Interesting NYTimes Article on the Photo Biz 3/30/2010

[aduncanson]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/bu...e&ref=homepage


I like that on the second page I find a moral argument for me NOT to try to sell my images.

[D. Bryant]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/bu...e&ref=homepage


I like that on the second page I find a moral argument for me NOT to try to sell my images.

Thanks for depressing us.

Now if I could just get another fish biscuit to last another day.

Don Bryant

[Greg Blank]

Katrin Eismann, is correct. I can see however that if you don't have your feet in the door and have some kind of publication history eventually it will be next to impossible to get anything like recognition, publication and ultimately make money doing photo as a career. Being I photographer would be a career path I would very suspiciously consider if I was starting out now. Just to be an editorial shooter.

I started getting work published right out of college so I still pursue it. Getting publications is something you have to constantly groom. I've done enough editorial work that I realize that even when you think the publication you freelance for will last forever and like you dispite your flawed personality that they will continue to feed you & give you work is not practical. Thier needs change, so you have to constantly be there..... or at least keep sending samples out to others etc.

I find the low key approach not calling the magazines & begging them for work or annoying them works best. There are so many wannabes and pestering never works, but is a common mistake made by beginning photographers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/bu...e&ref=homepage


I like that on the second page I find a moral argument for me NOT to try to sell my images.

[Wayne Crider]

I remember reading Pnet before this forum broke off and APUG came up and the rhetoric has not changed, only gotten more relevant. I think the line at the bottom of the link "Times Reader 2.0: Daily delivery of The Times - straight to your computer. Subscribe for just $3.45 a week." puts an exclamation mark on the print industry now days. It is not going to change, and those who fight the bottom line of paying anyone let alone a photographer a salary is probably fighting a loosing battle with the cost of overhead now days. You can find examples of the re-direction of the industry, (outside commercial stuff and fashion mags), in the number of photographers listing workshop ads, producing calenders, working as fine art photographers or luckily getting a column in a photo (digital) magazine. And now with the economy such as it is I see no changes except continuing closures for magazines and papers or at least them going online. It is a New (paperless) Age.

[QT Luong]

This has been going on for a while, but got picked up by the mainstream media only recently.

[Brian K]

I read the article, I also had a photo studio in Manhattan from 1980 to 2003 and I saw the way the industry was changing. With digital and digital retouching the requirement of being able to produce professional quality photographs every single time and the growing acceptability of lower quality work that could be repaired in photoshop made it clear that professional photography was in serious danger.

It's not that stock photography was new, it had been around for a while, but it had been photography that was produced by professionals and was an additional source of income for a professional which helped with the high overhead. But with the advent of fool proof digital cameras even the barely competent photographer could now produce an image that at least had reasonable technical qualities. And as these photographers didn't have to pay rent on 7500 square foot studios and have a half a million invested in equipment, they'd license a photograph for less than it cost to produce it, just to see their work printed.

So what's going to happen now is that the majority of work that doesn't require artificial or enhanced lighting (there's no photoshop filter for lighting), or a studio, will end up as go-out-to-dinner money for hobbyists, while people who have devoted their lives solely to mastering photography will go out of business. Granted there should still be some work in high end advertising, mostly still life and fashion due to the requirements for skillful lighting, (even fashion is in danger as there are some fashion photographers who don't do any lighting and even use P&S cameras) but location work, weddings, even journalism is going to see less and less assignments until the business is untenable.

[ethics_gradient]

Is Getty radically cheaper? I know their commission rate for the photog isn't high, but I was under the impression they were still operating as a traditional stock agency, not microstock.

[Robert Oliver]

I jumped out of the business in 2006 for this reason.... The writing has been on the wall for quite a while

[QT Luong]

I also had a photo studio in Manhattan from 1980 to 2003 and I saw the way the industry was changing. [...] location work, weddings, even journalism is going to see less and less assignments until the business is untenable.

What made you think that fine art would escape that trend ? It is becoming very easy to get one's own images printed and framed.

[Brian K]

What made you think that fine art would escape that trend ? It is becoming very easy to get one's own images printed and framed.

I didn't say that fine art would escape that, the fact that it's easy for people to produce their own books is another dumbing down and over saturating of a market. In the past having a real publisher invest hundreds of thousands of dollar in printing your book was a sort of vetting process. Only artists who they felt had a significant body of work, or a readily available market would meet that criteria, and that in affect kept a lot of poorly done photography off the book shelves and kept the credibility of being published intact.

Now people who print 5 copies their own book on Lulu claim they're "published" and try to co-opt the accomplishment of those who have really been published. In the past being published was a major life achievement and was taken very seriously. It opened doors for you, now it's meaningless.

I think the extreme ease with which photographs can be produced today has dumbed down photography to a major extent. In the past mastering photography took a great deal of time and effort. It was a slow and arduous process but one that was rich with a depth of understanding and knowledge, it's very length made for a more deliberate and thoughtful photograph. Now it's blast away at 5000 things with a digicam and hope that something "cool" appears on an image. We devotees of large format are very much a dying breed as few today have the patience to learn, the patience to shoot.

I spend 3-6 months a year on the road and in a good year I get 12 images that I will use. I see bodies of work at galleries today that could be knocked out in a weekend. Rationalized with essays that took more time to write than the photographic work took to produce. Not a special moment captured, not a sight worth pausing over and contemplating, just mundane fast food photography justified with the thinnest of concepts.

I still love photography, and on occasion I still see work that inspires me, I want to be inspired, I want to be blown away by an image, but there are very few to be seen today, and the prospects for seeing more grows less everyday.