On a warm Friday afternoon, the owner of a small company in Woodstock enters the office with an armload of 52-oz. bags of M&Ms. In the research department, behind a maze of metal file cabinets, a staffer swings back and forth on a sturdy swing attached to the high ceiling. A dog named Maisie wanders upstairs and back down again, looking for a floppy stuffed animal, a piece of frayed rope, or someone to feed it a treat.

This is the environment that cofounder and president Mark Antman has created for the staffers at The Image Works, an independent digital stock photo agency that has grown from a two-person operation in 1983 to a global company that licenses editorial, commercial, contemporary, and historical images——to book and magazine publishers and other media. In the company's archives, clients can find engravings of Napoleon and Charlemagne, photos of Civil War battlefields, slides of the bacchanal at Yasgur's Farm, and digitized images of events that occurred in the world just minutes ago. On September 11, 2001, the company processed, archived, and delivered an image within a half-hour of the event's happening.

"In this business," says Antman, "we learn new things every day. A few years ago, someone asked for an image of Phineas Gage. Who was he? The only thing we could find was a picture of the man's skull with a hole in it. After more research, we learned that Phineas Gage was a railway worker who had gotten a spike through his head." In 1848, during an accidental explosion, a tamping iron shot through the flesh beneath Gage's left cheekbone and exited out the top of his head. The researchers learned that, after Gage recovered, his behavior changed dramatically, and this became crucial to early understanding of the functions of the brain.

photo researcher Sarah-Maria-Vischer-Masino kicks her feet up on the office swing.

Antman chose to locate his company in Woodstock because "there was no reason not to start and grow a company here. I believe that part of business is to integrate work into a personal lifestyle. I looked in Kingston, but almost everyone who worked with me was from Woodstock. Why should I add almost an hour to everyone's commute? Another wonderful thing about being in this part of the Hudson Valley is that there are so many creative people here. I have an extraordinary staff. The people who work here are very bright and incredibly curious about everything."

Antman and a dozen employees maintain an active archive of over 1.5 million images in analog form (old-fashioned color slides and black-and-white prints) and access more than 25 million images through their foreign affiliates. The images come from a variety of sources: photojournalists that are under contract; affiliated agencies in China, Germany, and other countries; and newspapers and specialized collections, such as the Charles Walker Collection of Mystery, Myth, and Magic and Britain's National Trust Photo Library. Every day, the company adds new images to its searchable online database, www.theimageworks.com.

Antman became passionate about photography at around the age of 10. "I found an old enlarger and convinced my mom to buy the chemicals and set up a darkroom. Watching the print come up in the developer was the most magical thing I'd seen."

In 1983, after studying biology and chemistry at NYU and working as a photographer, Antman met kindred spirit Alan Carey when they were both taking pictures at the first New York State Duck Calling Contest. "Alan's background was in news photography," says Antman. "My background was in documentary stock photography. Alan became intrigued with the idea of becoming partners. The decision was not to start a photo agency. We wanted to hire someone to do basic office work to free us up to do more shooting and not be tied to the business end. Alan had the US. I covered the rest of the world."

The first incarnation of the company was located in a spare room in Antman's house in Woodstock. All of Antman's and Carey's "stuff"—photographs from assignments as well as personal projects—filled two drawers of a metal file cabinet.

Director of Photography Maya Johansen views an image of a newly initiated priest in Ujjann, India by Jagdish Hearwal.

A year or two later, Antman decided that he didn't want to travel as much. He wanted to spend more time with his young child. The Image Works began to evolve, and as the photo archive grew, so did the need for space. Over the years, the company has changed location four times, each time to a larger facility, and is currently housed in a 10,000-square-foot building on 12 wooded acres.

Carey retired from the company in 2002. Antman continues to run and expand the business. "Due to the current technology, it's much easier to add many more images to archives, which would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. The digital revolution and consolidation of stock photo agencies have changed the industry. Now stock photography has become a big business. The question is: How does an independent business survive and compete against the richest and largest corporations in the world, corporations that are driven by different values? Big agencies can quickly provide digital images from the archives they've acquired. But their other material doesn't affect us. Our editorial specialists can look in our digital files first, then search our extensive analog archive. Potentially, we can dig deeper."

Since the company's inception in 1983, Mark Antman has come up with a number of technological innovations that have given The Image Works a competitive edge. In 1989, two years before any other stock photo agency, The Image Works began using SlideFax, which offered an instant fax review of color slides.

"In the old days, there was no way to show somebody a picture unless you actually took it to them," says Antman. "We would gather the slides and send someone to the Trailways bus station in Kingston. The slides would go to Port Authority, then be delivered to the client. The whole process would take three or more hours."

To cut down on the time, Antman devised a way of converting a slide to a print that could be faxed. "The sooner we could get an image to an editor that would satisfy his or her needs, the greater the chance of a sale."

After SlideFax—before the Internet and current method of digital scanning—Antman came up with a system that allowed clients to dial into a computer and retrieve images that a staffer had put there for them. "I remember going to a conference and being asked if we had online delivery. Other agencies had been working on it, but they had not achieved it. We had."

Antman says that he wakes up with an idea, then goes out and does it. "I don't need to get another person's approval. The fact that I can do something immediately makes the job fun."