Podcast — Benoît Baume, Fisheye: Establishing Itself as a Specialized Media Outlet (3/6)

Margaux Vulliet: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Médianes podcast, which meets with media founders to share their experience. I'm Margaux Vulliet, a journalist at Médianes, and you're listening to Chemins. In this episode, we're meeting with the magazine Fisheye. It's a photography magazine that comes out every two months. It's also a gallery, an agency, and content for brands. Fisheye's mission is to spotlight emerging photographers. The media outlet will celebrate its tenth anniversary next year. And ten years ago, they were pioneers in offering such an editorial proposition. People told them "it will never work", and here they are, established in the world of photography. So, how do you impose your editorial identity? How do you find the right offer to stand out, how has specialized press evolved in recent years? We discuss this with Benoît Baume. Benoît, hello.

Benoît Baume: Hello.

Margaux Vulliet: Thank you for accepting our invitation, you're the founder of Fisheye. Is there anything you'd like to add to that introduction to the magazine?

Benoît Baume: Yes, there are always things to add because a media outlet today is constantly evolving. So in any case we can't give it a fixed definition because it's evolving almost week by week. We try to stay in tune with the times, try to understand trends and respond to them both from an editorial perspective and from a business model perspective where things have evolved considerably for us over nine years. We're no longer the same company we were nine years ago, and in any case we don't generate our revenue in the same way anymore.

Margaux Vulliet: We'll come back to that anyway. In my introduction, I said authors, photographers and non-photographers specifically because for Fisheye, this distinction matters. Why?

Benoît Baume: It's extremely important because what interests us are people who have things to tell through their images. We consider photography as a medium of expression, just like writing, or as it's more generally recognized in film and video. And ultimately, we tend to overlook the fact that photography is a form of writing, a way of expressing a certain number of ideas. Of course, with an artistic dimension to it, but not only that, because there are also very strong messages linked to society. What interests us is how, through their writing, through their visual narrative, we can manage to take the viewer on the path that's been laid out by the author. That's why we really speak of authors, because that's where things come together for us. The aesthetic side of photography isn't the primary element; what's extremely important is the way we create a discourse and express it through our images. And obviously the aesthetic quality of the photos matters because it's one of the factors that will allow the photos to be distributed and seen, but it has to fit into a much broader discourse.

« The very subject of our magazine is tied to its medium. »

Margaux Vulliet: If you had to quickly tell someone who's never opened Fisheye what they could find in it, without revealing too much, what would you say?

Benoît Baume: It's a magazine where we're quite attentive to form since we believe that if only one type of magazine were to survive in the end, it would be photo magazines. A printed photo isn't a digital photo. So the very object of our magazine is tied to its medium. A photo on a screen that you're going to print on paper — and depending on the type of paper it's not at all the same result — it's not the same thing at all. So we, for example, made the choice to have two different papers — at the current time of the explosion in paper prices over the last year and a half, in proportions we've never seen before.

Margaux Vulliet: What didn't have an impact on the magazine's price?

Benoît Baume : So we'd already raised the magazine's price since over nine years, we went from €4.90 to €6.00, and now we're at €7.50. We haven't passed on this new price increase. However, printing and paper costs have risen significantly, but we have an economic model that allows us to withstand that. Today, what's fundamental is precisely the quality of the object we're offering, so whether it's these 60 pages in the middle of the magazine, on a very matte uncoated paper, slightly textured, where we have our portfolios, which really gives the magazine an almost book-like appearance. And then, in contrast, at the beginning and end, glossy coated paper that's much closer to what you might find in fashion magazines for example. So we made the choice to have these three sequences in the magazine: an introductory sequence, where you'll find mostly news, portraits, projects, things that seem to us to be deep-rooted trends in society with respect to images. There's an entire portfolio section in the middle, with what we call stories, that is, real narratives told through these images. And then at the end, you'll find an entire calendar section. And then lots of things around the world of books and quite a few columns too because we have quite a few people who contribute to thinking around the notion of contemporary imagery.

« A few years ago, it would have been unthinkable to enter that market, which was very well-established.

Margaux Vulliet: So precisely, whether in form or substance, it makes you stand out. That said, if I say that Fisheye is a reference media in the field of photography, you don't quite agree with the notion of reference media. Why?

Benoît Baume: Because the photo magazine as such had always been rather dominated by so-called technical magazines. For a very long time, the world's biggest photo magazine was a French magazine called Chasseur d'images—which it still is—that was a magazine which tested photo equipment. Today, clearly, it's a medium that's rather losing ground, as other very strong media have done. There are magazines that were very important just five years ago that have disappeared, like Le Monde de la Photo. A fair number of titles have disappeared in recent years, or titles that have suffered major setbacks. I'm thinking of the legendary magazine, Photos, which belonged to Lagardère for a long time, then was bought before being resold recently to Studio Harcourt, a magazine that stopped publishing for a while, that has evolved quite a bit in its form. And what I mean is, a few years ago it would have been unthinkable to enter that market which was very structured. And ultimately, the collapse of that market left room for us. But we ourselves are extremely atypical because we're not quite in the same category as the magazines I've just described here. We've somewhat reinvented a model in the middle of the photo magazine space, but we're not trying to copy ourselves in the process because I think we're a model that's hard to copy too.

Margaux Vulliet: You were just mentioning other photography media outlets that may have disappeared or others that are still around. Fisheye launched in 2013. At that time, how were you observing the ecosystem of photography media? Ten years ago, how was it going?

Benoît Baume: There were some very strong media outlets. What you have to understand is that this market was driven by advertising from camera manufacturers, who had enormous budgets back then because you have to remember that the digital market, equipment market—that is, the shift from film to digital—experienced extremely strong growth right up until 2011, 2012. In 2013, the digital camera market began its decline, attacked by the arrival of smartphones. But at the time, camera makers like Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, and Fuji had enormous budgets and were massively overinvesting in advertising, betting they could offset potential losses by getting people to upgrade from compact cameras to DSLRs or mirrorless cameras, which were just emerging. So they kept investing heavily, but the market fell so dramatically that between 2012 and 2021, the camera market was divided by 10. So it was a huge upheaval. The streams of funding that had been flowing to this very specialized media simply stopped reaching these outlets, and many media either drastically scaled back their ambitions or disappeared entirely. So in that context, we managed to carve out a path for ourselves.

« It was fairly obvious something was at play around imagery because unlike other markets that collapsed, the practice of photography didn't collapse at all. »

Margaux Vulliet: I'd say, you see media outlets disappearing, and you're like "I'm coming in with a new media," it's quite striking.

Benoît Baume: It's surprising, but at the same time I came from a photo media background myself because I was editor-in-chief of Images, which was another contemporary photography magazine. So I knew this market, I knew these players, so I wasn't coming into the ecosystem blind. Second, I could see clearly that we needed to reinvent the business model—that we couldn't rely solely on advertising, subscriptions and sales. And third, it was pretty obvious that something significant was happening around imagery, because unlike other markets that have collapsed, photography as a practice hasn't collapsed at all. There was a huge paradox between the camera equipment market collapsing and the practice being more intense than ever on the user side. And that's a dichotomy that people struggled to grasp and understand. What you also have to factor in is that the market became more professional, so there was a need to speak to professional users. Fisheye has always been read by professionals too, and we actually did pretty well on that front. On the other hand, we continued to develop other types of relationships because imagery became extremely important, particularly through Instagram. As a result, all brands, especially luxury brands and fashion brands, seized on imagery as a differentiating factor. We also had the good fortune to benefit from advertising from these luxury brands that came here looking for, I'd say, a connection to a creative community that mattered to them. Essentially, we replaced the loss of photography advertisers with lifestyle or fashion advertisers.

Margaux Vulliet: Beyond bringing a fresh perspective to that market with a new business model, what drove your desire to launch Fisheye?

Benoît Baume: I was editor-in-chief of Images. It was a very beautiful magazine, but it showed rather the finished result—it did portfolio features, talked more about the authors than techniques, but it often did this with fairly classical authors, or in any case people who already had strong recognition; whether through various festivals, publications, exhibitions, or museums. So we had difficulty addressing the question of emerging talent. At that time, social networks were appearing, or in any case beginning to take shape, and there were a certain number of authors emerging in a somewhat spontaneous way, and we struggled to document this new scene. I felt it was a view of the world that was new, the world was changing extremely fast. Who better than photographer-authors to tell us about the world visually and make us aware of these changes? Because that's the power of photography—it captures something that marks our consciousness and imagination very strongly. I had difficulty moving my own teams. I sensed it was happening in a form of tension, and that's not necessarily what I aspired to. I said to myself 'if you can't do it here, do it elsewhere and decide to do it', and that's how Fisheye was born. The name is linked to this idea of having an extremely wide view of the world. Fisheye is a lens in photography with an extremely wide angle, I chose it for that reason and for a second reason, which is more of a wink, which is that the Fisheye distorts greatly and is therefore a fairly inexpensive lens compared to others. These were lenses used mainly by younger people entering that market, especially in urban sports, and it was also a way of marking the media as belonging to a generation of slightly younger creators.

« I think the question of perspective and legitimacy arises in the media. »

Margaux Vulliet: You were saying you were editor-in-chief of Images; how did that role help you in creating and launching Fisheye?

Benoît Baume: When you're editor-in-chief, you take an interest in production issues, your printers, the constraints, how things work, the files… You know how a newsroom operates, you know who you need. I knew all the players in that market, so it was quite easy to go see them and present the project to them. And above all, I had strong editorial knowledge of photography, which gave me credibility when I launched the title. I think the question of perspective and legitimacy comes up in the media. In that world, I was considered by the market players to be a legitimate player. Perhaps that fades over time, but in any case when you're starting a media outlet, the question of the legitimacy of your perspective is an important one.

Margaux Vulliet: That's an interesting question about legitimacy. In your view, at what point can you say "I'm legitimate"? Is it because you have experience in that field, because you're experts on the subject? How would you define that notion a bit?

Benoît Baume: I think legitimacy is acquired in many different ways. It's not really in fashion anymore, but back then there were people who had blogs that were very relevant, who were legitimate through this practice, which could be a non-professional practice but which gave them this legitimacy. There were people who built this legitimacy through a presence on the ground, a certain number of events, very notable active participation, involvement in associations; being members and active participants in a number of projects that organized exhibitions for example. There were a number of things that could give you this legitimacy. And what's important, I'd say, to be legitimate, is to be connected with your ecosystem, to engage with it, to bring original contributions to it. So it can happen quite quickly. It might take two or three years maybe, but you don't need to have 20 years of experience to be legitimate. You need to know how to carry out actions or have original proposals that, I'd say, break away a bit from the beaten path and bring a perspective that is intelligent, intelligible. And that will obviously confer legitimacy.

« And it's clearly the audience that, once this period of creation has passed, will bring legitimacy to the media. »

Margaux Vulliet: Having a name that's starting to become recognizable in the media ecosystem you work in?

Benoît Baume: Yes, but not only that. Obviously the credibility of the person and the name are linked. But beyond the name, beyond the person, I'd say it's also the movement that matters, there's also this notion of team that creates the media. So when I created Fisheye, I didn't have much budget, so I couldn't afford photography stars. But I built a team that resonated with that vision and managed to create a real editorial approach around it. But quite quickly, after about a year actually, the editor-in-chief decided to leave to go live abroad. At that point, I told myself "we've built something, we need to try to strengthen it" and so I asked — it's been eight years now — the current editor-in-chief, Éric Karsenti, to come on board. And Éric is someone with a name, who is credible in photography, and he clearly helped us take a step forward through his profile, his credibility, and the fact that he has many connections in that network. So that too, it's important — this notion of team, of community that we manage to bring together. And clearly, the media itself too, because that's what a media outlet does: how does the media aggregate an audience? And it's clearly the audience that, once the creation phase has passed, brings credibility to the media. There's its editorial line, what it tells, the way it's done, and especially the audience. The audience obviously has consequences on how we'll be perceived, both by people who can provide us information like press attachés, like industry players. And then readers and advertisers. So the question of audience aggregation is fundamental, obviously.

Margaux Vulliet: So right at the beginning, how did you bring together the first members of the Fisheye community?

Benoît Baume: At first, you're not quite sure, so you reach out to your own network. I remember the day we created the Fisheye Facebook page—I was checking the subscriber count every ten minutes, and within a day we'd crossed 1,000 subscribers thanks to our network. But then something happened. We also got, I'd say, a bit of visibility. We did some PR work. We sent the first issue of the magazine to France 2's newsroom, and we ended up on the 20-hour news. That gave us quite a lot of exposure. And then with the first issue, we printed more copies and distributed 20,000 or 30,000 copies to photo shops all across France. We made it available for free in those stores, which allowed us to reach a community of photographers who came to buy equipment in those shops and to build awareness pretty quickly, because they weren't used to being offered a magazine.

Margaux Vulliet: Yes, it's true that free of charge, even for you, it's a gamble since you've invested in this first issue and you need a return on investment.

Benoît Baume: Yes, but then it was still sold at newsstands. There were plenty of people who didn't go to photo shops who bought from us, and we'd also run a promotional campaign. You always have to think about how to promote your media.

"We had put together a media plan for retail locations, particularly at all the newsstands in Paris."

Margaux Vulliet: How did you come up with this promotion?

Benoît Baume: With very limited resources! But for example, printing an additional 20,000 or 30,000 copies does have a cost, though it’s fairly marginal because the extra copies—back then, the price of paper hadn’t skyrocketed—were much cheaper than the initial print run. We’d put together a media plan for retail outlets, particularly all the newsstands in Paris. And we’d also done a bit of digital marketing—which was still somewhat new at the time—and in the end, things worked out pretty well since the first issue sold very well.

Margaux Vulliet: Do you remember working on that first issue? I imagine it’s something that really sticks with you.

Benoît Baume: Yes, well, for the first issue, we weren’t ready—we’re never really ready, I’d say, to let things go. So there are a lot of flaws; when I reread it today, it’s a magazine that doesn’t satisfy me. We made some pretty bold choices—in particular, we wanted to establish our editorial direction. We tried to bring together ten French photographers who, in our view, represented the new generation. We went to see them all, brought them together, and created a group photo featuring everyone in the shot. We inevitably had to work late into the night to finish that issue, and I think we had a deadline—we had to send it out by 7 a.m.—and I think we finished putting the magazine together at 5 a.m. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case today. Nowadays, by 7 or 8 p.m. on a deadline night, everything’s done.

"We need to try to identify the emerging social network and invest heavily in it in terms of time and energy."

Margaux Vulliet: You were talking to me earlier about digital marketing. For the first two years, you didn't realize how important social media was. How did you address that later on?

Benoît Baume: We were on Facebook. Back then, nine years ago, it was pretty much the go-to platform. Instagram was on the rise, but we were still struggling to figure out how to use it, and pretty soon it became clear that we needed to repost the photos people were sharing with us and highlight them. We figured it out after a while, and it started working really well. And before we knew it, we’d built up a large community—we now have 141,000 followers—and, most importantly, we have a hashtag that’s been used 1.5 million times: #Fisheyelemag. Creators use it so we can spot them and feature their work.

If I have one piece of advice for someone starting a media outlet, it’s this: don’t go on the dominant social media platforms of the moment. Try to find an emerging social media platform and invest heavily in it in terms of time and energy—though perhaps not in terms of sponsorship right away. It’s much easier to build a community on a social media platform that’s just getting started. Typically, we see today that TikTok’s algorithm is much more permissive than Instagram’s. These days, building a community on Instagram is complicated because, naturally and organically, you’ll have access to only a small audience. And they’ll do everything they can to make you pay to increase your reach. On TikTok, that’s not the case yet. It will be at some point, so you have to try to identify the platform or space where things are just starting to take off. You have to bet that it’s a platform that’s going to grow. A lot of media outlets have invested in Snapchat; I’m not sure Snapchat will still be around in four or five years. It’s a bit of a gamble, but I’d say that for a young media outlet, trying to understand the new platform that’s about to launch and investing in it will allow it to build a community much more easily and quickly at a lower cost—and will position it in the market’s eyes as an innovative player. In any case, I think it’s entirely beneficial for a young media outlet to adopt a strategy like this.

"We spend a lot of time proactively curating content to seek out these new perspectives."

Margaux Vulliet: To clarify this #Fisheyelemag a bit, does it also allow you to discover certain photographers—especially new ones—that you might not have come across elsewhere? 

Benoît Baume: Exactly—the fact that we get 2,000 to 3,000 posts every day using this hashtag means we get to see a lot of images. Overall, the content is high-quality, so we see a very international range of material. Today, we’re featuring people from Asia, South America, Africa, and even the remotest corners of Uzbekistan—people we wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. This is because they haven’t been published by other media outlets—we’re used to turning to specialized photography media in the United States, England, Germany, or China. But ultimately, these are already people who have been discovered by a media outlet and published. That’s not always the case, and it’s a very direct and straightforward way to reach out to them. And then, we ourselves spend a lot of time proactively curating content to seek out these new perspectives.

Margaux Vulliet: What’s unique about the way we work with photographers?

Benoît Baume: Today, photographers have had to fundamentally reinvent their business model. There are photographers who have mastered the ins and outs of social media and truly understand it—they can have a significant and rapid impact. Sometimes there’s a dichotomy regarding a photographer’s influence because they’ve managed to build a community all on their own. You have to find the right photographers—just because you have a large following doesn’t mean you’re necessarily a great photographer, and just because you have a very small following doesn’t mean you’re a bad photographer. How do you strike an interesting balance that will leave a lasting impression and still be relevant in two, three, or four years? That’s what we need to figure out.

"I don't believe in a paid subscription model on the web for small media outlets."

Margaux Vulliet: The magazine is the core element of the Fisheye brand. There’s also the Fisheye Galerie agency and content creation for brands. How do you coordinate all these activities to maintain financial balance? Because clearly, the magazine isn’t your biggest source of revenue.

Benoît Baume: Well, the magazine is profitable on its own, which is already very good. But it’s true that the magazine currently accounts for about 15% of our revenue. What you have to take into account is that to assemble a high-quality team, to produce a magazine, to have the people who will enable us to produce the magazine and pay them fairly, we need other sources of income. We have a vision at Fisheye: to maintain our independence in the media, we do other things—which may involve communications—but which ensure that we aren’t dependent on any single advertiser or revenue source, and thus we can fully preserve our freedom of expression. And in fact, one thing people recognize about us is that we’re very free in our expression within the photography community. Sometimes we’re too free—people might criticize us for that—but it gives us the ability to be free in our media. So, what else do we do? We have several ventures. We’ve developed activities that I’d also describe as editorial, since we’ve established two galleries—one in Paris, one in Arles—featuring photographers we first discovered or published in the magazine before developing a gallery concept. We’ve also expanded our publishing arm, since this year alone we’ll be publishing five or six books through our own distribution networks that we’ve created. A marketplace, photo books on our website, and a number of distribution agreements. For example, we’re releasing a book in September with AFP featuring the AFP archives, and for this book, we’ve signed an exclusive distribution agreement with Fnac, for instance, to distribute it and gain visibility. So our publishing business is becoming increasingly structured at a time when paper has never been more expensive; but ultimately, publishing has never been doing better. Then there’s our long-standing content creation business—that’s legitimate. When you have journalists who are experts in their fields, when you have people who know how to lay out and format this information, why on earth would we let the profits and financial gains from these activities go to PR agencies, which then subcontract the work for a pittance to people like us who do the same thing? So we might as well go straight to the source and offer our services directly. That’s what we’ve done, notably by creating all of Fnac’s magazines over the years. And we’re still doing it—it’s a matter of loyalty to Fnac, since we created *L’éclaireur*, Fnac, which is Fnac’s media outlet. I’m not afraid to call it a media outlet because, in this case, we’ve actually recruited a team of journalists to run it. We have seven or eight full-time staff members working on this media outlet, which covers culture, society, and tech. The editor-in-chief is Florence Legrand, the former editor-in-chief of Les Numériques, a highly regarded website. So that’s one of our content creation activities. We also do a lot of photo production—that is, we produce photos for people who ask us to. So it’s the same thing: we identify the photographers we feature in the magazine, and now we’re identifying them to commission their work—it’s not very different in the end. And recently, we’ve had the opportunity to work with the Paris Opera to create all the show posters for the 2021–22 season. We’re doing a lot of work for Paris 2024, the Olympic Games, but also with LVMH, Koering, and many other companies that now allow us to offer photographers all over the world, and as a result, our production business is growing more and more. And above all, this helps fulfill one of our original goals, which was: when we set out to reinvent photojournalism, how could we also contribute financially to the ecosystem for photographers who were seeing their business models severely disrupted? Being able to provide work for photographers is also important to us, and in fact, at Fisheye—in the print magazine, and I’ll clarify, in the print edition—we pay all our photographers. Online, we don’t do that right now because the business model is much more complicated, but we’d like to eventually be able to pay for online contributions. Which isn’t necessarily ideal on our part.

Margaux Vulliet: Why is the business model more complicated on the Web?

Benoît Baume: The business model is much more complicated for a purely web-based platform, especially since we aren’t very aggressive with advertising—we want to keep the site relatively clean. We don’t use data, we don’t allow Google ads on our site—we operate in a self-contained ecosystem—so when people visit us, they aren’t bombarded with ads. I don’t believe in the paywall model on the web for small media outlets. I think it works for major media outlets—it works very well for The New York Times or Le Monde. We don’t have enough content to make that business model viable. The leading photography site, Focus Numérique, tried a paywall, and after a year, they went out of business. I think that for a highly specialized media outlet, you really have to offer very specific services to transition to a paywall model. We also have a second publication at Fisheye called Lense, which we acquired very early on—perhaps around the end of our second year—and which has a strong, fairly technical community centered around photography. And, by the way, we still haven’t made it a paid service; it remains open to everyone. This allows us to build an audience, and we’re focused on leveraging that audience rather than charging users to access the platform.

"I don't feel like we've changed our original mind."

Margaux Vulliet: And in your opinion, have you lived up to the commitments Fisheye set for itself at the very beginning—regarding its values and editorial direction? Because things have changed a lot since then, as the platform has diversified significantly. Is the editorial policy still being followed as closely as the commitments you made at the beginning?

Benoît Baume: They have changed, but not necessarily for the worse—in other words, they’ve helped us strengthen our financial foundation. Today, we generate about 5 million euros in revenue, which gives us real freedom in our media operations. As I mentioned earlier, when the price of paper tripled or quadrupled in a year and a half, we didn’t say, “We’ll switch to a different kind of paper, we’ll use a lower-quality one, we’ll print fewer copies, we’ll reduce the number of pages in the magazine,” because many media outlets did just that. We, on the other hand, maintained our page count and the quality of our paper because we were able to absorb those costs—thanks to our other revenue streams. From an editorial standpoint, we’ve developed a new layout that was introduced a year ago—which we mentioned earlier—and I actually feel that the magazine’s quality has improved over the years. And in that regard, I don’t feel like we’ve strayed from our original vision. In fact, people may criticize us for various things, but not necessarily for our editorial quality.

Margaux Vulliet: What, for example, could people hold against you?

Benoît Baume: People might criticize us, for example, for focusing on certain types of photography. There are certain categories of photography that we don’t cover very much. For example, wildlife or nude photography, photojournalism, or highly aesthetic photography—these aren’t the kinds of things we usually highlight. There are other media for that. We stick to our focus on auteur photography. Which, of course, has a specific definition. In the same way, we all write emails or text messages every day, but we’re not all authors or writers—it’s kind of the same thing in photography. We all take photos every day, but we’re not all authors or photographers.

Margaux Vulliet: Exactly—you don’t define yourself as a photographer; you have this more editorial approach to photography, which brings us back to the question of legitimacy we were discussing at the beginning. How do you approach working on the subject of photography without being a photographer yourself? Do you see it as an advantage or a disadvantage?

Benoît Baume: Well, I think you can’t be both judge and jury—you can’t take photos, call yourself a photographer, and spend your days looking at portfolios and saying, “This is good, this isn’t good.” At some point, you’re on one side, and you’re on the other. There’s the realm of criticism and the realm of users. And obviously, I take photos, and I love it, but I don’t consider myself a photographer at all. I feel comfortable writing; even when I take photos, I never think my photos are extraordinary, and I don’t believe they have any significance beyond that circle—and it’s certainly not something that drives me. So you can certainly be a legitimate authority based on your knowledge of the field—on having seen many exhibitions, on having a critical eye capable of putting things into perspective, on knowing the key figures, on knowing the photographers, and on loving them deeply without being one yourself. And that’s it—I don’t think it’s a problem. I think that in photography, you can talk about photography without having been a photographer yourself.

“You have to know how to fulfill your role, and ours is that of a curator, a producer, and someone who puts things into perspective rather than someone who creates things directly.”

Margaux Vulliet: I have one last question, specifically about diversification. How do you find the right balance of diversification? How did you come to the conclusion that “we’re going to launch a gallery—it’ll work—and we’re going to work with brands—it’ll work”? Have you even tried diversifying in ways that didn’t work out?

Benoît Baume: Of course, we’ve tried things that didn’t work out the way we thought they would. For example, with immersive media. Very early on—as early as 2014 and 2015, so really at the very beginning of the medium—360° video emerged. And right away, it was something that really caught my eye. And in 2015—actually, in 2014—the first Oculus came out. And I thought to myself, “This is something that’s going to take off.” 

Margaux Vulliet: The virtual reality headset that was acquired by Facebook.

Benoît Baume: Exactly. I thought to myself, “We’re going to start doing things around this,” so we put together a team to produce 360-degree video. We’ve actually made quite a few films and projects, and we also created a festival in Arles with Les Rencontres, which went very well. But the world of 360-degree video is actually evolving very quickly, as we’re moving from 360-degree video with a fixed viewpoint to real-time 360—what’s called real-time 3D—with the emergence of major players in the field today. This is changing a lot of things, and we hadn’t necessarily anticipated it, so our 360 production arm, Inside in House, hit a rough patch at one point. So we’re forced to rethink things a bit. And clearly, this made me realize that it would be better to work with artists and creators, while we focus on conceptualizing the projects, setting them up, and acting more as producers than necessarily as directors. Since then, we’ve developed many immersive projects. But ultimately, by bringing together the right talent, it’s a much less stressful model for us. And sometimes, you have to know exactly what your role is—and our role is more that of curators and producers who provide context rather than direct directors.

Margaux Vulliet: Thank you very much, Benoît, for taking the time to answer my questions. Thank you, dear listeners; you can find the other episodes of *Chemins* on all streaming platforms. And above all, take care of yourselves and your media.