Unsurprisingly, the international picture market has not been immune to the recent downturn in global economic fortunes. The most significant casualty appears to be the impending closure of venerable French agency Sygma.11 In 1999 Sygma was bought by Corbis, an American firm privately owned by Bill Gates which specialises in the buying and selling of pictures rather than the production of them.12 The trade press has been critical of the manner in which Corbis ran Sygma, the troubled recent history of which has featured mass redundancies, strikes and seemingly unreasonable changes to photographer's contracts.13 All of these factors appear to have contributed to the tragic demise of the thirty-seven year old agency.
Other fixtures of the international agency scene have managed to survive and even thrive in the economic crisis. Collectively owned VII, formed in 2001 by nine photographers working on both sides of the Atlantic, specialises in conflict photography and, as such, has had no shortage of work in recent years. VII's own promotional material reflects on the agency's position in the marketplace in relation to global conflict with perhaps surprising honesty, stating that 'VII has been responsible for creating and relaying to the world many of the images that define the turbulent opening years of the 21st century.'14 VII also prides itself on being 'technologically efficient' and to this extent has it's own online magazine and social networking site. New York's Black Star was founded in 1935 by three German-Jewish photographer's fleeing the Nazi regime, and was one of the initial contributor's to LIFE, with the weekly news magazine providing over a third of the agency's initial business.15 Although the agency has an overseas presence, Black Star is most renowned for its documentation of American history over the past 70 years; in their investigation on the 1981 assassination plot against Ronald Reagan, the FBI purportedly turned to the Black Star archives for assistance.16 Global giant Magnum Photos is, like VII, collectively owned by its members and has offices in New York, London, Paris and Tokyo.17 Historically, Magnum has benefited greatly from the demand for colour photography from magazines such as Rolling Stone, Time and Newsweek,18 but the agency has a diverse profile which includes conflict and protest photography.19