A new site to help find talent worldwide

Not long ago, I was having a conversation with Rob Haggart of aPhotoEditor.com -- a former colleague at Wenner Media -- and he mentioned the popularity of his list of reps and agents posted permanently on the site, but bemoaned its outdatedness and brevity. As a side project, I took on the task of sprucing it up the reps list, thinking it would be a great way for me to look at a lot of photography and retrain my eye after ingesting so much celebrity. I'm an obsessive researcher and soon discovered that there were hundreds more agencies to add. Then it occurred to us: what if we created the definitive list, with every agent shop worldwide and then tagged/curated/located their talent? It could be a valuable tool for creatives, who aren't flying talent around as much as they used to, and also a place for agents to engage creatives in real time as opposed to waiting for heavy tomes to be printed.

What you see now is our beta product, which we are calling phase one. It is free for agents to join, and they are able to log on, claim their tiles, and therefore keep their rosters and information very up to date. We've included links to all of their social media efforts since blogs and tweets are the new portfolio drop offs. Having just launched, we are still adding information, and there are a few bugs. Nonetheless we are confident that it is by far the most exhaustive directory of its kind and will accumulate much valuable information as time passes.

Our plans for the next few phases are to offer enhanced tile features to agents for greater visibility, build a customizable aggregator feed from agency blogs, and create a Pinterest-like board application to help organize your artists and share lists. What started as a humble list, we hope to be an indispensable part of the daily life of photo editors/buyers and other creatives.