SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ENTERPRISE : Varied Images of America : Photo Agency Finds Success Through Diversity

The photograph shows six young people, arms reaching toward the sky and cheering.

For Leslye Borden and Liz Ely, co-owners of PhotoEdit, a small stock photo agency, the shot of half a dozen happy kids represents sales of $15,000 and symbolizes their specialty. For the youngsters in the agency’s top-selling photo are Asian, black, Latina and Anglo--what the company calls “the face of the new America.”

Five years ago, the tiny photo agency shifted its focus to images of minorities, women, children, the disabled and the elderly. The orders came pouring in so fast that Borden and Ely soon had to send photographers out for more. The demand forced the company to move from a Tarzana dining room to a fourth-floor office in downtown Long Beach. Sales this year are expected to reach $1.5 million.

Borden actually blushes when she talks of her success.

“I keep saying we’re a small stock photo agency,” she said. “But the demand just fed on itself. We had touched a nerve.”

The nerve is diversity. The demand for photos portraying a mix of varying ethnic and racial groups has grown as the population of the United States has become increasingly varied, said Mark Antman, co-director of Image Works, a stock photo agency in Woodstock, N.Y.

Even the current shift toward political conservatism and the rising sentiment against affirmative action programs won’t dampen the growing demand for diverse images, Antman and Borden say.

“It’s the reality of the changing demographics of this country,” Antman said. “This is a significant and growing market. It’s almost impossible to sell a photo of a group of four or five people unless one of them is from a different ethnic group.”

“It’s a marketing decision, not a political decision,” Borden said.

Antman held a workshop on the subject earlier this month in Newport Beach at the annual meeting of the Picture Agency Council of America, a 99-member association that represents stock photo agencies nationwide. Borden spoke at the workshop.

The two are among a handful of competitors in a niche market that the larger stock photo agencies have largely ignored.

The greatest appetite for such photos is from textbook publishers, which seek to reflect and appeal to those in the school-age population using their books, Antman said. But advertisers are also paying increased attention to diversity in their ad campaigns.

The need for diverse photos is especially great when advertisers narrow their focus, perhaps targeting a group by ZIP code or using magazines with editions tailored to certain parts of the country. Ads used in this way are often most effective when they reflect the ethnic and racial composition of the area, Antman said.

Along with increased diversity has come increased sophistication in the way images are used, he said. In the 1960s and ‘70s, textbooks showed different racial and ethnic groups, but each segregated in its own photos. Often, shots of people of color showed them in activities and poses more typical of Anglo culture, Antman said. Today’s images show people in more culturally realistic settings or put people of varying groups together in a picture.

“Teamwork, getting along, studying together or helping each other--those are the photos that sell the best,” Borden said.

Borden and Ely did not start their business with the idea of concentrating on diversity. Their idea was religion, Ely said.

The two were already in business for four years as InfoEdit, a photo-finding consulting service, when in 1987, Santa Monica photographer Alan Oddie gave them 30,000 of his spiritually themed shots of water, hands in prayer, crosses and communion scenes to market for him. The pair changed the company name to PhotoEdit and stored the slides in a bedroom in Borden’s Tarzana home.

But as they worked their new business, they soon noticed that textbook publishers, their major clients, were asking for group shots with almost mathematical ethnicity-based formulas, such as two Anglos, a black, an Asian and two Latinos.

They decided to shift their emphasis to diversity and the business took off immediately, Borden said. The volume soon had them giving more bedrooms in Borden’s house over to slides as her children left for college. Eventually the slides spilled into the dining room, where the women sorted the images. Finally Borden decided her house couldn’t hold any more.

Last month, they moved more than 500,000 slides and seven employees into new quarters in a Long Beach office with a harbor view. The company has about 65 photographers on call. Borden estimated that 90% of the company’s images are of people, with 60% of those photos portraying diversity.

PhotoEdit specializes in natural, unposed photos of real-life people, not models. Top sellers have included wheelchair athletes racing, a Latina mother and daughter, and a black family standing in front of a house with a “Sold” sign.

Their main clients continue to be textbook publishers, which pay less than advertisers but have a greater commitment to diversity. Banks, health insurance companies and telephone companies, which have especially diverse audiences, have also sought them out, Borden said.

But the women have discovered that commitment to diversity requires extra care with photos.

“We know some photographers who say people with brown hair are Hispanic when they’re not,” Ely said, adding that the agency tries to list the countries of origin for many of the Latinos in its photos.

She recalled selling a photo to a bank that showed an elderly Asian man playing chess with an Asian child. The man was Korean, the child Japanese--and the bank used the ad in a campaign directed at the Chinese community. Some people recognized the difference and were offended, Ely said.

“Now when they call and ask for Asians,” she said, “we ask which Asian group.”