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Holland’s ANP launches World Portraits
Stock photography meets micro-banking
Bas van Beek, the stock photo industry veteran who helped build Benelux Press to become the number one stock photo agency in the Netherlands, has helped launch World Portraits, an entirely new agency with an ethical twist. The agency, which will feature images of people from all corners of the earth, but especially from less developed nations, has created a payment system whereby the models shown in the images will receive a share of the revenue whenever their likeness sells.
The idea for World Portraits came to van Beek years ago, when an Indian man who had posed for a Benelux photographer but received no compensation, saw his image in an advertisement. van Beek recognized the unfairness of the situation for that model and countless others. Simultaneously, the micro-banking phenomenon began to take hold in the international community providing a practical solution to the difficulty of finding and paying models in remote places with no banking infrastructure. According to van Beek, the models will receive 20% of the license fee, the photographers, 40% and ANP, the remaining 40%. "It may not seem like a lot, but to someone in Bangladesh, Nairobi or Mongolia, it can be quite a lot of money. It's far better than the usual situation where the model would sign a release and then never hear from the photographer again, or even know whether the image was used anywhere," he says. In addition, the increasing global awareness of fair trade issues makes World Portraits appealing to art-buyers.
van Beek has formed the agency under the auspices of ANP, the Dutch press agency where he currently holds the position of Director of Photography, and with grant money from the DOEN Foundation. Princess Maxima of the Dutch royal family helped formally introduce World Portraits last week at a ceremony at the Museon in The Hague. Both the DOEN Foundation and Princess Maxima ardently support so-called micro-banking, a growing lending program whereby individuals in third-world countries receive small loans to help start business enterprises. The World Portraits revenue share arrangement with models in remote places with little banking infrastructure will use the micro-banking system to ensure models receive their share of revenue generated by their images. The agency has even translated the model-releases into the local languages to ensure the models understand what the meaning of the document they sign.
As stated in a press-release about the new business model for paying model’s, “With World Portraits, depicting people of around the world in their every-day routine, ANP Photo shows how businesses can put fair trade and ethical issues at the heart of what they are doing.”
Click here to see a gallery of images from the World Portraits Collection.
Click here for access to information about licensing World Portrait images from ANP.
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