The Image Bank
Overview
The Image Bank was a stock photography agency founded in 1965 and based in New York, New York, that became one of the pioneering companies of the modern stock-image business. For more than three decades it supplied pre-shot photographs and film to advertising agencies, publishers, corporations and designers, who licensed existing images for their campaigns and publications instead of commissioning new photography. Long owned by the Eastman Kodak Company, it was one of the two great international competitors in rights-managed stock photography by the late 1990s. In September 1999 Getty Images acquired it from Kodak for 183 million dollars, in a deal that doubled Getty's archive and made Getty the largest online image provider of its day.
The Stock Photography Idea
To understand The Image Bank, it helps to understand the trade it helped create. A stock agency holds a library of existing photographs, catalogued by subject, and licenses them for specific uses — an advertisement, a book cover, a magazine article — for fees scaled to the prominence and duration of the use. For advertisers, stock offered speed and certainty: the picture already existed, its quality was known, and it could be in a layout within days. For photographers, a good agency turned each strong image into an asset that could earn royalties for years.
The model depended on breadth and organisation. Clients expected an agency to find, from millions of frames, the exact sunset, crowd, animal, cityscape or lifestyle scene a campaign required — sports, iconic places, flowers, nature and thousands of other subjects — and to clear the rights reliably. Agencies like The Image Bank, alongside Comstock, WestLight and Tony Stone, were the huge distributors of this system in its classic era, and many professional photographers made an excellent living from the royalty cheques their libraries generated.
Growth as an International Agency
Founded in 1965, in the decade when colour photography conquered advertising and publishing, The Image Bank grew from its New York base into an international operation with offices and affiliates serving the world's major advertising markets. Its library accumulated the general commercial subjects the trade demanded: travel and landscape imagery, business and lifestyle scenes, nature and wildlife, sport and leisure, and the polished, aspirational photography on which consumer advertising of the 1970s and 1980s depended.
By the 1990s it stood in the top tier of the industry. Getty's own regulatory filings of the period, cataloguing competition, named The Image Bank — then a wholly owned subsidiary of Eastman Kodak — and the Visual Communications Group as the two international competitors in rights-protected stock photography, a market otherwise made up of local and specialist libraries and regional agencies. That description captures its stature: not the largest library in every niche, but one of only a handful of genuinely global generalist agencies.
The Kodak Years
Eastman Kodak, the Rochester film giant, owned The Image Bank from 1991. The fit seemed natural: Kodak sold the film on which the stock industry shot, and the agency gave it a business in the pictures themselves. Under Kodak, The Image Bank sat within the company's entertainment and commercial imaging interests, and it continued to expand its holdings — in June 1997, for example, it acquired Archive Holdings, the New York company that operated Archive Films and Archive Photos, strengthening its position in historical imagery and footage.
Yet the decade was turning against the old model. Digital delivery was arriving, and with it new competitors who sold images online, cheaply and instantly. Royalty-free collections on CD-ROM, sold for a one-time fee, and later microstock websites, undercut the careful per-use pricing on which agencies like The Image Bank had thrived, even as the overall digital image market grew toward an estimated two billion dollars. Kodak itself, squeezed across its film businesses, would eventually sell assets that were no longer central to its strategy.
Services and Clients
The Image Bank's clients were the creative industries: advertising firms and design agencies building campaigns, book publishers and newspapers and magazines illustrating print, broadcast production companies needing stills and film, corporations producing reports and presentations, and, increasingly in the 1990s, web designers. Its film holdings mattered alongside its stills; after the Getty acquisition, the combined company counted its film library in tens of thousands of hours, a substantial share of it contributed by The Image Bank and the film archives it had absorbed.
Service, in the rights-managed era, meant research as much as inventory: picture researchers who knew the library, could interpret a creative brief, and could guarantee that a chosen image was available for the intended use without conflicting licences. That human expertise, and the trust it built with art buyers, was a large part of what an acquirer was paying for in 1999.
The Getty Acquisition of 1999
In September 1999 Getty Images completed its purchase of The Image Bank from Eastman Kodak for 183 million dollars in cash, financed by a public offering of six million shares at thirty-nine dollars a share. The stock purchase agreement was dated 20 September 1999. Getty's chief executive, Jonathan Klein, said the company's first priority was to enhance The Image Bank's e-commerce operations, giving the traditionally offline agency access to online markets and operating efficiencies.
The strategic logic was scale in a consolidating market, and the immediate context was rivalry: Getty announced the deal explicitly as a move against Bill Gates's Corbis, which had just added the Sygma news archive. The acquisition doubled the size of Getty's photo and film archive, bringing its total to more than sixty million photographs and some twenty-seven thousand hours of film, and made it the largest online image provider. The following year Getty added the Visual Communications Group for 220 million dollars, completing the absorption of both international rivals its filings had once named.
Integration and Aftermath
Within Getty, The Image Bank's library was integrated into a single online platform alongside the Tony Stone, Hulton and other collections Getty had assembled. The separate agency identity, built over thirty-four years, faded as clients were migrated to Getty's e-commerce system — the very transition Klein had promised. Its photographers' images continued to earn within the combined library, but the brand that art directors had telephoned for a generation ceased to be a destination in its own right.
The absorption also marked the end of an era for the industry the agency had helped invent. The rights-managed model it exemplified — high fees, negotiated uses, researcher-led service — was progressively displaced, first by royalty-free discs and then by subscription and microstock pricing, until Getty itself announced plans in 2019 to phase out rights-managed imagery in favour of royalty-free. The Image Bank's history thus spans the full arc of classic stock photography: its invention as a modern licensing business, its maturity as a Kodak-owned global agency, and its consolidation into the digital platform economy.
Place Among Its Peers
Measured against its contemporaries, The Image Bank occupied the commercial centre of the trade: Bettmann and later Corbis were stronger in history, Tony Stone in European creative work, and the news agencies in topical pictures, while The Image Bank's strength was the broad, polished general library an international advertiser needed — which is precisely why a consolidator seeking instant global scale found it worth 183 million dollars.
Legacy
The Image Bank left no single famous photograph to posterity; its legacy is systemic. It helped prove, from 1965 onward, that existing photographs could be organised, catalogued and licensed as a durable business — the premise on which the entire stock industry, from Corbis and Getty to today's online libraries, still rests. Its 183-million-dollar sale remains a benchmark of the value the market once placed on a great general library and the client relationships around it, and its images, absorbed into Getty's archive, are still licensed to publishers and advertisers today, long after the nameplate came down.
