Garnet Media launches in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa May 2009

The stock image industry has been through a complete transformation in the last ten years, moving from purely analogue storage of slides and negatives in filing cabinets, to massive online databases with millions of images searchable at the touch of a button, and now social networking tools spreading words and images within seconds, from flickr to twitter to blogging and Facebook, anyone can sell an image by just getting it out there to be seen.

Garnet Media represents a select group of photographers, providing a range of services to assist working in this digital environment. Acting as their agent, Garnet Media channels photographers' images to income generating sources in the news, magazine, book publishing and commercial arenas, as well as offering help with marketing and finding commissioned work. Most importantly Garnet Media finds pictures that people need...from Nelson Mandela and the apartheid era to Hip Hop musicians, soccer supporters and everyday South Africans.

We specialize in being able to get you exactly what you need because many of our photographers can shoot images at short notice to add to their stock collections, thereby making the pictures available to clients as stock imagery....a dripping tap, a person drawing money from an ATM, a child with their hand raised in a classroom...the less obvious images needed for books, magazines and projects that not many photographers have taken, but so many publications need.


Garnet Media represents photojournalist Karin Retief whose photo essays and features cover travel and people as well as important social issues in Southern Africa.

Johannesburg based photographer Thabo Moloto's focus on the music scene and all things happening in Jozi, Garnet Media is able to supply clients with strong images covering the Gauteng region.

Andrew Ingram is a news photojournalist based in Cape Town, but his interest in multi media and has taken him into the world of High Definition Video. After his day job picture editing he can often be seen rushing about with a video camera, mic, lights and lots of other bulky stuff - for fun!

He is also making panoramic photographs, the bigger the better, which are digitally stitched and printed on canvases.

Owner and Manager of Garnet Media, Maryann Shaw has 14 years experience in the media industry. After a Fine Art degree in Photography and Journalism at Rhodes University, she first worked in a Photo Library environment in 1995 in London at the Julian Cotton Photo library, and was exposed to the idea of an image being sold again and again if it served the right purpose: a picture of a contributing photographer’s two year old playing in the bath with bubbles was sold for billboards, magazine and newspaper adverts because an advertising agency needed to illustrate this concept for a baby friendly bath product.

Since then, she has set up or managed photo libraries for Struik Publishers (1997), Alain Proust and Cape Photo Library (1997-2000), Eric Miller and iAfrika Photos (1998-2000) Garnet Images (2003-2005) Media 24 and IMAGES24 (2005-2008) and Africa Media Online (2008-2009).