There’s a Strange Reason Your Graduation Photos Are So Expensive

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Several years ago, I attended my wife’s graduation from a grad program at a large research university. High school, college, med school, it’s all the same: You dress up, get there early, sweat in the sunshine, and holler like hell when the grad’s name gets called. You settle for a crappy phone picture of the jumbotron.

Fortunately, two black-suited photographers were on the scene to capture the dean’s handshake up close, as well as shoot a pair of official-looking portraits against a forest of flags.

Unfortunately, the resulting shots belonged not to the university or its graduates but to a company called GradImages. We could download the photos—for $39.95 apiece. Why did a JPEG of this proud moment cost as much as a steak dinner? And why was the university nickel-and-diming us over the photos of my wife getting her diploma? It felt like a fee for something she and her classmates had earned, or even, in some sense, paid for through their tuition. This was a commencement, not a log flume.

Search for GradImages online, and you’ll find no shortage of similar gripes on sites like Yelp, on which the company has a 1.4 rating; or Reddit, on which graduates vent and scheme to outsmart the company’s watermarks with A.I. From the Ohio State subreddit: “Grad Images is a terrible goddamn company.” From Georgia Tech: “WTF is GradImage that charges me $40 for a digital image.” From the University of Central Florida: “GradImages is CRIMINALLY expensive.”

When I talked to commencement officials at different universities across the country, however, I heard a different story. “We have never had a complaint,” James Vitagliano, an associate dean at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston, told me. Melissa Goitia, the director of university ceremonies at Arizona State University, concurred.

“I can tell you why we don’t do it,” she told me. “We’re taking thousands of photos over the course of a week at multiple events. A company like GradImages is very well versed at taking lots of photos at a quick pace. Very few institutions have the staff to do it.”

Indeed, if it’s so outlandish to charge $40 for a digital photo of a handshake, then how did GradImages become the nation’s premier commencement photographer, claiming to capture nearly 2 million graduates at 6,000 commencements and related events each year in the U.S. and Canada? Was I just being stingy, discounting the hard work of the photographers? Or were industry heavyweights GradImages, Flash Photography, and Pro Pics spinning sentimental moments into gold? (Neither Flash Photography nor Pro Pics returned a request for comment.)

This is the story of how a handful of companies came to dominate the market for commencement photos—a tale of technology, market power, economic inequality, and the emotional value of a good education.

It used to be that capturing a graduate’s walk across the stage was a high-stakes job for a nimble family photographer: You had one shot, and you wouldn’t know if you had nailed it until you developed the film. In 1974 Jack O’Connor was running O’Connor Studios, a school portrait company in Massachusetts, when a recent grad brought him a blurred Polaroid of his own ceremony and proposed a new model. “There was no one taking photographs of graduates,” O’Connor told me. His company shot New England schools like Harvard, MIT, and Holy Cross before it was purchased by GradImages in 2018.

Early entrepreneurs struggled with technological limitations, including winding super-long rolls of film and tracking down students’ mailing addresses. One used strobes to light up indoor ceremonies and hired people to stand near the bathrooms to make sure the extension cords stayed plugged in. “When we started, it was very complicated,” said O’Connor. “We had people tape-recording, saying ‘Connor, tall and blond’—and we’d have to match the images to names.”

Universities, which were less oriented toward customer service in those days, went for it because the photography entrepreneurs devised a business model that persists to this day: They shot the ceremony for free and sold the results to the students afterward.

It’s a consequence of this model’s success that many graduates mistakenly believe that these photos are as much their due as the diploma. “They take it for granted now because every commencement of size is photographed, but the schools never did that themselves,” said Bob Knight, who founded Bob Knight Photo—the antecedent of today’s GradImages—in the 1970s and sold it in 2007. “From the beginning, it was being done by a specialist and outsourced.”

Those specialists quickly realized something about their clients: Many would pay a lot of money for the product. Although a 5-by-7 GradImages print can be had for $16 today, including shipping, the website pushes buyers toward add-ons and “package” deals that cost upward of $100. Such offerings helped nudge the average sale to $75 by the 1990s, Knight recalled. “We did a lot of studying, and who we were trying to sell to was women. The No. 1 decisionmaker was Mom.”

This reflects several unique characteristics of a college graduation. It’s a highly symbolic event, with a number of very rich attendees, for whom an expensive package of photos is a drop in the bucket coming on top of years of educational investment. At Vanderbilt University, Knight said, the team managed to sell even 25-by-30-inch posters.

But that’s not every buyer’s profile. With the catalog price optimized for the Bank of Mom, the flipside is that many graduates wind up leaving without any photos at all. Even at the most selective schools, it’s common for only half the student body to make a purchase—a participation rate Jack O’Connor grudgingly accepted as part of the model. “We often asked ourselves: Why at Harvard are our sales only 35 to 40 percent when they just spent $200,000 to send their child to school?” (Only about 45 percent of Harvard undergraduates pay full freight—which might explain that disparity.) Bill Campbell, vice president of event management and photography services at GradImages’ parent company, Balfour, told me in an email that at some schools just 10 percent of students make a purchase.

Christopher Snyder, a professor of economics at Dartmouth, said it was easy to see how the “optimal price” for the photo companies might be one at which relatively few grads buy a picture. Economists call this phenomenon deadweight loss. “Getting 10 percent of students to buy at $40 is worth more than having 70 percent of students buy at $5,” Snyder told me. (OK: 10 x 40 = 400; 70 x 5 = 350.) “The high-demanders are cutting the low-demanders out of the market. You’re losing a lot of social surplus—a lot of willingness to pay is being lost.” But you can’t charge two different prices to the same set of buyers.

“Our prices for our products are reflective of this type of photography and are competitive or lower than our competitors’,” said Campbell. He reminded me that price isn’t the only reason someone might not want a photo of themself: “Photography is such a unique business, in that images are so very personal, capturing the essence of a person, and they may not always come across exactly how the person wants or how they felt in that moment.”

Even if less than half the class is buying, it’s a very good business. After acquiring the company now called GradImages in 2007, private equity investors boasted that they had nearly tripled its revenues in a decade. The next sale, in 2018, put the outfit’s value at $64 million. In 2021 GradImages was bought again and placed under the collegiate souvenir clearinghouse Balfour, with a new majority equity holder, New York–based PE giant Cerberus Capital Management. It’s part of a pattern: Another PE shop, Apollo Global Management, owns Shutterfly, which operates school photo giant Lifetouch.

Companies once navigated the seasonal nature of graduation by doing other things. O’Connor estimates he has shot 13.5 million elementary school photos; Knight got into the Santa and Easter Bunny businesses and bought the road race photography company MarathonFoto. GradImages bulks up in the spring with dozens of listings for trainee photographers. The pay is $80 to $100 to work a four-hour ceremony, dark suit not included.

If commencement photography is lucrative and leaving sales on the table, why doesn’t anyone else try to undercut the big players? One theory is that the complex logistics of the early days made it a tough business to break into, so better technology has helped a few large companies consolidate their advantage.

Gone are the endless spools of film that collected in university commencement offices. Now GradImages has an open database in which anyone can find and purchase photographs of millions of graduates—my sister, my neighbor, and my wife are all on there. Gone are the days of describing students into a tape recorder. Now GradImages uses facial recognition to match graduates to candid photos of themselves. (The parent company is being sued in Illinois for this practice, which plaintiffs allege violates the state’s data protection law.)

But ultimately, it’s the university administrators who call the shots. The confab of the North American Association of Commencement Officers is sponsored by the photo companies, and they sometimes pay the schools directly for the right to shoot. The administrators don’t keep track of how many graduates buy photos. “It’s a free service. It’s not about the price. The decisionmaker is making a decision about what you bring to the ceremony, not the price of the pictures,” said Knight. “Most administrators had no idea what we were charging.”

And if there are some students for whom that price is too high? They cease to be the university’s client the moment they walk across the stage. Snyder, the economist, said he could imagine another model. Colleges, he said, “can be the agent of the student in some respect.” They could make contracts conditional on affordable photo prices. “You don’t want to leave students with a bad taste in their mouth.”