October 19, 2013


Today photography is not photography in the older sense of image making.  There used to be a separation between the family photo book, the mundane consequences of living a normal life and the inspired craft of creating powerful images that made us really think about the world.  These images had purpose and they spoke to the human condition and tried to change society for the betterment of all.

Photography has become an assembly line of mass production for venture capitalists who have doubled down on investing in social media websites.  It was estimated that in 2012 over 380 billion images were made around the world.  In that year 350 million images were uploaded to Face Book each day alone.  These statistics will only grow exponentially as more and more people get their hands on smaller and cheaper cameras that can virtually shoot the image for them.

The social media websites are the perfect vehicle for the crowd sourced image making frenzy.  These companies get free imagery, most of which are snapshots of people's everyday lives. Let me repeat... that content is free. Can you imagine any other business where a company doesn't have to pay for inventory to be sold on their shelves or at least guarantee a return on sales when a certain volume of supplies are sold?  Can you imagine a business that can set pricing for its suppliers and sell the product to others without maintaining a decent selling price, and then does not share the profits with the very suppliers that created the inventory in the first place?

These social websites not only receive pics of people's lives but also written keywords about their personal inner likes and dislikes.  It is like a petrie dish of scientific laboratory testing.  All this blood sweat and tears is free to be analyzed by statisticians eager to mine the data to direct specific ads to the captive lemmings.  It seems that reality TV and social media sites have become "bare it all" brawls with no social redeeming value but to hear ones own shallow voice cry, "look at me!"

Making a living off your photo making efforts is becoming nonexistent.  Photo buying clients (a dying breed in an ecosystem being washed away by image flooding)  now bargain with impunity, making their case for lowered fees by letting the photographers know that any overpriced image quote (above free) is unacceptable.

Images are becoming stage props to be shown as teasers in front of the main show, ads.  Is the image really that important when any photo exposed to shallow eyes for a split second on a small hand held device doesn't register a meaningful view, but the next more important image, a  product, stops those eyes cold, their mouths begin to drool with envy... "I got to get me one of those!"

Visual content is king.  Paying for visual content is peasantry.  Words are becoming less and less important as papers shrink and minds shrink right along with them. Short sound bytes make perfect sense.  Keep your words tweetful and generic and no one will get what you are truly talking about.  Truth in six words or less.

It will take a strong focus to swim out of this tsunami of imagery that is destroying the photography landscape. These currents are strong, backed by bean counters making huge sums of money off the masses and their personal inventories.

Putting you imagery in free stock, penny stock or royalty free stock is also a no-win situation. These stock agencies could care less about your return on your investment.  Your time and energy are just part of the image content submission process.  It is your responsibility to shoot what they tell you to shoot, upload and size the images, color correct the images and then caption and keyword them on the promise of volume sales.  Huge volume sales, not for the individual photographer, but for the venture capitalists owning these stock agencies that are demanding a return on their investment at the cost of the lowly photographers.

What goes around comes around.  Stock photography undermined the assignment photographers income foundation and the new crowd sourced images have destroyed both professions simultaneously.

The tech companies make money, the manufactures make money, and the social media websites make money and the photographers run on treadmills thinking they're going places, but in this new reality of hand held media devices handcuffed to young eyes, all they are doing is running out of breath supplying a nano second of data to a kid skateboarding on the street cutting off an old geezer in an old Saturn because he is too busy looking at his damn phone as if nothing else existed!!