AFP, As Fast and Accurate as Can Be
What kind of photographs can you find at Agence France Presse (AFP)? All themes, all registers, all styles. Judicial, political, sports, etc. From portraits to factual coverage. AFP publishes about 3,000 photos a day, excluding special events such as the Olympic Games, which can almost double our output.
Is it only photographs that you produce? 95%. But when it comes to breaking news for which we can’t immediately be on the spot—you can’t guess where a bomb’s going to explode—we gather photos via social networks, after establishing a contractual framework (reproduction rights, etc.).
What do you expect from your photographers? The wire agency photographer must be ultra-versatile, even if each has their own favourite fields.
As a wire agency, what changes have you seen with digital? There was a brief period of doubt. Was video going to supplant photography? On the contrary, photography has boomed exponentially. Whether for professionals or amateurs, photography costs nothing nowadays. On social networks such as Instagram there are now very high-level amateurs. This fierce competition’s forced professionals to raise their game. Moreover, in general, there are many more photographers than 20 years ago. More than half are amateurs.You can’t take everything for granted just because you’re a professional, but we’re lucky enough to have networks and contacts amateurs don’t have, which allow us to build very different picture stories for our clients.
FREEDOM OF TONE
You’re therefore juggling the quantity of images you have to produce every day with the demand for quality. It’s a tricky equation, to which you have to add possible surprises in the field. Reporting isn’t an exact science. Light, an essential element of the image, can make a photograph extraordinary, and therefore decide the quality of a report.
Your ethics at AFP is “exhaustiveness and objectivity”. Is that still tenable? The reliability of information through images, and therefore the reliability of the image, is the criterion at AFP. Our charter forbids any modification that might alter the meaning of the image. When we get a photo from a third party, our first concern is to check that it’s indeed true, that it really belongs to the author who claims it. Our reputation depends on it. AFP is, moreover, the only agency to have an extremely expensive software programme developed by the French army in the early 2000s. Every digital camera, every smartphone has a unique sensor signature. This software looks to see if it sees more than one. This saved us, for example, when Bin Laden was neutralised in 2011. AP, Reuters and we received a photo via Twitter of what was supposed to be his remains. It was in fact a very well-done montage. We didn’t release the image. And the other agencies, seeing that we weren’t releasing anything, didn’t release it either.
Has the competition from amateurs changed your ethics towards “shock photos”? With smartphones, the potential for violent images has increased. We make sure it’s news first, and select the most accurate image. You can’t talk about a bombing that killed 300 people without showing a body. But modesty is very different from one country to another. France, for example, is very modest when it comes to its own people, but has no problem showing the bodies of children in Syria, Iraq or Libya. So an agency like ours offers the whole range.
These cultural differences also exist in the treatment of events. Our freedom of tone is one of the reasons why clients, especially Americans, appreciate AFP. We’re the only one of the three wire services that doesn’t have any moral censorship, within the limits of respect for human dignity. For example, for Femen, their body is their banner. But at Reuters and AP, with their AngloSaxon culture, their breasts are always covered by a detail.
The competition between us, however, remains speed. The primary goal of a wire service is to cover every event as quickly and accurately as possible. Print media only accounts for 20-30% of the global customer base. The rest, including newspaper websites, is online. So there is no longer any notion of a deadline, it’s 24 hours a day. For example, during the 100-metre race at the Rio Olympics, between the moment Usain Bolt crossed the finish line and the moment the photo was available 42 seconds elapsed, during which the photo was taken, transmitted in real time to the editorial team, which checked the framing, reprocessed it if necessary, and delivered it to the servers of all our clients. Our competitors have never been faster than us.
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