Standards · Published in full

How to tellwhether tobelieve a caption.

Deliberately short, and none of it is about us being trustworthy. It is about what we have written down and can be held to.

The rules we work to

Nothing staged: Nobody is asked to move, to repeat what they just did, or to look at the camera. If a frame needed arranging to work, it is not filed — it is not a better picture, it is a different kind of picture.
Nothing added or removed: Dust, dodging, burning and a global contrast curve. Nothing else. No object is cloned out, nothing is composited, and no frame is flipped.
Captions: Place, date, and what is happening, written by the person who was there. Where we do not know something, the caption says we do not know it.
Consent and payment: Consent is asked for in the language the subject speaks and recorded against the frame. Nobody is ever paid to appear in a photograph.

Updated each March

The picture code: Nine pages, written in 1998 and amended three times. Each amendment is listed with the assignment that prompted it.
The corrections log: Every caption we have corrected since 1998, with the date, what was wrong, and who was told.
The accounts: Published each March: income by source, the sixty per cent split, what the retainers cost and what the owners took out.
Ownership statement: The eleven photographer-shareholders by name, with their holdings and the undertaking not to sell to a stock library.

All four are sent by the office on request, in print or as a file. Write and say which one you want.

Why five weeks?: Because the first two are spent being a stranger. A photographer is noticed for about a fortnight, and almost everything worth licensing is made after that stops. It is not a romantic rule; it is what the contact sheets show.
Can I send a shot list?: No. You can tell us what you want to understand, in any amount of detail, and the photographer will tell you what is there. A list of pictures to reproduce is a commission to confirm something, and confirmations are cheap and usually wrong.
Can I crop, or drop the caption?: You can crop for the page. You cannot crop a picture into a different meaning, and the caption travels with the frame in every use. Neither is negotiable at any price, which is why they are not on the rate card.
Do you retouch?: Dust, dodging, burning, and a curve. Anything beyond that would make the caption a lie, and the caption is the part clients are actually buying.
What happens when a caption is wrong?: It is corrected on the file in the archive and sent to everyone who has licensed the frame, whether or not they would have noticed. The correction stays in the log permanently.
Who owns the pictures?: The photographer, always. The agency licenses on their behalf and takes forty per cent. Eleven of the eighteen also own the agency.
Do you do advertising work?: No, and not as a moral position — it is that a photographer who spends half the year making pictures to a brief stops being able to work without one.