In The Simpsons Movie, Homer’s dad has a divine vision, accompanied by thrashing on the floor and speaking in tongues. In times past, such an event would have been just gossip for the church ladies, but in the film, Jeff “Comic Book Guy” Albertson whips out his camera phone and captures the moment for posterity. The scene echoes what’s happening around the noncartoon world on a much larger scale. On-location images from the London subway bombings were shot on camera phones. A witness also used one to take images of Saddam Hussein’s hanging last year. Photojournalists had been barred.

Several photo agencies have set up sites for user-generated content, such as You Witness News, a Reuters affiliate, and Getty Images’ Scoopt. The material posted may be grainy by professional standards, but it’s sometimes all that is available. “Photographic agencies have realized the growing importance of mobile-phone images and have begun to pursue and market them,” says MaryAnne Golon, photography director at Time, which ran a dozen cell-phone images from the London bombings.

The sites handle amateurs’ work as they would that of pros. Scoopt, for example, pays a 40 percent royalty—the industry standard for news images—every time a user’s photo is sold to a media outlet. But more than money could be at stake. Several amateurs have won the Pulitzer Prize, including Charles Porter, a bank employee who took the photo of a fireman cradling a baby injured in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. With technology rapidly improving, it may not be long before a camera-phone shot snags a big prize.