Not a pretty picture for the paparazzi

Andy Pemberton

• Last Updated: November 23. 2009 7:27PM UAE / November 23. 2009 3:27PM GMT

Photographers try to capture an image of Britney Spears through the back window of an ambulance in January last year. The market for such paparazzi photographs has recently taken a hit. Mark J Terrill / AP

When François Navarre, the co-owner of the celebrity photo agency X17, was recently looking through tax forms that detailed his company’s earnings from 2007, he cried salty tears, said his wife and partner, Brandy Navarre. “You can’t believe the cheques that were coming in in 2007 versus now. It’s a different world,” she told the website The Daily Beast.

According to the Navarres, the market for paparazzi photographs of celebrities has tanked. The Daily Beast conducted a straw poll and discovered that a celebrity shot now sells for 31 per cent less than it did in 2007.

“That number comes from a survey of just one agency: X17,” says Gary Morgan, who, with his partner, Kevin Smith, runs Splash, the world’s leading celebrity photo agency. “As a survey, it’s a load of rubbish,” he says with characteristic bluntness. “But it’s also right. The volume of demand is actually bigger, but the price for non-exclusive shots has dropped.”

During the gold rush of celebrity photography between 2005 and 2007, magazines bid colossal amounts for key images. In 2007, Us Weekly’s annual photo budget was $8 million (Dh29.4m). Just over a year ago, People magazine in the US and Hello partnered up to pay $14 million for the first shots of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s newborn twins, Vivienne and Knox.

The high point (or low point, depending on your point of view) for celebrity photos came on February 16, 2007, when Britney Spears, in the midst of a breakdown, visited a hairdresser in Florida and shaved off all her hair. The price for that shot was $300,000. At the time, 20 per cent of all paparazzi coverage was devoted to the frazzled star. X17 alone had 15 photographers devoted to tracking and photographing Spears’s every move.

Julian Linley, the creative director of Heat and Grazia, two of the biggest celebrity-driven women’s weekly magazines in the UK, recalls those heady days. He says that he remembers buying one set of photos for $140,000. “It would be extremely rare if we paid more than $75,000 today.”

So where has all the money gone? Partly, it’s the recession. But there are other factors at play. There were simply too many paparazzi, Hollywood studios became controlling about the behaviour of their young stars, and magazines got a lot more canny about how they spent their photo budgets.

“Everyone has got a little more realistic,” says Linley. “We only spend money where we need it. On the cover but not inside the book.”

When gossip blogs such as TMZ and Perez Hilton and thousands of others appeared on the scene, paying less for non-exclusive images, the nature of the paparazzi business changed. Everything was about volume.

“If you want to make $20,000 today,” says Morgan, “you have to sell your picture to 40 websites at $500 a time.”

But it isn’t just the photo market that’s calmed. The way celebrities are treated in the media has changed, too.

“We started to feel uncomfortable running pictures of Britney while she was having a breakdown,” says Linley. “Jade Goody and Heath Ledger dying also changed the tone of celebrity coverage.”

Of course, it helped that talent shows such as The X Factor, which, for the most part, accentuates the positive in its coverage of its plucky contestants, started to become massively successful. You could call this “the Susan Boyle effect”, after the homely star who became a global phenomenon courtesy of a healthy set of pipes and an uplifting back story.

“It’s a change of mood,” says Linley. “There’s a recession and everyone is miserable and wants to be cheered up. They’re tired of horrible stories about Amy Winehouse.”

So does this mean the appetite for pictures of celebrities in their bikinis or staggering out of nightclubs is finally peaking? Not a bit of it, says Morgan.

“There are new emerging markets in China and India who have a thirst for this stuff. We recently sold pictures to Iran and 26 countries in Africa. New platforms like the internet and hand-held phones are taking over from traditional newspapers and magazines. Web video is going to explode next year,” he says.

“The market might be changing, but people are still fascinated by celebrities,” says Linley.