In staggering news from several sources, the famous Getty Images is applying for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and planning to go private.
As a private company, Getty will be controlled by the Getty family affiliates as well as Koch Equity Development and will also be backed by $533 million in new equity.
This comes after its proposed $3.7 billion Shutterstock merger fell apart earlier in the year. But the wider story might be that the economics of commercial imagery is being rewritten by AI.
Far from photography being dead, the background to this is that people have never consumed more photographs in history. The problem is that we've spent the last couple of decades training everyone to expect images instantly, infinitely, and for little to zero cost.
You can see this when you go back to cheap stock image companies followed by smartphones and currently free user generated images. These days it's easy enough to get an AI agent to produce you a pretty reasonable image from your phone or laptop – straight from the algorithm.
This is definitely a pattern that the wider photography community should pay attention to as images have become abundant.
And it should be separated out from good photography which still remains rarer. It puts the onus back on photographers to double and triple down on originality and approaches to photography that are not yet subsumed by AI. Being the cheapest photographer on the block is no longer a business moat.
You can read more about the situation from the horse's mouth here, but it's also being reported on here.
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