. What began as a jokey phrase used amongst photographers has been taken from us and turned into a widely accepted description of what we do.
Often when I bring this subject up the reply I get back is something along the lines of “What’s your problem? It’s just a word. I think it’s quite fun”. Well, here’s my problem…the term implies that our sole contribution at work is to own a camera and turn up on time. In nobody’s dictionary is a snap considered to be something that took any skill or input to achieve – it is without a doubt a derogatory term when used to describe a photo.
Of course, most people using the do not really believe we are just taking ‘snaps’. I’ve heard the term used by many colleagues and clients who I know to have a great respect for, and understanding of, what we do. But the term has slowly seeped into our collective consciousness and rarely gets questioned. Whether the person using them intends it or not, some words are loaded with meaning.
One defence of the word I’ve often heard is: “Well OK, obviously some of you guys are photographers, like those who do reportage and high end portraiture – but you can’t exactly call waiting outside court or a night club and taking a few snaps of someone leaving photography”. Yes you can. If you think having five seconds (that’s not an exaggeration) to get a sharp picture of someone running towards you in the dark isn’t a skill then I suggest you try it for yourself. Afterwards you’ll need to talk to quite a few people to make sure that you’ve identified the right person in your photo. But it’s just a snap so maybe don’t worry about that part too much, eh?
Some of my colleagues will no doubt think that I am getting carried away over an insignificant and almost endearing term. And they might compare me to a cabbie who would like to be know as an Executive Transportation Route Consultant (sorry cabbies – if that’s what you want, then that’s fine by me!). Indeed, the online forum where the majority of Britain’s working press photographers discuss their profession is called Snapperweb, so obviously not everyone feels the same way as me.
But I believe if press photography as a profession is going survive the transition to online then we need to learn to acknowledge and communicate to others the contribution we make to journalism – and the language we use is a powerful symbol to the wider world as to how we view ourselves.
Despite what some people will have you believe, press photography is alive and well – most of the space in our national newspapers and news website is given over to photographs and most of these photographs are taken by professional news photographers and not amateurs. This tells you all you need to know about the power of the still image and the skill of the people taking these pictures. Yet shift rates have remained the same for over a decade, the public view our profession with complete disdain and staff positions are almost unheard of. That tells me that as a profession we do not have the power or influence that is commensurate with the contribution we make – stopping using the term “snapper” to refer to ourselves is a small, easy step we can take towards rectify that situation.
So then, just to sum up – a snapper is a type of fish and not a press photographer. Spread the word!
I’d love to hear your thoughts, whatever side you take in this debate. Leave a comment below or tweet me and the association – @mikaelbuck and @TheBPPA
The views expressed here are solely my own and do not necessarily represent the views of The BPPA.
You can see Mikael’s gallery page here.

New from the UKPCA – Passport and Chips

All change at the UKPCA – the UK Press Card Authority, where the BPPA is one of the card issuing gatekeepers. At today’s meeting they voted nemo contra for two fundamental reforms.
The meeting faced two problems. First, Custom Card, who administer the card on behalf of the gatekeepers, had detected two duplicate applications for the card from one individual through two different gatekeepers using subtly different details! The database relies on these details and the fraudulent application was only spotted because both applications came in on the same day with the same photograph. Fraudulent information undermines the integrity and security of the entire system. Clearly the case for independent verification of personal information is overwhelming.
Secondly the UKPCA had been approached by Downing Street police, asking  in the nicest possible way what we could do about security generally, and saying they got on well with the regular photographers, but they’d had complaints from them about people getting in with Demotix cards,  some of whom did not appear to be even taking any pictures!
Demotix cards – the ones that look surprisingly, alarmingly, you might even suspect deliberately, just like ours.
Custom Cards wanted to activate the card chips, which all UKPCA cards now carry, in full – all data, not just pin numbers (the phone line verification for which is not 24 hours). And they now have an app which would allow police to check card holders instantly and speedily. That would take care of any confusion over those Demotix cards looking so  much like ours, because they just don’t have one. And avoid what one photographer recently went through in Downing Street – 45 minutes while police checked him out.
So why on earth hasn’t this been done before? The chips are all there, all ready, we all pay for them….answer, because the NPA and NS simply refused to cooperate. That’s now history. The vote’s been taken. All gatekeepers must now accept fully working chips as a condition of remaining gatekeepers. Custom Card will now switch them on, and distribute the app.
Back to personal information – the other major change. From today, for verification purposes, all applications for the press card must be supported with the number, and a scan, of either passport or driving licence. Speaking for myself, I cannot imagine why anyone thinks this such a big deal – every year I submit both my passport and driving licence numbers three times, to get into the major party conferences. And have always thought it absurd that I have to meet a higher standard of security vetting to get into those than I do to stand all day outside No.10.
These two long overdue, vital changes will improve both the security and the authority of the – our – press card. And make card checks easier , faster, and painless for all concerned. Job done.
 

Mentoring young photographers

Phil Clarke-Hill

It goes without saying that the business is now unrecognisable from the one that I entered in the early 1990s. Then, the structure was relatively linear and there was a clear defining path to an editorial career. Now, every photographer has to be a brand and use social media to shout their wares and tout their abilities. It isn’t even clear what editorial or documentary photography actually is anymore.

I’ve talked before about a ‘bleed’ from the art world and as previous postings on this site seem to indicate, a good deal of photographic education now wraps itself in talk of ‘practice’ and pseudo academic language.

As an editorial photographer and one that works in a documentary tradition, I’m actually delighted that new ways of seeing are being utilised but I’ve always tried to make work that is simple and engaging. I firmly believe that if you’re photographing people in (often) difficult situations you have a duty to be clear and straightforward and that your work should be similar. Your work should be about the subject and not about you.

It’s hardly surprising then that there’s a good deal of confusion about how to progress within the business – or more crucially how to make pictures that won’t fade with current fashions but have a longevity that speaks to an audience with simplicity and crucially, I think, a beauty.

In the past, when I was stuck visually or with an issue of editing, I could ask older, wiser members of my agency for help and advice. That old agency structure has now by and large fallen (in some ways a positive step) and it often leaves people working in a vacuum.

Photography – documentary photography, photojournalism – whatever you call it, is analogous to its written cousin. It is fundamentally a craft that has elements that are worth learning. I’ve always thought that if you are trying to communicate with an audience by showing them the world (perhaps with a view to changing/challenging their opinions) your work must be clear and simple. That isn’t to say dull, but it must be engaging and understandable. There are so many images now and so many photographers producing them. If everyone’s a photographer then you have to make sure that even if your Tweeted voice isn’t the loudest, the work that you produce is the absolute best it can be.

Over the last decade I’ve had dozens and dozens of young (and some not so young) photographers writing to me to ask if they can assist me or just get feedback on their work. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but if someone sends me a half decent email I‘ve always responded and if I’m in the UK, often arranged to meet.

Phil Clarke-Hill emailed me several years ago to ask my honest opinion of his images. We met up several times and it was clear that although he had talent and a strong desire to shoot, he wasn’t as focussed as he could be and his way of shooting was too loose. Some of his frames had a picture in them desperately trying to get out.

I had him shoot some exercises, I lent him an old lens. I set him a project to work on. I made him change where he stood. I made him look up some photographers that I really admired and crucially explained why I thought their images worked and still work. Moreover, I made him aware of authors that wrote beautiful reportage. I’m convinced that there is a symbiosis within all journalism and in the best practitioners there is an erudition, a refinement, a clear, simple way of communicating a story to an audience that transcends the medium.

Phil listened and really engaged. He started to make pictures that were clearer and that said what he wanted them to say – images that could be read visually. Two years later, he’s in a very different place. He’s shooting assignments for good magazines and specialising in South America – especially Brazil. He regularly emails and sends me stuff and asks advice about the things that don’t often get discussed – travel, visas, logistics, pitching – essentially, being a professional. He’s just about to make a book and has an exhibition soon. It’s surprised me how much I’ve enjoyed the process myself – seeing someone benefit from my experiences and (many) mistakes.

Someone else that I’ve worked with over the last couple of years is the young Bangladeshi photographer Farzana Hossen. I taught a workshop in Chittagong four years ago for the Pathshala Institute for a group of local and visiting Norwegian young photojournalists.

Farzana, it was clear, was an exceptional photographer with an inherent and classical visual sense and she was full of questions – not about ‘how’ but ‘why’. The series that she was working on, about her own family, was both mature and subtle. Her next work about violence against women in Cairo was more straightforward visually but much more complicated to shoot. We spoke over email and ‘phone about the logistics and dangers of the work (during the 2013 demonstrations) and I did my best to advise on fixers and contacts for her work. Later that year when she came to London I helped edit her project on acid attack survivors that won her the Ian Parry Award.

Currently, I’m working with a photographer in New Delhi (where I’m still partly based) and another in the UK. What’s really interesting for me, is that I feel the process has invigorated my own work. I have a new book out next year and I can honestly say that some of that work was influenced as much by working with (and learning from) several younger photographers. It may be clichéd but it’s true that it’s been enormously gratifying to be able to help someone and pass on what (limited) knowledge I have.

My mentoring isn’t intended to be a competitor to a University course – many of which I’ve guest lectured at – I see it as guidance for people who are actually trying to work in an industry that is both confusing and constantly moving.

Stuart Freedman is a Freelance Photojournalist and Mentor who points out that his degree is in Politics rather than photography. His website is https://www.stuartfreedman.com/mentoring/

 Phil Clarke-Hill

Theoretical Photography & The Big Bang Theory


Like most professional photographic organisations, The BPPA has a strange relationship with photographic education. On one hand many of our members visit courses on a regular basis and quite a few fill roles as members of industrial liaison groups. On the other hand we find it impossible to whole-heartedly recommend more than one or two courses anywhere in the country.  We readily acknowledge that there are many lecturers and tutors that try hard to prepare their students for entry to the profession but  it appears that there are relatively few that come close to succeeding.
Professional photographers talk about this topic a lot – mostly bemoaning the state of photographic education and even when it is pointed out to them that not all those studying photography want to become photographers they are still highly critical of the status quo. Anecdotes about students who don’t know their “apertures from their elbows” abound and entire cohorts are dismissed because of this. Many courses aren’t concerned with training for the craft of photography but it isn’t always clear that the undergraduates signed up for those courses realise this.
Members of The Board of our association have become quite disillusioned by the long-running trend towards “academisation” or “academic drift” even within courses whose principle purpose is to produce graduates capable of working in the photographic industry. The world of academe understands intellectualisation and it understands research based methodologies. It doesn’t understand or, more importantly, respect craft, skill or talent.
What we are scared of is a pecking order of tutors, lecturers and professors developing where those who talk intellectual nonsense about photography using terminology compatible with the way that higher education perpetuates itself are placed at the top and those whose goal is to equip students with real world skills are looked down upon or relegated to support roles. We know that photography – and press photography in particular – has a vocabulary all of its own with liberal usage of slang, acronyms and technical jargon but the way that academics use language is either intentionally or unintentionally excluding the profession from taking an active part in education.
If you’ve never watched the US sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” you’ve missed out on one of the best bits of television to come out of America in many years. It also serves as a good analogy for what is happening to arts education in general and to photographic education specifically.
At the top of the tree we find Dr Sheldon Cooper – a theoretical physicist whose intellectual arrogance allows him to look down on all other areas of research and education. Next on the ladder we have Dr Rajesh Koothrappali – another theoretical physicist whose work is less well respected and nowhere near as trendy. Moving down the list we have an experimental physicist Dr Leonard Hofstader who actually gets his hands dirty in the lab and Dr Am Farrah Fowler who is a neuroscientist. Getting nearer to the bottom of the tree we have Dr Bernadette Rostenkowski who has sold out and works in the real world in research with a large pharmaceutical corporation and poor old Howard Wolowitz who ‘only’ has an MA and is an engineer and an astronaut. There are several other characters including the pivotal non-scientist Penny but for the purposes of the comparison we have enough players.
You could easily build a table with direct comparisons from the world of Big Bang Theory to the world of photographic education in the UK. At the top there are the Sheldons – thinkers who write papers, have big thoughts about the nature of photography but who, on the whole, don’t take real pictures – or at least ones that matter. There are the Leonards – practitioners who cannot make a living outside of academe who occasionally have something interesting to contribute to the bigger picture and there are the Howards that actually contribute something concrete but whose achievements don’t cut much ice within the education system. You can slot the other characters in for yourself.
Everyone wants to look down on the Bernadettes – highly trained and highly qualified and actually earning a living from a real world application of those skills – but they prefer to ignore or dismiss them instead. A big mistake and a very silly and divisive attitude. I’m not going to stretch the analogy any further by shoehorning the other key characters into it but, if you are a Big Bang fan, that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a go.
Unfortunately there is one problem with this comparison. The Big Bang Theory is really funny. Academic drift in UK photography education isn’t.
There seems to be a tendency within arts education that exists to make sure that it continues to exist: a self-perpetuating and self-interested core whose sole purpose appears to be to create a world where the words spoken and written about the art are more important than the art itself.
Good news of sorts – we are not alone. The concept of academic drift is well recognised and well documented.
Dr Jonathan Harwood is Emeritus Professor of History of Science & Technology at the University of Manchester and he wrote a very interesting paper entitled “Understanding Academic Drift: On the Institutional Dynamics of Higher Technical and Professional Education” in which he identified a trend in higher education whereby knowledge which is intended to be useful gradually loses close ties to practice while becoming more tightly integrated with one or other body of scientific knowledge. One of his key conclusions was that as teachers search for status in the academic hierarchy there is a tendency to mimic colleagues with perceived (or actual) higher status and that choice of language (dense ‘academic’ jargon, etc) is one obvious way to achieve this.
It is clear that this tendency to become part of the system has spread from Dr Harwood’s initial research areas of agriculture, engineering, medicine and management sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries into arts and photographic education in the 21st.
Theoretical photography has grown and flourished inside the academic world whilst it appears that nobody from our industry was watching. It employs a vocabulary so opaque that you have to study with the masters of the game to understand it and by then you are part of the game. You have become part of theoretical photography and if you dare to become the little boy who calls out the Emperor’s New Clothes as a sham then you are dismissed as not having sufficient intellectual capacity to ‘get it’.
There are those who inhabit the arts establishment who are complicit in the game too and all of the time those of us who practice and love photography are being nudged out of what should be a series of inclusive discussions. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue if they went off to play their game and left us to get on with doing the job but there are two serious side effects that cannot be allowed to continue.
The first is the effect on those young people spending a small fortune studying photography with the intention of making it their career. Many (or even most) of them are being taught by people with no real understanding of, or regard for, the industry and whose primary motivation is to further their own careers as academics.
The second is the way that Government defers to academic opinion rather than that of professionals. In an industry like ours where practitioners are, by the very nature of the job, individuals it is so much easier to consult with a learned professor than it is to talk to photographers. All too often this results in a skewed view of what is happening, what needs to happen and how to get from one position to the other.
Dialogue is almost certainly the answer but how do working photographers get inside the walls of academe to get it started and how do we persuade academics to put aside their opaque vocabulary? Could it be that we need intermediaries and interpreters? The answer might be that those lecturers inside the system who haven’t bought into the academic drift yet could act as a bridge.
As an association whose mission is to promote and inspire the highest ethical, technical and creative standards from within our industry we would like to extend an invitation to meet, talk and see if we can do something to stop theoretical photography mimicking theoretical physics.
Acknowledgement:
Dr Jonathan Harwood https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11024-010-9156-9
 

British Photographic Council concerns over consequences of new copyright law

This is a re-posting from the British Photographic Council’s website. The BPPA is a member of the BPC and members of The BPPA’s Board have been deeply involved in the process so far.
Government adopts “friendless, unnecessary, poorly explained and fraught with risk” new copyright legislation, against united opposition from the photographic sector.
In all of the publicity over the impending introduction of new ‘Orphan Works’ legislation, some of the finer points of proposed changes to copyright legislation have been overshadowed, including Exceptions to Copyright for Private Copying and Quotation and Parody.
These two exceptions went before the House of Lords for debate at the end of July 2014, with none of the concerns having been regarded or addressed by Government Ministers, and despite questions from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments concerning their legality under EU legislation.
These changes have now been approved, threatening seriously to impact photographers many of whom may not even have been aware of these proposals. The government has made these changes through Statutory Instruments, or secondary legislation, rather than being subject to the full scrutiny of parliamentary debate, which accompanies proposed changes to primary legislation.
The most important relate to Copyright Exceptions, which are those recognised exceptions to UK copyright law that allow use of copyright material for education, archiving and similar purposes without breaching copyright. These currently work well and are precisely worded to ensure no ambiguity.
Members of the British Photographic Council have been expressing concern over proposed changes to these exceptions since meeting with the then Minister for IP (Intellectual Property), Viscount Younger of Leckie, over a year ago, and a Joint Position Paper followed. Among the concerns were the proposed changes to the exceptions for Private Copying and for Quotation and Parody. Of particular concern was the ambiguity of the wording and the impracticality relating to how photographs could be ‘quoted’ and the separation of quotation from the previous sensible restriction to criticism and review, leaving its purposes vague and apparently limitless.
The ambiguity in the exceptions will require legal definitions that will be left to the UK courts to decide. There will be a financial impact for photographers both in loss of licensing revenue and in the cost of legal claims and damage to the reputation of photographers, particularly in the area of journalism and current affairs. Further restrictions are needed in the use for Parody & Quotation, to limit the impact of derogatory use. The impact assessments have been clearly done in a ‘one size fits all’ manner, with no consideration to the business models of the photographic sector.
Also approved was the exception for Private Copying with no compensation for rights holders, unlike in Europe where there is a compensatory levy.
We ask the Government where’s the evidence that supports these changes, who did they look to, and are they really striking the right balance for individual creators such as photographers?
The BPC supports concerns over the legality of these draft regulations that have been raised by various bodies such as the British Copyright Council, and our members including BAPLA, NUJ, AOP, BIPP, EPUK, BPPA and Redeye. We believe the Government would be acting ultra-vires if these regulations are implemented as drafted.
The BPC wrote to Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, Lord Clement Jones and Baroness Buscombe outlining these concerns, asking that they reject these proposals so that they can be subjected to the full scrutiny of Parliament via primary legislation.
During the debate Lord Berkeley of Knighton said: “Many people working in the creative industries live on fairly modest means. Their royalties need to be protected—without them, they will find it very hard to survive.”
Lord Scott of Foscote added: “The importance of this is plain. There are a number of individuals who create copyright works on which they rely for their livelihood. They are entitled at the moment to the protection of the law of copyright so that the work they have brought into existence is not taken advantage of by others, without reward for them. The regulations now before the House will have a very serious effect indeed on people of that sort.”
Baroness Morris of Yardley said: “I agree with everyone else who has spoken. I have real doubts about what they will mean for the creative industries.”
Lord Grade commented: “the Government are demonstrating a complete ignorance of the economics of investment in the creative industries. Today’s Motion is yet another example. It is time they tore up the Hargreaves report and listened to the people who make the investments.”
Lord Clement-Jones said: “I am afraid the statutory instruments will pass today, but they are fairly friendless and fraught with the risk of legal challenge. They are badly worded and unnecessary, and they are poorly explained, and the consumer will remain confused.”
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara concluded by saying: “The feeling in the industry is that the battle over these regulations is over and that those affected have been consulted to death but not listened to and, as a result, are simply exhausted. That, more than anything, suggests that the Government have got this completely wrong from beginning to end— although, in fact, I do not think that we have heard the last of these proposals.”
The House of Lords approved the exceptions with scepticism from our supporters. We want to see the Government start the process of a proper impact assessment straight away, working with photographers and their representatives to review the impact it will have over the next year, and ask both Parliamentary Houses to table the review at the earliest in 2015. Surely this approach is the purpose of legislation and the practice of good policy.
The British Photographic Council (BPC) represents over 20,000 photographers via 14 member organisations including trade associations, unions, institutes and networks. They are: Association of Photographers; British Institute of Professional Photography; British Press Photographers’ Association; British Society of Underwater Photographers; Bureau of Freelance Photographers; Chartered Institute of Journalists; Editorial Photographers UK & Ireland; Master Photographers Association; National Association of Press Agencies; National Union of Journalists; Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild; Pro-Imaging; the Royal Photographic Society and Redeye, the Photography Network.
For further information please contact:
Isabelle Doran (BAPLA) on 020 7025 2256
Simon Chapman (NUJ) on 07889 747916
Andrew Wiard (BPPA) on 07973 219201
Denise Swanson (BIPP) on 07973 373657