Without photo libraries…

Australian magazines would not have cover images.

There is an increasing trend to just pull images from international editions and reuse them for the Australian editions. Does no one shoot their own covers anymore? Vogue Australia shoots a small handful of covers themselves, as do teen girls mags everynow and then. But the women’s lifestyle / fashion mags… ick!

The worst example was something I noticed a few months ago, Aussie Women’s mag Madison had recycled an old old old image of Scarlett Johansson from a European issue of Glamour – dated nearly two years ago!!

Look at all the current covers of the mags below – they all were not original covers / images shot for the sole purpose of using it as a cover image. Oh and one of them looks like spew. Who’s bright idea was the colours on that cover? Where have the days of creating your own magazine cover from the conception of the idea, to styling and shooting and then retouching and adding coverlines gone?

Oh yeah. It’s cheaper to just buy the images in the Australian publishing environment.