Picture imperfect

Why is Bill Gates so unpopular at the Visa Pour L'Image photographic festival in Perpignan? The world's richest man is not attending the annual gathering of 2,000 photojournalists - indeed he would be wise not to - but his online photo agency Corbis is the chief topic of conversation within the international brotherhood of photographers.

In the 1970s and 1980s, photojournalists were stars and Paris was their headquarters. Photographers for Sygma, Sipa, Gamma and Magnum roamed the world in sleeveless safari jackets, lugging camera bags as they courted romance and danger.

That changed in the 1990s, as the wire agencies Reuters, AFP and AP began to use more digital cameras. Images could be transmitted from anywhere in the world in minutes. The Internet made it difficult to control copyright.

Over the past two years, Bill Gates's agency Corbis and another US agency, Getty Images, came to dominate the world photo market, buying up smaller agencies and archives and shifting the centre of world photography from Paris to Seattle.

The photographers thought they were creating art; the US executives want "product". "We're fighting against the standardised information put out by the McDonalds of communication," one photographer told Le Monde.

Corbis and Getty each claims to possess 70 million images, and they sell photos as illustrations, giving little importance to on-thespot news coverage. Photographers who have sold their archives to Corbis are regarded as traitors.

Last March, Corbis sent a contract to 50 photographers at Sygma, the Paris agency it bought last year. The document referred to "providers of visual content" and, the photographers say, would have put them on salary while appropriating resale rights to their work. The photographers were so enraged that they hired a lawyer.

Corbis withdrew the contract, calling it "a mistake". But three award-winning Sygma photographers and two executives have since resigned. One of the departing photographers, Allan Tannenbaum, posted a bitter letter to his colleagues on the Editorial Photographers UK website (epuk@epuk.org). "Corbis . . . went on a search and destroy mission . . . Corbis wants your pictures, but they don't want you," Tannenbaum writes.

Corbis had invested hundreds of thousands of francs in co-sponsoring the Perpignan festival, where it hoped to do some recruiting. But feeling against the US agency is running so high that Corbis cancelled a press conference.

An internal Corbis memo entitled "Plan for Perpignan" has been passed around by angry photographers. "The audience may well be hostile," it warns. It also suggested that "the press conference could be held in French, which would please the natives".