The School Photo Industry Is a Master Class in Drama

DALLAS — Chris Wunder, who has spent the better part of the last four decades photographing schoolchildren or managing those who do, used to tell kids they could bring a “personal prop” for spring portrait day. When he forgot to qualify the invitation, some, especially in rural areas, would arrive with shotguns, venomous snakes and, once, even a pony.

Other dangers were self-abetted. He no longer provides hair spray, after a young mischief maker in North Carolina used a lighter to turn the canister into a flamethrower.

Mr. Wunder’s toughest battles, however, haven’t been getting youngsters to stand still and smile, or getting their parents to fork over $27 for three portraits and a few wallet-size photos, but with Lifetouch, the school picture behemoth that photographs roughly half of America’s 50 million schoolchildren every fall.

The company is based in Eden Prairie, Minn., though, if you ask Mr. Wunder, there is little Edenic about its business practices. In his early days as a manager at Inter-State, the country’s second largest photo company, Mr. Wunder watched as Lifetouch gobbled up competitors and grew to $1 billion in annual revenue. Now, as the owner of the photo franchise PortraitEFX, he has lost contracts to Lifetouch salesmen with fat expense accounts.

Last year, Shutterfly, the online photo printing giant, acquired Lifetouch for $825 million, unlocking even cheaper production costs and a more seamless online sales machine. The “dark side,” as Mr. Wunder calls Lifetouch, is set to expand its empire.

But there is a resistance, and Chris Wunder is its leader.

And so, on a Monday morning in March, the first day of the #1 Original School & Sports Photography Boot Camp, at a Dallas airport hotel surrounded in all directions by chain restaurants and strip clubs, Mr. Wunder strutted before a projector screen. He barked advice to three dozen independent school photographers, a mix of veterans and newbies, all of them looking for big paydays.

Victor Rosas, 45, of Amarillo, Tex., is trying to make the transition from shooting weddings and quinceañeras that can last 12 hours. Casey Craig, 33, from Conroe, Tex., quit her job at an engineering firm during an energy downturn to shoot full time. Michael Feldman, 62, joined his father’s photo business 15 years ago, but with two new high school contracts this fall with 4,000 students, he wants a tuneup. They’ve paid up to $300 each to be here.

Over the next five days, Mr. Wunder, 65, would teach them how to beat not only Lifetouch, but also such regional powers as Strawbridge Studios and Barksdale School Portraits. He would flip PowerPoint slides like “You NEED to earn a good $IX-FIGURE income” and “Fundamentals of Posing-Head Tilt.” He would confide the secret to defeating head lice when 100 kids use the same mortarboard: Buy lots of coffee filters and call them “hygienic cap liners.”

And he would stress the importance of reading obituaries in the local newspaper.

“The industry rule is you do three days of mourning before you go in and make a sales call to a new principal,” Mr. Wunder said.

He’s a salesman first, and a photographer second. The people in the room are high-volume photographers; they are not Ansel Adams trekking through Yosemite and waiting patiently for the perfect light to illuminate Half Dome.

“Do you want to be a starving artist?” Mr. Wunder asked. “Or do you want to have two homes and be able to take nice vacations and put your kids through good schools?”

‘Get Her Mona Lisa Look’

The school photo industry is wobbling. In the last 20 years, the spread of digital cameras and smartphones has dented demand. Prices remain stubbornly high, largely because of the high percentage of photo fees that most schools traditionally ask for (and get). Buy rates have dropped across the country.

There is still plenty of money to be made, however. A $50 portrait package costs an independent photographer about $5.50 to print. The sheer volume of kids means that a photographer can net $7,000 at a midsize elementary school. A few months of shooting can yield a six-figure income.

Grabbing a share of the industry, worth $1.6 billion a year, according to IBISWorld, a market research firm based in Los Angeles, requires precision planning. There’s a tight window, usually before lunch, to get the snaps. Principals want to resume classes. Parents want photos taken before lunchtime and recess, when spaghetti sauce and grass stains ruin special outfits.

In Dallas, Mr. Wunder hammered home again and again the need for speed.

“Seconds! Seconds! Seconds!” he shouted, pacing the room. He told his pupils to photograph each subject in 39 seconds or less.

Mr. Wunder once dreamed of taking down Lifetouch himself. Maybe it’s the underdog in him, the coal miner’s son, but he just doesn’t like its business practices, which he believes are dirty.

They lowball competitors and drive them out of business, then hike prices, he said, and lie about competing companies. Other photographers also complained about Lifetouch. Susan Sheridan, a sales rep for Barksdale, said: “A couple of years ago we got some bad press coverage that was totally slanted against us, and we know their reps were sharing that with our customers.”

And David Alishayev, of the School Photo Company, a small outfit in Queens, said that Lifetouch had angered a school client when it raised the price at the last minute on photos.

Lifetouch sales reps, according to Mr. Wunder, are instructed to weep in front of principals when they lose a contract. Asked about Mr. Wunder’s allegations, a Lifetouch spokeswoman replied in an email: “There’s plenty of room for national and local players alike.”

Mr. Wunder wanted to get his PortraitEFX franchises into all 50 states. He set his sights on poaching large national preschool accounts. But he ran out of time. He is nearing retirement, and he knows he needs help slaying the dragon. Boot camps like this one are his last, best hope.

Over the first 48 hours, Mr. Wunder showed scores of PowerPoint slides. Amid the more generic life-coaching platitudes were concrete tips gleaned from years in the field.

Ever thought about head tilt? Allowing for the odd sideways angle, there are basically two directions a subject’s head can go. Years ago, the choice was framed as Peter Pan/Macho Man. Later, informed by changing sensitivities, it was rebranded as orchid/onion. Today, tilting toward the knees is known simply as a masculine pose, and away from the knees as feminine. And God help you if you position a boy the wrong way, Mr. Wunder warned.

“Mom may not know why she doesn’t like it,” he said. It’ll be a gut reaction, he added, but she’ll either ask for a reshoot or not buy photos. Pens scribbled furiously around the room.

Smiles need to land between cheesy and nothing at all. “Get her Mona Lisa look,” Mr. Wunder advised. “That’s an expression she’ll never outgrow.” To get there, try “cheeseburger” for young kids, “money” for adolescents and “weekend” for teachers’ own portraits.

And no touching. Mr. Wunder could not stress this enough. Female photographers can still get away with moving subjects’ shoulders or hair, but men can’t. Years ago, he got a phone call from Arizona, where one of his photographers was about to be arrested on charges of harassing two girls. The girls later withdrew their accusations, Mr. Wunder said.

Over lunch, some of the more experienced photographers bemoaned this last point. They used to enjoy getting hugs from excited students, but no more.

“It takes a bit of the fun out of it,” Michael Feldman said. T&F Camera, his company in Vineland, N.J., dominates the South Jersey market. When he does sports photos, another major source of revenue, kids’ drawstrings often dangle from their shorts.

Mr. Feldman said they ask, “Can you help me?”

His reply is always the same: “No!”

Fund-Raising, of a Sort

Mr. Wunder is a businessman, living in reality. He is not an artist prone to fantasies, like the one in which principals fall in love with his photos and forget to ask for a cut of the action.

“A lot of people don’t like Chris Wunder for saying this,” he told the room. “But buy the business!”

At the dark heart of the school photo industry are the payments made to schools, which are practically mandatory. Most photographers shy from using the word “kickback,” calling the payments rebates, profit-sharing or fund-raising. Whatever term they use, the payments are why an average photo package costs about $27 for just a few snapshots. Up to half the cost of your child’s school photos goes back to the school.

Mom-and-pop studios operating on slim margins often have trouble competing. The practice has been the subject of multiple lawsuits since the 1980s.

“That’s a way to race to the bottom,” said Kelsey Kleiman, who, with her husband, Dennis, runs Stomping Ground Photo, in Brooklyn. Their studio distances itself from Mr. Wunder’s high-volume, assembly-line techniques. Stomping Ground’s photos — lots of bright colors and kids jumping in the air — could be promotional material for a new NBC prime-time comedy.

And yet the traditional financial arrangements between photographer and school remain, even in this comparatively progressive corner of the market. During an interview, Kelsey and Dennis, who were on speakerphone, were asked how much they give schools.

“Our baseline for fund-raising …,” Kelsey said, then went silent. It was hard not to imagine frantic pantomiming from Dennis. “What?” Kelsey continued, seemingly to Dennis. “I can’t say that? What?”

They muted the call. When they returned, Kelsey and Dennis were on the same page. “I think we probably raise the same or more than our competition,” she said. They don’t want rivals, be they Lifetouch or Chris Wunder, to outmaneuver them.

Mugs, Mouse Pads and Market Forces

On the second day of the workshop, the group hung green screens, mounted cameras, test-fired lights and prepared for a mock picture day, during which local child models played the part of schoolchildren.

Before they arrived, Mr. Wunder gave a pep talk. He warned that after the models went through a few times, he would instruct them to start messing up on purpose. And he wanted newbies up close and shooting. Inexperienced photographers shifted uneasily. A few of them sneaked away to the hotel bar to settle their nerves.

There’s plenty to be anxious about for new entrants to the market. Start-up costs are relatively low; $5,000 can buy the equipment needed to photograph a small school. But in April 2018, when Shutterfly purchased Lifetouch, Shutterfly instantly gained access to 10 million American homes, and it wants to shunt parents into its online store and keep them there for life.

Even the bigger regional school photo companies are nervous. Ms. Sheridan, of Barksdale, said the acquisition lets Lifetouch turn around photos in days, not weeks, and offer schools an 8 percent cut when parents buy mouse pads and coffee mugs on the Shutterfly website, which the company confirmed.

“When Shutterfly’s stock goes down, we all get excited,” Ms. Sheridan said. (Shares rose to more than $100, an all-time high, after the Lifetouch acquisition, but have since lost more than half their value. The stock has traded around $40 a share for the last month.)

But Lifetouch is vulnerable too. The company has a one-star rating on Yelp, where reviews include a scathing October 2018 takedown with Lifetouch photos attached of a young girl sobbing. In an all-caps-littered review, her mother curses at the company, apologizes for cursing and says, “I want my money back.”

Chris North, the C.E.O. of Shutterfly, said in an interview that he is aware of complaints, but that internal data shows parents and schools are largely satisfied.

“At the end of the day, we have to delight two parties or we won’t be in business,” he said.

A continuing class-action lawsuit by former and current employees alleges that Lifetouch may be less sound than Shutterfly thought. In the mid-2010s, Lifetouch was in financial trouble, according to filings in the suit, and company executives inflated sales figures and cashed out of the employee stock ownership plan as the plan lost more than $840 million in value.

Lifetouch declined to comment on the litigation. (A lower-court judge had ruled against the plaintiffs in November, and employees are currently appealing.) In a March financial filing, Shutterfly admitted: “We may not realize the benefits we expect to receive from the transaction.”

Mr. Wunder remains impassioned. In January, he led a panel at the School & Sports Photographers Conference in Las Vegas about Lifetouch. One of his PowerPoint slides read: “Never before have high-volume photographers been faced with a threat so insidious, it threatens our very livelihood; and not years down the road — It begins right NOW.”

‘The Picture Man Is Here’

Back in Dallas, it was 6 p.m., and a racially diverse parade of tots and preteens was finally arriving. Mr. Wunder likes to get a broad mix: For some novice photographers from more rural areas, it’s a chance to widen their portfolios and marketing materials.

“I don’t want to get too close to the kids,” a photographer from Denver said, nervous about her breath. A few minutes later, she circled back. “In my defense, if you’re staying at the hotel you get two free drinks before 6:30.”

Photographers approached Kylie Marie, 5, with a guarded friendliness typically reserved for recently landed extraterrestrials.

“Turn this way,” a photographer shouted. Kylie Marie stood still, with a confused, frozen smile. “Turn this way, honey!” Nothing.

Mitchell Moore, 52, Mr. Wunder’s business partner and resident kid whisperer, shook his head. Mr. Moore chalks up his easy rapport with children to being “just a bit A.D.D.” and also to his stint working at the restaurant chain Golden Corral, where employees were urged to remember names and personal details about diners.

“Watch this,” Mr. Moore said, then moved his own feet and asked Kylie Marie to copy him. She immediately responded. The photographers oohed and aahed. Moments later, Mr. Moore guided her away, his hand never closer than an inch to her back, blocked by some invisible force field.

More children arrived. Mr. Wunder paced the room, urging his students to pick up the pace.

“Pretty soon they’re going to be ready to go to prom and they’ll still be waiting to get their pictures taken!” he said.

In a studio setup for tiny tots, Mr. Moore massaged the bald head of a Miami-based photographer to elicit a laugh from a toddler.

“The things we do to get them to smile,” Mr. Wunder said, then laughed. “Might be a little creepy.”

Two hours and hundreds of photos later, mock picture day was nearly done. Mr. Wunder palmed $20 bills into kids’ hands and thanked them for their good work.

He still had plenty to cover in the next three days. He would encourage psychological warfare against principals: Contact them two weeks after Lifetouch delivers its pictures, when “mommas” are complaining about poor photo quality and customer service. He would explain how to close deals with Jedi mind tricks: End a bargaining counteroffer with “Fair enough?” And he would outline the school sports industry.

Throughout the sessions, Mr. Wunder preached that school pictures are a business, not an art. But as 11-year-old Oliver Chen, a late straggler, mugged for the camera and flash bulbs went chunk-chunk, he got more expansive.

“The real reward comes when you got up on that real crisp autumn morning, and you drove across town, and you set up the equipment and you get greeted by the lunch ladies and sometimes they bring you a biscuit out of the oven,” Mr. Wunder said. “And then you see this entourage of little bodies with big smiles and little bow ties and they’re looking up to you like, ‘The picture man is here.’”

He was still in a reflective mood a few minutes later at the hotel bar, whiskey in hand. When floods and fires strike family homes, his photos are the treasures first spirited out, he said. And then, at least once a year, a car crash means the portrait he took of a schoolchild is her last. Mr. Wunder always rush-orders and frames a 16-by-20-inch photo for the funeral.

The fiercely competitive mask had slipped. Mr. Wunder sat up straighter and took a sip of his drink.

“You know,” he said, finally. “It’s just something we like to do.”