Fabrice Connen (DPPI): “Need to find other outlets”

What is the activity at the agency during this period of confinement?

In the absence of current events, we must move on to something else. Concretely, the photographers were put on partial unemployment. But as DPPI draws on 56 years of archives, we embarked on something that we had wanted to do for years... but had never had the time to do: delve into this mine . And when I talk about archives, I'm talking about the pre-digital era, black and white slides and negatives. I take tons of them home, select them, scan and reprocess the best images. With modern technologies, we can make them more beautiful than before. Afterwards, it is a matter of indexing them correctly and then putting them on our site. It's a way of enriching our offer, of promoting our photo collection, many of which have been dormant for a long time. In-depth work which is not remunerative at the moment T but which allows us to extract a sort of “best of”, for later.

Does each photographer do the same thing in his corner with his own archives?

No, I work from the archives which were at the agency's headquarters. I took the equipment to digitize home; my office has become a Boeing cockpit. You have to be careful to caption and classify correctly. All this will make it possible to meet the needs of the press, book publishers but also brands; car manufacturers and others. In this stock, which includes 20 million photos over 55 years of existence, we find part of the heritage of manufacturers and partner companies who have invested in motorsport. So, we can extract it and why not, offer it to them.

When activity picks up again, there may be very busy weekends with many disciplines happening at the same time. Is this likely to present difficulties for you?

We regularly hold meetings by videoconference, firstly to get news from everyone, but also to prepare for the resumption. We try to establish schedules, which are modified from one week to the next... In the best case scenario, we will have a lot of work in the second half of the year. If there are indeed overlapping dates, this could pose logistical problems for us, between the agency's five photographers plus the 15 regular service providers. We may be short of hands, but I would much rather have this problem to resolve than be out of reporting, like at the moment. But it is not for tomorrow, because if we are talking about deconfinement on May 11, for DPPI – and as for AUTOhebdo moreover – this is not going to mean full resumption of activity from May 11! The lack of news will go well beyond that. The question is: until when?

If, on the contrary, there is nothing – or very little activity – by the end of 2020, could that endanger the agency?

We made sure to protect the company by making ourselves as secure as possible with state and banking aid. But obviously this can only last for a while, because all this is not free. A blank year, I prefer not to think about it because the blow would be really very severe, even if it were to resume fully in 2021. The impact will already be felt in the second half of 2020, we will be able to measure it at that time. At the end of the year, will we have the same budgets, the same number of organizers in front of us, to negotiate contracts... Today's reality leads us to be circumspect, but this period is also conducive to imagining other avenues for diversifying income. The exploitation and promotion of our archives is one thing, but we are also thinking of setting up a photo studio or even offering training for amateurs, drawing on the experience of our professional photographers. We will need to find other outlets to ensure the sustainability of the agency. In our traditional professions, if we don't evolve, it risks being complicated.