For the past seven years, Corbis Corp. has been acquiring the electronic rights to photos and art from collections around the world. Now Ansel Adams’s unforgettable ““Moonrise Over Hernandez,’’ the National Gallery of London’s famously cryptic ““The Marriage of Arnolfini’’ by Jan van Eyck and Delacroix’s ““Liberty Leading the People’’ from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg all lie in the digital domain of Corbis. And backed by the personal fortune of its owner, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, the company has been advancing the state of the art in turning photographic negatives into electronic images and distributing them to businesses and the public.
Painstaking process: The trend of converting images into electronic files isn’t new. Publishers want a photographic medium that fits in with the rest of their digital technology. In response to that demand, and partly to preserve fragile works of art, museums and photo archivists have been digitizing copies of the world’s photos and art work for the past several years. But the cost of scanning and indexing is steep, and ensuring that the digital image matches the original precisely is a painstaking process. With the help of tens of millions of dollars from Gates, Corbis is the most formidable player among digital archives.
Gates started the company in 1989 as Interactive Home Systems, with the goal of becoming the world’s premier provider of art via computer. The idea was to create a huge store of images – most of them photographic – for people to use in everything from high-school history reports to glossy magazines. But photographers quickly rejected the contract terms drawn up by the company’s lawyers and acquisitions were hard to come by. Gates gradually learned to move more gingerly in the world of artists. Last year the company was reborn as Corbis, Latin for ““woven basket.’’ Shrewdly, Gates hired a new management team more sensitive to artists’ rights. It includes professional photographers, photo editors, art historians – and three full-time copyright lawyers.
The company operates out of a modest office building in Bellevue, Wash. Many of the 130 employees have experience in the arts, and the dress code leans toward jeans and sandals. Bookshelves are laden with such titles as ““A Hundred Years of Federal Forestry’’ and ““The Pelican History of Art’’ instead of computer manuals. Corbis headquarters lie a few miles south of the sprawling Microsoft campus, but the two companies have little to do with each other. Corbis, explain company officials, is a long-term project for Gates that wouldn’t fit in with Microsoft’s quicker pace. ““The only thing we have in common is that Bill is chairman of both,’’ says Corbis CEO Doug Rowan, a 57-year-old computer-industry marketing veteran. Which means that a new acquisition is invariably followed by a flurry of letters to Corbis, lamenting the prospect of Bill Gates’s controlling not just the operating and application software we use, but entire cultural troves as well.
Corbis’s objective is, as Rowan puts it, to ““capture the entire human experience throughout history.’’ To that end, Rowan travels the globe scoping out potential acquisitions. The largest and most public purchase so far occurred last October when the company bought the entire Bettmann Archive, whose 16 million images include some of this century’s most enduring photographs – from Einstein sticking out his tongue to an exploding Hindenburg to Marilyn Monroe’s swirling skirt. Long an admirer of the Bettmann collection, Gates paid a reported $6 million for it, or about 37 cents per image.The purchase swelled Corbis’s holdings and technicians have been busily scanning and cataloging images at a clip of about 40,000 per month. By the end of the year, Corbis expects to have 1 million electronic images.
The company is also commissioning photographers to shoot events, people and themes. Corbis has assigned a photographer to capture the reinterment of the Romanovs in St. Petersburg; another photographer is taking pictures of Mediterranean ruins; a third is taking contemporary photos of Europe’s famous battlefields. One Corbis manager describes the company as the ““New Alexandria,’’ in reference to the literary and scientific center of ancient Egypt.
Corbis officials are quick to point out that most of its licensing agreements are nonexclusive, giving the photographer, artist or museum the right to license the same material. In keeping with Gates’s belief in the power and potential of the Internet, Corbis is targeting the Net as its most promising distribution channel. Later this summer the company will test several new online services. One uses a ““white board’’ metaphor: while logged on to the Internet, a photo editor calls a Corbis researcher and describes the shot he or she is seeking. The Corbis researcher then zaps samples to a World Wide Web site for the editor to view while on the phone to the researcher. The selections, made on the spot, are then pressed onto a CD-ROM and sent overnight, or sent directly over the Net. The company also has its sights set on the consumer market. As more home computer owners discover the Web, a mass market for electronic images is emerging. According to the Corbis scenario, a sixth grader working on a school report will browse through the Corbis Web site, click on a photo or painting and pay a nominal fee for one-time use of the image for use in the report.
Corbis isn’t the only one selling images over the Internet (box). Picture Network International, an online graphics service in Arlington, Va., representing such stock houses as Magnum and Black Star, has been distributing photos, clip art and sound effects from its Web site since late last year. Targeted at both professionals and consumers, the service offers a list of categories to choose from, as well as a sophisticated program for searching. Payment is made by mail or telephone. And PhotoDisc in Seattle has been distributing photos online since last October.
But the sheer breadth of the Corbis collection is clear from the CD-ROMs it produces for the public. The company’s four current titles (two more are due out soon) are a showcase of sorts for the archive. Drawing on rich images from the collection, the titles focus on art, science and history. One of the forthcoming disks prominently features a digitized image of da Vinci’s Codex Leicester on the nature of water, light and the earth. Gates had bought the manuscript itself in 1994, and Corbis then acquired the usage rights to photos of the manuscript. Eventually, Corbis plans to make its CD-ROMs available online, with direct links to the Corbis archive.
Whether Gates will succeed in his goal of amassing the archive of all archives is unclear. ““Regardless of how much Corbis acquires, they can’t compete with the whole rest of the world,’’ observes Josh Bernoff, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. The Library of Congress, for instance, is spending $60 million to digitize 5 million images. Still, considering Gates’s deep conviction that content is king, and his even deeper pockets, images stamped with the Corbis copyright are likely to be a ubiquitous fixture in the digital age.
Corbis has a high profile, but it isn’t alone in the digital image market. Here are some other companies in the field:
West Stock makes a wide selection of its photos available here; no membership fee ( http://www.weststock.com)
15,000 pictures are available here; customers can pay using cybercash or over the phone with a credit card (http://www.photodisc.com)
2,400 of Liaison’s 4 million photos can be accessed at this site (http://www.liaisonintl.com)
Stock photos, illustrations, clip art, royalty-free photos and sound effects; this site has it all. And a natural-language search engine to find it (http://www.publishersdepot.com).
A sampling of the company’s vast archive is available; it also ships images on CD-ROM (http://www.corbis.com)
