imageBROKER: a champion of quality and diversitiy in travel
imageBROKER is a German agency with a long history in the industry and truely deep roots to photography preceding its founding in 2003 by several decades.
Founder, Klaus-Peter Wolf, and his wife have been professional photographers since the early 80s, when they photographed for 20 international agencies and travelled some of the then world’s remote and exotic places together on assignments for several months at a time. And in the eighties "remote" had a far more serious meaning than today, where nearly every point on earth can be reached by airline and rent-a-car booked on the internet.
Upon each assignment, Klaus and his wife returned to Munich with up to 25 kg of film (instead of 20 grams of storage cards), which then had to be painstakingly processed manually into slides, barcoded, archived and shipped via postal service to agencies around the world (some agencies in Germany even used to pick up boxes of slides themselves by car).
While the technological advances and the tech bubble burst of the early 2000’s caused considerable changes in the industry and the acquisition and closure of many agencies, this new landscape paved the way for Klaus to found imageBROKER.
Feeling the urge and passion to continue making a living through photography, Klaus started digitizing images and making them available for viewing by agencies on his personal website (at a time when this practice was somewhat controversial and not accepted by all agencies). Nevertheless, he grasped this opportunity and followed through with the encouragement of others with digitizing and marketing images of photographers across his network.
And in the midst of these circumstances, imageBROKER was born; digitizing and supplying images from Klaus, and three close friends/photographers via burnt CDs and DVDs sent to agencies. The first contracts were signed on the Wolf’s kitchen table with photographers who still supply him to this day.
In the early years, he held training seminars on digital photography and the digitization of the industry, which contributed significantly to growing its supplier base.
Today, a decade and a half later, relationships with more than 1,000 international top photographers ensure a constant supply of new imagery on every imaginable topic. Among them are the world’s best animal, nature and travel photographers, who deliver breath taking pictures worthy of any calendar.
Even today each and every uploaded image goes through a rigorous selection process, including a strict technical quality assessment, and is individually keyworded by proper keywording experts.
The over 1.1 million large collection includes premium RF and RM images, as well as a smaller, but growing, budget collection. Users of imageBROKER pictures have previously described the images as “addictive”, “brilliant”, and “a blessing to their eyes”.
imageBROKER has not forgotten its photographic roots, and therefore strives for “fairness” – one of the agency’s core values – in relationships with its artists and suppliers. Consequently, the agency’s photographers earn a fair royalty of 50%. This not only encourages them to continue shooting and delivering the highest-quality images, but, equally importantly, enables them to do so.
At PantherMedia we are very grateful to handle this collection and offer it to our customers. It's incredible granularity enables designers and calendar makers to find exactly what the need, even when it is a rare site they are looking for. Travelguides and great calendars need more than just the typical every day tourist high lights to be truly outstanding. And that is where imageBROKER delivers with quality and diversity. Check out our light box with our favourites from this great collection here.
