January 29, 2006
The paparazzi are now everywhere
The Sunday Times Scotland has a wonderful interview of Kyle MacRae, the founder of Scoopt, the first agency to broker cameraphone pictures for amateur paparazzi and citizen reporters.
Excerpts
"On July 4, the website launched. Three days later London was bombed. “At the time, it was disastrous for us,” says MacRae. “Pictures of maimed bodies and people in distress were allegedly making their way onto the internet, and to be associated with that would be bad news both from a business and a personal ethical perspective.”
Many of the most iconic images of the attacks were taken on camera phones, however, in Tavistock Square and on the devastated trains. “Over a longer period, that helped to close the credibility gap and convince people that we had an idea that could work,” says MacRae. Scoopt was picked up by, among others, CNN, Wired magazine and Newsweek. A bandwagon was rolling.
Six months later, MacRae has crow’s-feet from working round the clock, and the site has 5,500 members in 86 countries. More significant, perhaps, are its imitators — sites such as The Snitcher Desk and Cash Your Pics. Last week Splash, one of the biggest picture agencies in America, announced that it too was starting a service for members of the public who wished to “snap, send and sell”.
But some of the successes appear to have taken even MacRae by surprise: “The highest single-value picture we’ve sold so far was of the new Dr Who monster, Sycorax. A Dr Who fan was watching the filming in June in the Forest of Dean, and this monster came out of the dressing-room trailer, so he took a photograph of it.
“That’s a good example because it was just an opportunistic moment. Nobody was hurt. Nobody killed. No damage done. The photographer made a thousand quid just before Christmas. He was delighted.”
... For all the animosity between celebrities and paparazzi, professional photographers know the rules, where the legal and ethical boundaries lie — even if they sometimes choose to overstep them. The amateurs of Scoopt don’t.
True, the site offers guidelines and has some safety checks built in: all contributors must be over 18; Scoopt will not accept any pictures of children; nor will it take pictures obtained through what MacRae calls an overt breach of privacy (such as breaking into somebody’s house).
But it seems almost inevitable that amateurs will overstep the mark. “They won’t think twice about sticking a camera in somebody’s face,” says MacRae. “Is that something I feel happy about? No. But it’s not something we encourage either. "
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/picturephoning/archives/2006/01/011347.htm