The German photo agency Laif has new owners.
A cooperative founded by the agency's photographers took over all the shares from the previous owner, ddp Media GmbH, last Friday.
Since the cooperative was founded in April, the initiators had raised more than 300,000 euros from supporters and members.
The Laif cooperative is to act as a shareholder after the acquisition.
The operational business is to be continued unchanged.
Henner Flohr
Responsible editor for the picture editing.
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The Cologne picture agency was founded in 1981 by Günter Beer, Jürgen Bindrim, Manfred Linke and Guenay Ulutuncok.
It is one of the renowned agencies for photojournalism in Germany.
She represents more than 400 photographers, including many who regularly work for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
In addition, Laif sells the archive photos of international media, such as the “New York Times”, for the German market.
In the summer of 2015, ddp took over the agency, which had previously been run independently by the photographers for 34 years.
In September 2021, ddp was in turn bought by Action Press AG, making Laif part of one of the largest photo agencies in the world, according to the company.
Such superlatives fueled doubts among the Laif photographers about the future positioning of their agency in the photo market and led to the founding of the cooperative with the self-confident goal formulated in the preamble of developing Laif into an "institution for the preservation and promotion of independent photojournalism".
The photographer Andreas Herzau, one of the board members of the cooperative, explains that the takeover is based on the desire for the greatest possible independence from the big agencies.
Above all, there is a need for control over future photo uses and price models when selling the photos.
With this approach, the cooperative for Laif follows a different path than most small agencies that join the big providers or are driven out by them.