While Seattle is home to Getty Images and Corbis, the biggest players in the stock photography sector, Calgary has a rich history of stock photography professionals and companies. It all started back in 1985, with Greg Kolodziejzyk's Image Club Graphics. In 1994, he sold the company to Aldus/Adobe, and Greg retired soon after that. (Today, he's doing some pretty crazy stuff, like setting world records.)
Adobe divested Image Club in 1998, and the management team, in a management buyout led by Brad Zumwalt, rebranded the company as Eyewire. A few years later, Eyewire was sold to Getty Images. Getty operated Eyewire for a few years, before deciding to close the Calgary office and consolidate the remaining resources in Seattle (The eyewire.com domain was eventually sold to Fonts.com). A few years ago, most of that team collectively created another stock photography great venture, Veer. Dizzy yet?
Eyewire retained only core management and employees after Adobe's divestiture. This caused a scattering of former employees with varying degrees of stock photography experience throughout Calgary. Some moved to other cities, including product manager Niall O'Driscoll, who went on to become VP of Content at Hemera (now a part of Jupiter Images).
Some former employees of Image Club/Eyewire, including Bruce Livingstone, went on to start new stock photography ventures, most of which are now defunct. Bruce and I were both former employees of Kolodziejzyk and Zumwalt during the Image Club and Adobe days, but we were not a part of Eyewire. Bruce went on to start iStockphoto in 2000, I joined him about a year later, and the rest, as they say, is history.
So there you have it. You may need to read this post twice and email me for a diagram.
For those of you thinking of starting the next great stock photography company, where would you locate - Calgary, or Seattle?
hey Pat! Thanks for remembering me! So much has grown from what I started a way back in the early 80's. I know that in these days of crazy insane technology, it's easy to trivialize some of the 'innovations' from those ancient days.
ReplyDeleteBut you have to ask yourself - if I didn't start Image Club in little frozen Calgary back in 1985, where would everyone be today? Would you guys even know what the term stock photography meant? I doubt it. You'd probably all be oil executives or something - no doubt you would all still be successful, but who knows to what extent and in what industries... Me too!
Greg K
http://www.pedaltheocean.com
Greg, agree 100%. The mentoring and leadership you provided helped spur on another generation of entrepreneurs, and it just so happens that we didn't have any better ideas for a business than you did over 20 years ago!
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