An open response to a recent social media post about gender in press photography

The BPPA has come in for some criticism from a group called Women Photographers of the UK about what they refer to as the uneven representation of women in the current Assignments 2019 exhibition. You can read their open letter here on Medium. This is a response from Lynne Cameron, Vice Chair of The BPPA.
 
Dear Suzanne, Anna and Susannah
 
We would like to reassure those expressing concerns about the representation of women in our industry that we are very aware of the issues and are currently working on projects to support and help current and future female members of the organisation. We were disappointed that these concerns were not directed to The BPPA in the first instance as we welcome all constructive criticism. It is one of our core values to work transparently with all parties in any matter related to photography.
 
The issue of gender imbalance is a complex one, not just related to photography but to wider society.
 
The association is proactively working to improve such imbalances. As an example The BPPA elected me as Vice Chair and Julie Edwards as our Social Media and Website Editor at last year’s AGM. We are both long-standing professional photographers who have first hand experience of gender related issues within our industry. Julie and I are bringing our experiences, energy and ideas to The Board and welcome further positive constructive comments which could help address this wider topic.
 
In relation to the exhibition (it is not a competition) we would like to reassure those concerned that images were curated by highly regarded members of the profession who were deliberately not given any information about the name or gender of the photographers in order to make the selection process ‘about the images’ as far as is humanly possible.
 
We are extremely proud of Assignments – an exhibition designed to promote and highlight the amazing work that is being produced by our members.
 
The Board of The BPPA welcomes constructive input from anyone who wants to help to promote and inspire great photography. If you have ideas on what more can be done on the issues raised then please get in contact with me or any of the other members of our Board.
 
Lynne Cameron
 
Vice Chair, The BPPA
 
 
 
Statistics:
 
1. The BPPA has 321 paid-up members of whom 40 are women – which is approximately 12.46%.
2. 16 photographers joined or rejoined in order to take part in Assignments 2019 of whom 25% were women.
3. 161 photographers entered photographs for Assignments 2019 of whom 18 were women – 11.2%
4. 1,351 photographs were entered of which 148 were entered by women – 10.95%
5. 110 photographs were selected for exhibition of which 10 were by women – 9.3%

Photography is not harassment

 
This is an open letter to the ITV management who have promoted their programme “Tonight: Harassment Uncovered” which, in places, confuses photography with sexual harassment. The programme aired at 7.30pm on the 23rd of February 2017
Dear ITV
Professional photographers are against any and all harassment of people going about their private and lawful business. To suggest or imply anything else would be disingenuous at best and libellous at worst. Street photography is a legitimate and entirely honourable form of documentary photography practised the world over.
Should any individual use this or any other art form as a cloak to hide their illegal activities then that is an issue that should be part of a Police investigation and not an excuse to demonise an entire genre of documentary photography and film-making.
The laws already exist to stop harassment and stalking and a blanket ban on any and all photography or filming without permission (amateur or professional, it matters not) would be to the detriment of society as a whole.
The BPPA

Insurance and what to look for

Alan Davidson/The Picture Library Ltd

 
Let’s start off by stating the obvious – professional photographers tend to own a lot of expensive gear. Most photographers have insurance for that expensive gear and one of the most common queries that you’ll see on discussion forums frequented by those professionals is about which insurer is the best/cheapest. Insurance is proof of two of life’s most enduring truths:

  1. The best is rarely the cheapest (unless price is your only arbiter of ‘best’)
  2. The devil is in the detail (or the small print)

Having spent days or even weeks looking into insurance for photographic equipment I thought that it would be useful to write down a few things that you might like to consider and a few questions that you might like to ask when assessing the relative merits of competing quotes. The first thing that you need to know that the company offering to sell you insurance is most likely to be a broker and not an actual insurer (or underwriter).

Insurance broker noun  A person or company registered as an adviser on matters of insurance and as an arranger of insurance cover with an insurer on behalf of a client.

There’s nothing wrong with a good broker – they know their industry, will have worked with people like you before and will generally know where to get the best deals with the right cover. The actual insurer will be an underwriter.

Underwriter noun A person or company accepting liability under (an insurance policy), thus guaranteeing payment in case loss or damage occurs.

There are about six or seven underwriters who have products and experience in the professional photography arena and each of them lays down their own specific rules and exclusions when offering policies through brokers. That is how it works: you go along to a broker who then offers you a policy underwritten by someone else. Most brokers stick to the same two or three underwriters for specific types of policy and will generally pick up very quickly what you want and be able to advise you on which policy to take out.
That’s all good if the broker has made an accurate assessment of what you want. Sometimes all they hear is “cheap” and will just get you the lowest priced policy which may or may not be a perfect fit for you and your work. Sometimes all they hear is “comprehensive” and get you a policy with all of the bells and whistles at a higher cost and the chances are that you might not need some of those bells and whistles. This brings up a whole series of things that you might want to know the answer to before you speak to a broker.

  1. What kind of cover do you want? Theft and accidental damage?
  2. Are you prepared to have a high excess payment?
  3. How would you describe the kind of work that you do? Is it hard news, sports, features, PR, general editorial?
  4. Do you have secure locks on all potential access points to your home and/or office where you will be leaving your equipment?
  5. Where do you live? Town or country, house or flat?
  6. What kind of vehicle do you drive? Saloon, estate, hatchback, convertible, van?
  7. How good is your security on and in your vehicle?
  8. Where and when do you leave your gear in your vehicle? Daylight, overnight, only when working?
  9. Do you need to be able to leave gear in hotel rooms? If so, where in the world?
  10. How often and where in the world do you travel with gear? Most UK insurers limit you to a total of 90 days.
  11. If you travel, is you gear covered in the hold of an aircraft or elsewhere whilst in transit?
  12. Does your work take you into area or scenes of civil unrest?
  13. Do you need to insure rental or loan equipment?
  14. Do you need to insure laptops and other IT equipment? Does that include software?
  15. Do you need to insure an archive?
  16. Do you need Public Liabilities Insurance? If you do, is £2million enough or would you need £5million?
  17. What about Professional Indemnity Insurance?
  18. How do you want to pay for your cover? Annually or monthly?
  19. Do you want ‘new for old’ cover or will you accept a ‘wear and tear’ reduction to get the cost down?
  20. Have you got a figure including bags, cases and accessories for the kit you want covered?

That’s a long list of separate questions and each of them will have a bearing on which underwriter a broker should steer you towards and by answering each of them honestly you will get cover that suits you. Sometimes there won’t be a perfect policy and you will have to accept a compromise but you need to remember that all underwriters are in business to maximise their income and minimise the number of claims that they have to pay out on. If you give false information on your application they will do their level best to avoid paying some or all of your claim. We have all heard scary stories about people who have had claims dismissed over seemingly innocuous details and when our gear gets damaged or stolen the last thing that we need is to find out that we weren’t covered for that eventuality.
There are plenty of things that you can do to help get the cost down and/or your cover up and you can can go through the list above and see what you can do to help. Improving home security (some Police forces offer free checks) is an obvious one as is improving the security of your vehicle. Some underwriters offer discounts if you have recognised security cages or locking compartments permanently fitted in your car whilst others give better deals/improved cover for saloon cars with separate lockable boots. Further down the list, if you don’t insure your software (easy if everything is recorded and/or under subscription) you can save money – not much, but it all adds up.
What else can you do to help? The most obvious is to keep a full and up to date list of your gear complete with serial numbers. A simple spreadsheet stored on a cloud somewhere is an easy win but registering your gear with either Canon or Nikon Professional Services is also a good idea. Fairly new to the market is Lenstag – which in their own words was “designed to get your gear on record with the least amount of effort, the strongest ownership claim and as quickly as possible.” It is a simple concept with a central registry of owners, gear and serial numbers which can be managed via their website or their smart phone apps.

Commentating on the race to the bottom

 
Yet again The BPPA finds itself responding to a piece by Professor Roy Greenslade on The Guardian’s website. Yet again Professor Greenslade adds his influential voice to the drastically mistaken notion that anyone can take a picture good enough for a newspaper these days. Seriously? Have you looked at some of the utter rubbish that gets used in some of our newspapers? To assert that anyone with a camera can take a picture isn’t only an insult to the skilled photographers who make silk purses out of sows ears on a daily basis it also invites the bean-counters who are behind the decisions to axe photographers jobs to question the need for written journalists too.
I can just imagine the conversation between the accountants and the owners with an editor sitting there listening to the conversation;

Owner: We need to save some more money. Sales are still in decline and sacking the photographers hasn’t saved us enough.

Accountant: Well, members of the public are providing all of our visual content so maybe we can get them to supply the words too.

Editor: But…

Owner: Brilliant idea. Let’s start with all of the senior reporters who really know what they are doing. Editor – we need you to sell this to the staff.

Editor: But…

Owner: They’re all scared for their jobs anyway. Accountant – you are a genius and you will be rewarded for your work with a big pay rise.

Editor: But…

Accountant: Thanks Owner, maybe we should discuss a few other money-saving ideas that I have over a drink or two. Do we NEED editors?

How long will it be before expensive columnists get their marching orders in favour of a few blokes with word processing software who “can write a bit”? Who will those people actually be? Will they be honest and concerned citizens or will they be people with an agenda and an axe to grind?
We are already at the stage where a large percentage of the ‘supplied’ images being printed in some papers are not properly checked for honesty, accuracy or ownership (not to mention quality). Beyond that, nobody seems to care whether members of the public are putting their own or other people’s lives in danger to get the pictures that they are giving away for free. Even Professor Greenslade has to agree that journalism stands or falls on its honesty and accuracy even if he has already thrown the towel in on quality.
One of the numerous responses to his Media Guardian article points out that very few people remember the words after the event compared to the number who remember the images. You might think that newspaper owners would forget this at their peril – unfortunately they have forgotten and their newspapers are in peril. Another response points out that newspaper decline could well be a chicken and egg discussion. Which did come first – the fall in sales or the loss of photographers?
This is rapidly becoming a race to the bottom and it really doesn’t help the case for quality newspapers and quality journalism when one of the highest profile commentators on the industry has given up on any notion of defending the simple idea that quality products have longevity and cheap ones don’t. We’d wonder if The Guardian’s own Picture Desk team would agree with The Professor’s odd logic or if its own sub-editors would approve of his fact checking.
Losing reporters would be the largest and most recent nail in the coffin of local and regional journalism. National newspapers, radio and television get a lot of their best people from the superb training ground that is (or maybe was) local journalism.
If I were contemplating training as a journalist right now I think that I’d have second thoughts about it. If the learned Professor is right maybe those currently on his course should consider switching to accountancy before it’s too late.

The BPPA and The Leveson Inquiry in 34 minutes.

Three submissions, a lot of reading and an awful lot of discussion came down to a 34 minute appearance at The Leveson Inquiry today (Tuesday 7th February) afternoon. Was it worth it? Right here, right now the answer has to be a truly resounding ‘YES’. Our case has been outlined before; we wanted to impress on the world that there can be a huge difference between a professional press photographer and a bloke with a posh camera.

We wanted to make Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry aware that we are willing and able to be to be part of the process of finding solutions to the issues highlighted in the early evidence at the hearings. Most of all we wanted to highlight the four-pronged plan that we have developed to help ensure that photographs published in the UK news media have been checked thoroughly so that they comply with every law and ethical code that applies to that media in that situation.
Sitting there in the same chair that Paul Dacre, Editor in chief of the Daily Mail had occupied for the best part of four hours yesterday and that the familiar cast list of celebrities had sat in right back at the start of the formal hearings in November was more than a little nerve-wracking. Not so much on a personal level – but representing hundreds of honest, hard working and highly professional colleagues. If that wasn’t bad enough, the editors of The Times and The Sun were up after us!
We really cannot talk about today in terms of winning and losing but it seems that we have made our point and we know that Lord Justice Leveson himself said that

“Mr Turner, thank you very much indeed. Responsible photographers, like responsible journalists, are not part of the problem and they do need to be part of the solution. Thank you very much.”

If, after today, the industry takes us more seriously and if, after today, we are allowed a voice on issues that directly affect the lives, careers and reputations of professional press photographers then maybe, just maybe we can think in terms of a (small) victory.
Of course the 34 minute white knuckle ride was made a lot easier by the quality of our argument and the sentiments in our submissions.
The BPPA’s Board worked hard on this and there are a lot of people to say ‘thank you’ to. So to everyone who contributed, everyone who tweeted and re-tweeted about our submissions and liked our Facebook page. Thank you. It turns out that it was a pleasure to be your representative!
Links to the content of our appearance: TRANSCRIPT VIDEO

The BPPA gets its say at The Leveson Inquiry

Here’s a date for your diary: Tuesday the 7th of February. “Why?” I hear you ask, well it is the day when The BPPA will finally get to appear before the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practice & ethics of the press.
In our main submission to Lord Justice Leveson’s Inquiry we proposed a four-pronged solution to the issues raised in connection to photography at the hearings to date:

  • 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

We started the ball rolling back in November when the association’s AGM took place and we started to discuss what we could do about the beating that press photographers were taking during the first couple of weeks worth of evidence at The Inquiry. Like most people, we had thought that the early stages of Lord Justice Leveson’s hearings would be about phone hacking but time-after-time the actions of photographers seemed to get more coverage than those of private detectives and over-zealous reporters.
Within days we had made our first submission in the form of an open letter to The Inquiry where we outlined our objections and sought to be awarded “core participant” status for the proceedings. The legal team behind the Leveson hearings took a couple of weeks to get back to us to let us know that we would not be offered that status they invited us to make a second and much more detailed submission by the beginning of January. We put the 18 page document in on time and following a few emails back and forth asking for clarification of one of our points we finally learned this week that it is all systems go for Tuesday, the 7th of February.
The BPPA wants to be there at the table when solutions are discussed and when decisions are made. The BPPA wants the voices of press photographers to be heard. Most importantly, The BPPA wants to make sure that the profession comes out of this process with its reputation enhanced, with its future as secure as it can be and with improved media and public perceptions of who we are and what we do.
These are simultaneously worrying and exciting times for press photographers. As a profession we have worked hard to create some momentum towards those goals and it is our aim to keep that momentum going on February 7th.
Visit The BPPA’s website.