January 23, 2014

The world of Stock Photography certainly has changed.  I have touched on this topic before but I think it is worth mentioning again.  The art culture is deteriorating and losing its ability to sustain itself financially.  As we move forward in this new landscape of snap and post we are overwhelmed with content.  Most of this content is given away free of charge.

In stock photography the standard selling model is royalty free at micro prices.  They claim that you will make up for the low pricing with higher volume of sales.  I have been in this business a long time and have tried this RF model (briefly) and my experience is that the agencies win out and the photographer is left with pennies on the dollar with no chance of controlling the unlimited usage of their images after the sale has been made.

There is no turning back we are marching forward herded by the multi billion dollar social media websites.  We empower them with free content.  And they make their money off the visual art we worked hard to create.

You can hide your head in the sand and hope it will change but it won't and can't. People are social animals and want to be seen and heard.  Social media grants us a momentary spot light on a dull stage to be liked or disliked.  You do not have to know anything about art, all you need is a camera phone, special effects and magically you are an artist.

A culture needs a cohesive identity in order to feel a belonging to something more than themselves.  Art has always expressed our deepest thoughts and emotions in a way that can visually stimulate the dull brain to see more in this life than what is present physically.  It can make us aware of our inner selves and our relationship to the external forces that manipulate us.

We need to examine our motives for continuing in this media climate of manipulation and homogeneous snap shots. How can our images be seen when each second millions of images are bursting forth onto the Internet?  The truth is most of your images won't be seen.  You can have your own website.  You can submit to the agencies.  But this will not guarantee sales.  As a matter of fact the agencies have always been social media websites.  We give our images to them free of charge and they post them and try to attract buyers and then take a bigger and bigger percentage of our image sales.

I feel people do not want to have to think and work at creating meaningful photographs.  They want an instantaneous gratification, a selfish desire to be praised just by their finger pressing a button and a snap shot is born.

These pictures reinforce simple, mundane experiences that attract like minded viewers that
appreciate a certain compatibility with what is going on in their owns lives.  And this allows the hollow details to become transformed into the meaningful, the way of the crowd source.  This limits a persons ability to think out of the box and create imagery with substance and meaning.

We are becoming voyeurs of life and not participating in life.  Without a connection to nature we accept a shallow expression on a small screen to be elevated to the state of the real deal. And thus we are losing our ability to empathize and connect with others on a truly deeper level. We live in a vacuum of our own creations. We accept reality on a screen and have put a barrier between us and life.