Tight Sight: Liberal Arts in the Service of the Visual Content Industry

Cheryce Kramer

This paper examines the transformative role of a new institutional paradigm that has taken shape over the past twelve years: the centralized, virtual image databank. Currently the two major players vying for market domination are Getty Images and Corbis -- large conglomerates of former stock libraries which license and distribute the images in their collections for worldwide usage. They peddle everything from historical photographs to contemporary fashion from life-style to wildlife from politics to sports. Each company started with a distinctive business plan and service model, Getty saw itself as an aesthetic innovator in the sphere of stock photography while Corbis strove to become the world's premier virtual museum by acquiring digital rights to the grandmasters from all quarters. But in the heat of contest they have increasingly grown to resemble each other. One of the striking points of resemblance between them is the central role of liberal arts educated employees up and down the company ladder.

This paper examines how the liberal arts ethos as embodied by the personnel of both companies and articulated in their respective editorial policies, stands in sharp contrast with the impact this novel distribution mechanism is having on the configuration of public space and ideology. Despite the proliferation of digital cameras and home imaging techniques the diversity of image material in circulation daily seems steadily to be decreasing. Not only the material, vision itself is being 'branded'. Casting these businesses as vast technological and infrastructural systems revolving around a soft core of liberal arts educated editors, content managers, creative directors and so on, the paper asks why interdisciplinary humanists prove to be so useful to narrow commercial interests.

The paper will explore the apparent disjunct between the critical training of humanists, on the one hand, and the aesthetic and ideological agendas they are engaged to promote, on the other. Indexing practices and search engines are dismantled so as to de-mystify the process of how images are tracked and located by customers. A central ideological rift is identified between the celebration of human culture, in one sphere of public life, and a repudiation of human culture, in the other. Two exemplary case studies are presented, Otto Bettmann's commercial archive (a collection recently acquired by Corbis) and Tim Flach's animal photography (a key Getty photographer whose aesthetic captures the corporate strategies in question) so as to characterize the changing role of the humanities in the global management of visual content.