Photography Industry Challenges: Commissions, Fees and Visibility

Tightly packed stacks of paperwork filling a shelf

Most arguments about the business of photography come down to three questions. Who gets paid, who keeps the copyright, and whose name appears next to the picture. The documents that settle those questions are commissioning contracts, stock library terms and collective licensing schemes, and the organisations that represent photographers in the United Kingdom publish their positions on all three.

This page is a reference article about those pressures, written for readers who follow the London photography scene. A talk on the problems of the industry was held under this address in October 2017. Rather than report an event, the page sets out what the professional bodies have actually put in writing, with dates and links so you can read the primary documents yourself.

Commissioning contracts and what they ask a photographer to give up

The clearest recent example of a disputed contract in British press photography is the News UK contributor contract of 2020. On 16 September 2020 the National Union of Journalists and the British Press Photographers' Association jointly called on News UK to withdraw it. Their objection was specific rather than general. A single commissioning fee would give the publisher exclusive use of the work in perpetuity across its Times titles, so the photographer could never licence that work again. Contributors would also lose secondary rights, waive their moral rights, and accept an indemnity clause making them liable for claims arising from the images they supplied. Photographers were asked to sign by early October 2020 or lose preferred contributor status.

Each of those clauses has a separate cost. Perpetuity removes the resale value of an archive. A waiver of moral rights removes the right to be identified as the author, which is the mechanism behind a byline. An indemnity shifts legal risk from a publisher with lawyers to a freelancer without them. A photographer usually reads all three at once, which is why representative bodies respond to the whole document rather than one line of it.

Fees, stock libraries and the arithmetic of a per-image share

Stock licensing is where the gap between a headline percentage and an actual payment is easiest to see. In December 2018 Alamy told contributors their commission would fall from 50 per cent to 40 per cent from February 2019. After protests from the BPPA and the NUJ's Photographers' Council, the library partly reversed the plan on 19 December 2018, keeping the 50 per cent rate for images held exclusively with Alamy. The BPPA board said at the time that limiting the concession to exclusive material would still anger many members.

The same argument returned on a larger scale in 2026. On 6 August 2026 the BPPA published an open letter to Alamy's managing director about a commission structure due to take effect on 1 September 2026, under which most contributors' share would fall to 20 or even 15 per cent. The letter sets the percentage against the actual licence values the library was generating:

With the number of $0.39 sales that they are generating most of us will earn very little having spent a long time adding our carefully keyworded images to their library - that's less than £0.07 per image after the beginning of next month.

The association asked for the contributors' minimum share to stay at 40 per cent and for a workable way to withdraw material. The wider income picture is documented too. UK Visual Artists: A survey of earnings and contracts, published in 2024 by CREATe at the University of Glasgow and commissioned by the Design and Artists Copyright Society, surveyed 1,451 visual artists. It put the typical self-employed income of those working mainly as visual artists at £12,500, which the report calculates as 47.5 per cent below full-time minimum wage earnings of £23,795.

Secondary rights, the income that is never invoiced

Not all photographic income arrives as a fee. Collective licensing covers uses that cannot practically be tracked one by one, such as photocopying and scanning in schools, universities and businesses. DACS distributes that money to photographers, illustrators and artists through its Payback scheme, which pays an annual royalty where work has appeared in a book, a magazine or a television programme. On 29 September 2026 DACS announced that a record 115,000 creators would share more than £6 million in Payback royalties. A contract that signs away secondary rights, as the 2020 News UK document would have done, also signs away a claim on this kind of distribution.

Credit, consolidation and machine training

Visibility is the part of the problem that looks like publicity and behaves like rights. Attribution is a legal right in the United Kingdom, not a courtesy, which is why a waiver of moral rights in a contract matters more than it reads. Two further pressures have been formally addressed by the BPPA. In February 2025 it published its response to the Intellectual Property Office consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence, launched in December 2024, arguing against an opt-out system for the use of work in training models and for existing copyright law to be enhanced and properly enforced instead.

In April 2026 the association published its submission to the Competition and Markets Authority review of Getty Images' proposed purchase of Shutterstock. The CMA provisionally ruled that the purchase could not be approved unless Shutterstock first sold its editorial business, finding that the merger could cause a substantial lessening of competition in the UK editorial image market. Margot Daly, chair of the inquiry group, was quoted by the Financial Times as saying that a loss of competition could leave UK media outlets, large and small, facing a loss of choice or a more expensive service. Fewer buyers of editorial photography is a fee problem as much as a competition problem.

Where to read the terms before signing them

  • The Association of Photographers usage calculator prices additional use of commissioned work beyond the rights covered by the original fee, which is the calculation most often skipped when a client asks for more territories or a longer licence.
  • The British Press Photographers' Association publishes its open letters and consultation responses in full, which makes it a usable record of which contract terms have been contested and when.
  • The NUJ London Freelance Branch maintains a freelance fees guide covering photographic rates alongside writing rates.

Our know your rights reference page collects the copyright and permissions basics that sit underneath these documents. For the photographers working in London through this period, see the speakers index and the talks archive. Profiles that touch directly on commissioned and self-funded work include Luke Archer, Stuart Freedman and Martin Usborne, where the economics of self-published and independently published books come up repeatedly.

This site is an independent journal. It is not connected with the former PhotoForum talks group and it does not organise events.