LITTLE ROCK — John Rogers never knows what he’s going to find next among his 32 million photographs and negatives, most of them original newspaper prints from newspapers in Denver, Chicago and Detroit.
He was surprised, for instance, to learn that he has a sizable number of negatives of naked Baseball Hall of Fame members, including Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Willie Mays. The shots, which Rogers said look to have been snapped unintentionally in post-game locker rooms, were buried among the thousands of negatives that newspaper photographers put aside.
Rogers’ collection of images has increased tenfold in the past year as he has purchased photo archives from the old Sport Magazine, The Detroit News, The Denver Post, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Detroit Free Press. Some of the photos are mundane - apartment buildings that burned down or cats caught in trees. Others are among the most iconic images of the last century, such as the Kennedys, The Beatles and Babe Ruth.
Rogers, 37, has promised to digitize all of the 32 million photos within 18 months, free of charge, and in most cases has made a seven-figure cash payment to the newspapers as well. In exchange, he receives the prints and negatives, which he can sell in catalog auctions or on eBay.He has obtained copyrights for about half of the images, though the newspapers retain the right to reprint all their photos.
Rogers is widely known among collectors for his 2008 purchase of a rare Honus Wagner baseball card for $1.6 million, but he has aspirations beyond his private collection.
“The bigger long-term plan is to be like our own Getty [Images]: to have these 32 million images, and the ones that we do retain copyright to or get copyright to, we make those available for editorial use, commercial use, all of the above,” Rogers said.
His company, The John Rogers Archive, now employs about 50 people in the United States, most of them in North Little Rock, cleaning and scanning the images. The digital files are then sent to India, where about 80 workers attach data with the photograph’s date, subject, location and creator.
The final product he’ll deliver to the newspapers is an easily searchable, fully cross referenced digital version of the archive, Rogers said. His company is processing about 400,000 photographs each month and 50,000 negatives a day, he said.
He’s often asked what’s in it for him, and Rogers makes it clear that turning a profit is his first priority. He said the company’s revenue thus far, generated mostly from sales to collectors, has been $6 million to $8 million a year and is on track to top $10 million in 2010.
MUST MONETIZE IT
“At the end of the day it’s the dollars that make it all happen. I can have the passion and I can want to build my own personal archive and want to employ people, but if we can’t monetize it, it doesn’t work,” he said.
Once Rogers secures an archive and brings it to Arkansas - it took three 28-foot moving trucks to bring just a portion of the Chicago Sun-Times’ collection to North Little Rock - the process of selecting the most marketable images begins.
The biggest source of income is sales through auction houses such as Legendary Auctions in Illinois, where a single night can pull in $500,000, and the average sale is a few hundred dollars. Rogers also sets aside images for regular customers, like one who purchases every Chicago White Sox photograph without question.
Some customers have very specialized interests. Though he said he has no plans to distribute such images widely, Rogers sold a negative of a nude Mickey Mantle to a “private collector” for $25,000, after getting permission from Mantle’s estate.
About 80 percent of the images Rogers finds are not valuable enough to generate such high prices. A team of employees posts duplicates and other less-valuable photos on eBay, where the bidding usually starts at $9.99. These sales, which average about $21 an image, produce about $60,000 a week, Rogers said.
Frank Ceresi, who runs FC Associates, a Virginia-based firm that advises museums and collectors, will appraise the collection this summer. He said the archive’s value is certainly in the “many, many millions of dollars.”
“It’s probably the largest and most prestigious collection of photos and images in the country [owned by an individual],” he said.
Digitized archives, not to mention Rogers’ cash offers, are a boon to newspapers looking for new sources of revenue.
Tim Rasmussen, the assistant managing editor for photography at The Denver Post, said the newspaper will retain the copyrights to at least some of its photographs, and plans to sell some digital images online.
‘FABULOUS PHOTOS’
“We have fabulous photographs that go back to the turn of the century in Colorado and historical photographs and things like that,” Rasmussen said.
Having the archive in digital form will allow the newspaper to tap into an asset that is difficult to access in its current form - thousands of paper folders on hundreds of shelves that only a librarian can navigate.
“You have to know the subject name, you have to go find the folder, then you have to look at every image in the folder. And then if it’s been misfiled you can’t find it,” Rasmussen said.
Other companies would do the scanning, but for an archive with millions of images - Rasmussen estimated that the Post’s archive contains as many as 2 million images - their processes can be prohibitively expensive and time consuming.
SOME UNWILLING
Some papers are unwilling to part with prints, which they see as part of their legacy. Amy Disch, the library director for The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio and chairman of the Special Libraries Association’s news division, said the Dispatch’s prints are too valuable to part with. Disch said she was approached with an offer to digitize the Dispatch’s archives free of charge in exchange for the prints, but refused. She could not recall whether it was Rogers who made the offer.
But most newspapers either don’t realize that there’s a secondary market for these images, or simply don’t have the resources to digitize the images, which is necessary in order to sell the originals, Rogers said.
Rogers said he’s actively looking for new archives to take on. On Friday, he reached an agreement with the Sporting News for the purchase of its archives, whose images date to 1886. Through the purchase he acquired 600,000 photographs and glass-plate negatives, all of which he says are marketable.
Lately, Rogers has had his pick of publications. Initially, newspapers were reluctant to let their assets “walk out the door with some guy from Arkansas,” Rogers said. Now they’re lining up.
After he started on the Detroit Free Press archives in April, Rogers said, he has worked on an arrangement with Gannett to purchase more of the company’s newspaper photo archives. The Denver Post contacted Rogers after hearing positive reviews from The Detroit News.
“We’re at a crossroads of how big do we want to do it,” Rogers said. “We could probably take on 800 employees if we really started engaging every single paper that wanted to do it. It’s a matter of can we handle it or not.”
A year ago, Rogers had a collection of 3 million images he’d painstakingly assembled by buying photographers’ estates. He earned income on the collection by allowing the images to be used for retro baseball cards and for ESPN and HBO documentaries, among other things.
It was his friend, former NBC sportscaster George Michael, who persuaded Rogers to look to newspapers as a new source of material to expand the collection.
Michael, who died late last year, had assembled about 12,000 unique photographs of his favorite subject - vintage images of baseball players sliding. Michael “dragged” Rogers to Detroit to buy his first newspaper archive, and Rogers said he suspects that Michael targeted archives with the best collections of baseball action shots.
“Looking back on it, George just wanted me to buy the whole archive so he could get the sliding photos.”
The quest for photos of sliding ball players has led Rogers to what he sees as a noble endeavor: making history available to the public.
“We try to breathe life into them,” he said.
Business, Pages 67 on 06/20/2010