Setting trends for fifteen years, ZUMA Press is arguably the most important online, editorial picture agency. ZUMA offers direct and indirect opportunities for all manner of editorial photographers—seasoned pros and talented newcomers alike.
You can benefit from ZUMA directly by joining the more than 3,000 individual photographers already represented by ZUMA. You can benefit indirectly by gaining photographic inspiration and industry insight by reviewing ZUMA’s image collection and keeping tabs on its initiatives.
ZUMA is known for its hard-hitting, in-your-face photojournalism. However, the agency also covers sports, travel, celebrities, events, nature and much more. Always looking for skilled and dedicated photojournalists to round out its worldwide coverage, ZUMA might offer you a new and powerful outlet for your images. And you don’t have to be an award-winning photographer to join ZUMA. You simply need to a good match in terms of style and specialty.
Whether or not you become a ZUMA photographer, the agency offers photographers an easy and powerful way to improve their photography and understanding of the editorial industry: review the most relevant images in the millions of images represented by the agency. Thousands of new images are uploaded daily, and you can view them through extremely powerful search engines.
A few weeks ago I had a long, intriguing conversation with Scott Mc Kiernan, the photojournalist who founded ZUMA and now guides the agency as its CEO. Mc Kiernan is a driven and inventive but also down-to-earth. As both a dedicated photojournalist and an entrepreneurial pioneer in the electronic licensing of images, he is in a class of his own as the leader of a picture agency.
Understandably, Mc Kiernan is committed to ZUMA’s financial success. However, during our conversation it quickly became clear that he did not found ZUMA simply to exploit an untapped market. The year was 1993 and Mc Kiernan was covering the war in Yugoslavia. He hoped to use nescient technologies of the Internet to form a photographers’ cooperative, somewhat like a modern-day Magnum. An agency by photographers for photographers.
The cooperative idea did not pan out so Mc Kiernan incorporated ZUMA with a more traditional business model—that would end up serving far more photographers. Yet even with vast number of images ZUMA handles each day, the agency retains a culture that is photographer-centric. Mc Kiernan supports his hardest working, most visionary photographers by championing the distribution of their multiple-image picture stories—the kind of stories that many photographers complain went away with the loss of LIFE and Look magazines.
“The golden age of photojournalism wasn’t so golden,” Mc Kiernan told me. “We are in the golden age of communications right now. There are more ways to share more photographs then there ever were in the history of the world.”
Mc Kiernan excitedly pointed out that there are more than three billion cell phone subscribers on the planet—more than half the world’s population. “People with these phones can see more photographs on a given story then a reader ever could in LIFE or Look magazine.”
From its DOUBLEtruck Magazine to its zReportage.com initiative, ZUMA is heading up many efforts to ensure that its photographers can benefit for this new golden age of communications.
If you are not aware of the full scope of ZUMA Press or the possible role it might play in your career, be sure to check out its site. Request access, if needed. Read about the services and photographer opportunities. Even if you don’t find a new outlet for your images, you will definitely find an invaluable resource for learning and inspiration.