Getty Images Popular Books

Getty Images Biography & Facts

Getty Images Holdings, Inc. is a visual media company and supplier of stock images, editorial photography, video, and music for business and consumers, with a library of over 477 million assets. It targets three markets—creative professionals (advertising and graphic design), the media (print and online publishing), and corporate (in-house design, marketing and communication departments). Getty Images has distribution offices around the world and capitalizes on the Internet for distribution with over 2.3 billion searches annually on its sites. As Getty Images has acquired other older photo agencies and archives, it has digitised their collections, enabling online distribution. Getty Images operates a large commercial website that clients use to search and browse for images, purchase usage rights, and download images. Image prices vary according to resolution and type of rights. The company also offers custom photo services for corporate clients. History In 1995, Mark Getty and chief executive officer Jonathan Klein co-founded Getty Investments LLC in London. Mark Getty is the company's chairman. In September 1997, Getty Communications, as it was called at the time, merged with PhotoDisc, Inc. to form Getty Images. The company relocated to Seattle two years later and expanded in the United States, reaching 2,000 employees by 2006. In April 2003, Getty Images entered into a partnership with Agence France-Presse (AFP) to market each other's images. Getty Images acquired the Michael Ochs Archives in February 2007. The Michael Ochs Archives were described by The New York Times as "the premier source of musician photography in the world". In 2008, the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman (H&F) acquired Getty Images for $2.4 billion. In 2012, H&F put Getty up for sale. As of the ensuing sale to Carlyle Group, the company was said to have an archive that included 80 million stills and illustrations. The company was acquired by the Getty family in 2018. The company moved to its current headquarters, in the Union Station office complex in Seattle's International District, in 2011. In 2015, Jonathan Klein became the company's chairman and Dawn Airey was hired as chief executive officer (CEO) of Getty Images. Airey remained in the role until 31 December 2018, at which time she became a non-executive director member of its board and Craig Peters was appointed CEO. In 2019, Getty Images introduced Market Freeze, simplifying exclusivity of rights-managed images. Later that year, it announced that due to customers' changing needs, it plans to phase out rights-managed imagery by 2020 in favor of royalty-free images. In December 2021, Getty Images announced its intention to become publicly traded once more through combination with CC Neuberger Principal Holdings II. In July 2022, the SPAC merger was completed and the newly formed parent company of Getty Images went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol GETY. Activist investor Trillium Capital made an unsolicited bid to acquire Getty for US$4 billion in April 2023 – representing nearly a 100 percent premium. Getty turned down the offer questioning its credibility. In September 2023, Getty announced that it was partnering with Nvidia to launch Generative AI by Getty Images, a new tool that lets people create images using Getty's library of licensed photos. Getty will use Nvidia's Edify model, which is available on Nvidia's generative AI model library Picasso. Acquisitions Since its formation, Getty Images has pursued an aggressive programme of acquisition, buying up many privately owned agencies that had built up the stock photography industry, from small family-run firms to larger agencies. By 1999, it had acquired one of the largest agencies, Tony Stone Images; the online art seller Art.com; the sports photography agency Allsport; the market leader in the Benelux and Scandinavia: Word View (1996, from Bert Blokhuis, four offices, for undisclosed sum); journalistic specialists Liaison Agency; Newsmakers, the first digital news photo agency; Online USA, a specialist in celebrity shots; and the Hulton Press Library, the former archive of the British photojournalistic magazine Picture Post. The Hulton collection was sold by the BBC to Brian Deutsch in 1988, when it was renamed Hulton Deutsch. In 1996, the Hulton collection was sold on once more, this time purchased by Getty Images and renamed Hulton Getty. With the acquisition of the Hulton library, Getty Images took ownership of the rights to some 15 million photographs from British press archives dating back to the nineteenth century. Hulton Getty also included photographs from the Keystone Collection, as well as images by notable photographers such as Bert Hardy, Bill Brandt, Weegee and Ernst Haas. Getty has branched out into stock audio, music and sound effects, and also video with the acquisition of EyeWire and Energy Film Library. Getty has partnered with other companies including Slidely for companies and advertisers to use the Getty Images video library of around 2 million videos. In 2000, Getty acquired one of its main competitors, Archive Photos of New York (a division of The Image Bank), for US$183 million. The Archive Photos library was combined with the Hulton Getty collection to form a new subsidiary, Hulton Archive. Archive Photos was formed in 1990 from the merger of Pictorial Parade (est. 1935) and Frederick Lewis Stock Photos (est. 1938), two well-established US photo agencies. Their collections included archive images from The New York Times, Metronome and George Eastman House, and works by photographers such as Ruth Orkin, Anacleto Rapping, Deborah Feingold, Murray Garrett, Nat Fein and John Filo. Further acquisitions followed, with the purchase in 2004 of image.net for US$20 million. On 9 February 2006, the microstock photo website iStockphoto was acquired by Getty Images for US$50 million. In 2007, Getty successfully purchased its largest competitor, MediaVast, for $207 million. The acquisition gave Getty Images control of WireImage (Entertainment, creative, and sports photography), FilmMagic (fashion and red carpet photography), and Contour Photos (portrait and studio photography). Getty Images also acquired other subsidiaries, including Master Delegates, which includes Isifa Image Service in Prague and Laura Ronchi in Italy. In 2008, Getty purchased Redferns Music Picture Library, the music photo library built up by British jazz photographer David Redfern. On 23 October 2008, Getty Images announced their intention to buy Jupitermedia's online images division, Jupiterimages, for $96 million in cash. The sale went ahead in February 2009; Jupiterimages (including the sites stock.xchng and StockXpert) is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Getty. Jupitermedia, now trading as WebMediaBrands, continues its Internet publishing business, which they didn't sell to Getty Images. On 25 January 2016, Corbis announced that it had sold its ima.... Discover the Getty Images popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Getty Images books.