ZEFA (picture agency)
| ZEFA Central Color Image Agency | |
|---|---|
| legal form | GmbH |
| founding | 1956 |
| resolution | 2004 |
| Seat |
Düsseldorf Germany
|
| Branch | Picture agency |
| Website | www.zefa.de is forwarded to Corbis |
ZEFA Zentrale Farbbild-Agentur GmbH, was an international picture agency with headquarters in Düsseldorf .
history
In 1953 the V-Dia-Verlag was at home in Heidelberg. He produced slide series on all kinds of subjects for school lessons.
Walther Benser , a friend of the publisher Willy Vogt, quickly realized that one should create duplicates of slides in order to enlarge the distribution list and to protect the unique items , which were exposed to a high risk of damage. The two founded a picture agency under the umbrella of the publishing house in 1956, the ZFA Zentrale Farbbild Agentur . It was supposed to market the printing rights to a rapidly growing stock of images. The young company worked on for a few years. In the start-up phase, Walther Benser put the money he had earned with Leica lectures into the photo agency.
Then Walther Benser lost patience, brought the agency to Düsseldorf in 1964 and began to invest heavily in image quality and technical equipment. Success proved him right. Since 1969 at the company's headquarters in Düsseldorf-Oberkassel on the left bank of the Rhine on Schanzenstrasse 20a, the stubborn ZFA has become the sleeker-to-speak ZEFA with subsidiaries in London, Paris and Milan. In the 1980s, ZEFA was one of Europe's largest photo agencies.
In 1995 Erwin Fey took over ZEFA as managing owner and in less than ten years made it the largest agency in Europe - the third largest in the world. This was followed by the change of name to Zefa Visual Media GmbH , which was taken over by the US photo agency Corbis in December 2004 . With the takeover, Corbis was able to massively expand its presence in the highly competitive German market.
Web links
- Picture agencies, Gates cut jobs (Zefa) . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 2005 ( online ).