Modern business model

[gnuyork]

It's larger than photography, it's happening in all kinds of businesses. Cost cutting across the board. Cut coasts first, determine the detriment later. Sometimes it's hard to determine the negative impact of cost cutting. Sometimes, like when whole line of car's break system fails, it's easy.

...Mike

yup, my wife got let go from her job a month ago. She was the last hired in that department (two and half years ago - 10 or so with the company in general) and management needed to make cuts in her department, so naturally they let her go.

Well, turns out her boss called up a week later and said it was the one of the biggest mistakes the company made. Here department is so far behind because she is gone. I think they were feeling her out to see if she would come back. I don't think management realized until it was too late that they shot themselves in the foot.

I told my wife to ask for twice her salary if they want her back.

[Richard M. Coda]

It's larger than photography, it's happening in all kinds of businesses. Cost cutting across the board. Cut coasts first, determine the detriment later. Sometimes it's hard to determine the negative impact of cost cutting. Sometimes, like when whole line of car's break system fails, it's easy.

...Mike

It's everywhere... Try looking at the ads on Criagslist (don't start) for Graphic Designers... everyone wants you to be an "intern" or work for $9/hr. F-them. I don't see that in any other profession. We went to college, we have degrees, we have to constantly keep up with the industry, we have money tied up in hardware/software, and more importantly, we have families and bills to pay. You want something nice, then pay for it! How would a lawyer, or a doctor, or even a plumber react if you wanted to test them out for free for a year? F-them all!

[Frank Petronio]

Graphic Design died a few years back; print advertising is on life support. People simply aren't spending money on print or collateral materials anymore.

The excesses of the dot.com era combined with the following recession just collapsed the large Bell-shaped part of the market. All that is left are the rare high-end sophisticated clients and an entire landscape of clients who look at design as a commodity, done off-shore or by minimum wage kids.

[JMB]

It is indeed much larger than photography. We live in a world culture that aims almost exclusively at enhancing capital. The enhancement of the human being, far from the primary goal of our institutions, is mostly an impediment to radically narrow economic aims. Values of all sorts interfere with the blind pursuit of capital. The man who has given some thought to what it means for something to be "good," including his life, does not make a very enthusiastic slave in someone elses capital machine. And a strong sense of aesthetics has always led men to evaluate their conditions and wonder about things much larger than themselves. Questionnaires like the one handed the photographer job applicant are designed to discourage, weed out, and even humiliate thoughtful job applicants from all sorts of positions. Hence, the rude treatment and thoughtlessness that the photographer encountered when he applied for an art position sprang from something much more systemic than an austere cost cutting attitude in one company or even the cost cutting atmosphere in which companies world wide are embeddded. The ill treatment springs from the programatic devaluation of the human being upon which capitalism (and its corrupt cousin, totalitarian socialism) depends and thrives.

The success of radial capitalism (like digital photography) depends heavily upon human beings forgeting classical values and disappearing into the commercial chaos with a cell phone in each hand, a lap top taped to his back, an ipod clued to his head, a digitial camera choking him around the neck, and a televison screen pounding nonsense and anti-cultural "values" into his brain all in the name of "progress." Hence, if you find yourself anxiously dependent upon a job with a large company embedded in this anti culture to support your family (and this is exactly how you and millions of others are supposed to find yourselves in capitalism) you should not be too surprised if your prospective employer understands your dependence and freely subjects you to humiliations. He actually believes that he only needs a small mechanical part of you (until he can build a more complex machine) and most of all that a man might aspire to be actually impedes his kind of progress.

But all is not lost. Imagine the negotiatiing power if folks got together and decided not to go to work until a better deal was on the table.

[arca andy]

Ahh the wakey world of computers and the craft that they try and replicate.
Now anyone can be a photographer, graphic designer or what ever visual craft a computer software package is imitating.
Isn't time to remodel our businesses, pursaude our clients to appricate the craft of photography, the stuff that only we can only do... LF cameras, negatives, hand printing etc.
DLSRs have their place in the world of IT but not in the craft of photography.
Ta Andy the Luddite

[Mike Anderson]

Ahh the wakey world of computers and the craft that they try and replicate.
Now anyone can be a photographer, graphic designer or what ever visual craft a computer software package is imitating....

According to history as I've heard it, the first casualty of computers in the workplace was the secretary. Secretaries were, among other things, experts in business correspondence. When in the early 80s PCs began showing up on peoples desks, and a few years later people actually started to use them, people with little training in correspondence (let alone "typing") could fire up WordPerfect and spit out a "letter", beautifully printed on a dot-matrix printer. Who needs secretaries? Anyone can "type" a letter now. There was a class of "executive" that wouldn't have a computer in his office, wouldn't dream of touching a keyboard and still retained a secretary or two, but this became the exception not the rule. The standards of business correspondence went in the toilet, sloppy looking amateurish correspondence became accepted in the business world. Then email came along and even "executives" had to learn how to operate a keyboard, and secretaries (and secretarial schools) became a dying breed.

It's an old story.

...Mike

[Hugo Zhang]

It is indeed much larger than photography. We live in a world culture that aims almost exclusively at enhancing capital. The enhancement of the human being, far from the primary goal of our institutions, is mostly an impediment to radically narrow economic aims. Values of all sorts interfere with the blind pursuit of capital. The man who has given some thought to what it means for something to be "good," including his life, does not make a very enthusiastic slave in someone elses capital machine. And a strong sense of aesthetics has always led men to evaluate their conditions and wonder about things much larger than themselves. Questionnaires like the one handed the photographer job applicant are designed to discourage, weed out, and even humiliate thoughtful job applicants from all sorts of positions. Hence, the rude treatment and thoughtlessness that the photographer encountered when he applied for an art position sprang from something much more systemic than an austere cost cutting attitude in one company or even the cost cutting atmosphere in which companies world wide are embeddded. The ill treatment springs from the programatic devaluation of the human being upon which capitalism (and its corrupt cousin, totalitarian socialism) depends and thrives.

The success of radial capitalism (like digital photography) depends heavily upon human beings forgeting classical values and disappearing into the commercial chaos with a cell phone in each hand, a lap top taped to his back, an ipod clued to his head, a digitial camera choking him around the neck, and a televison screen pounding nonsense and anti-cultural "values" into his brain all in the name of "progress." Hence, if you find yourself anxiously dependent upon a job with a large company embedded in this anti culture to support your family (and this is exactly how you and millions of others are supposed to find yourselves in capitalism) you should not be too surprised if your prospective employer understands your dependence and freely subjects you to humiliations. He actually believes that he only needs a small mechanical part of you (until he can build a more complex machine) and most of all that a man might aspire to be actually impedes his kind of progress.

But all is not lost. Imagine the negotiatiing power if folks got together and decided not to go to work until a better deal was on the table.

Well written! A new chapter of Capital?

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

--Karl Marx

[Martin Miksch]

If I see what some photgraphers or graphic designers charged I understand that there is the need for cutting costs.^^
Regards
Martin

[Richard M. Coda]

If I see what some photgraphers or graphic designers charged I understand that there is the need for cutting costs.^^
Regards
Martin

You know, computers don't design anything, and cameras don't create images... people do. There are companies out there with BIG plans and want to pay $50 for a logo? They must have read about Nike or Target and think those are the norm. They are the RARE exceptions. A "corporate identity" is a valuable commodity and should be compensated accordingly. As I said before, F-them all.

[jp]

I wrote to my local newspaper and admonished them for frequently printing scenic/huma interest photos that didn't have a level horizon. (weak photography that is not corrected by editors or layout people). I reminded them that if a column of text were inadvertedly rotated 1/4", they'd notice real quick.

Except for sports, their photographers are the journalist with a P&S digital.

Only the big city papers have actual skilled photographers who specialize in creating quality photos.

Once video gets good enough (if it ever does), sports photos will just be video frame stills. No more still sports photographers will be needed, just a monkey with a handicam.