January 21, 2020

Photography As A Commodity

As with any commodity people will fight over pricing. But what most people never seem to realize is that once a new product, an original product, becomes a commodity then the corporate elites have taken its uniqueness and made it dull and redundant like toilet paper. 

Why would they do something like that, aren’t they in the business of profit no matter what the cost? Well, you have to ask yourself who is the patsy here, certainly not the corporations, not the mega photo agencies, it falls on the back of the photographers giving their valuable images away for peanuts on the dollar. And actually feeling good that one of their images sold for under a dollar. How absurd is that when in the rights managed days that image would have sold in the hundreds or even thousands. 

The losers are the image creators, the winners are the agencies taking their 80% of the profits from their photographers and they didn’t have to lift a finger all they do is allow the images makers to upload their products to be sold for pennies when it cost the photographer his time and money to travel to these expensive destinations. 

In the old days some agencies would chip in the cost knowing that the image creator would come back with great material to make up for their travel expense.  Now most photographers are on his/her own.

Within our capitalistic economic system we have commodified everything and anything that can be  exploited for profit, that includes people, ideas, mother nature, services, products… anything can be traded for money. 

Water is a precious commodity and it has become an object for exploitation by putting it in a plastic bottle to sell to the consumer, we need water to survive therefore it has become a great product to sell, a billionaires dream business. 

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Below Taken From Wikipedia:

[ In Marx’s theory, a commodity is something that is bought and sold or exchanged in the market.

It has value, which represents a quantity of human labor. Because it has value, it implies that people try to economize its use. 

It has a use value because, by its intrinsic characteristics, it can satisfy some human need or want, physical and ideal.

“As the division of labour becomes more complex, a class of merchants emerges which specializes in trading commodities, buying here and selling there, without producing products themselves, and parallel to this, property owners emerge who extend credit and charge rents. This process goes together with an increased use of money, and the aim of merchants, bankers and renters becomes to gain from the trade, by acting as intermediaries between producers and consumers.”]

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As a stock photographer you are relying on your photo agency to get the best price for the image you created. Oh, that’s right that was in the old days when the agency shared the profits from the great unique imagery that their photographers submitted to them. 

Now that has changed and images are repetitive and boring to look at. They are cliches of what the money men want to project externally, a mirage of happy faces, happy kids, happy grandparents all enjoying the great economy and healthy medicines that can help you cope with the prices that drain your bank accounts, hiding the undercurrent of corruption the wealthy manipulators have over the media spewing out this heartfelt desire to help all people reach their credit card limit. 

What is your truth, your personal vision and not a repetitive mind numbing cliche spoken on tv ads manipulating your intellectual perceptions to repeat and not complete your inner journey?

To create images with depth and a powerful individual determination you need to see photography as a documentation of your life cycle. It isn’t an ad selling products. Photography is a revelation of something deep inside you that has to be expressed.

We are living shadow lives of our true selves, taken in by medias subtle manipulation of our thoughts and emotions. We need to voice our own unique impressions and not let corporate voices deter us from looking at the truth behind the stage curtain. 

The goal of wealth is to sell products by playing to your fears. Your personal information is externalized through social media and that is the mind trap you have entered. Social media knows more about you than you know of yourself. Wake up to your inner force and break free from the spider web of lies and the words that impoverish our inner thoughts to seek false witness instead of the truth.

In this new physical world of valueless compassion we end up seeking an easy answer to the swill of voices spewing hate words to rile us up to condemn innocence and exploit our conditioned minds to seek purpose through violence toward others and ourselves.

The selective use of photographs tell only a part of the story. What happened prior to the photograph being taken, what happened during the exposure of the image, did the photographer pause just long enough to capture a lie and what happened in the aftermath of the image being taken. Frankly, just like social media, I don’t trust photographers today to photograph truth. I think everyone is pitted against each other and they don’t comprehend the manipulations of their actions and voices, they just don’t see their confinement to a select script of racism.

What can we say about today’s photographer, where everything looks and feels the same? I can no longer call it image creation but snap shooting of their external life, where they go, who they are with and what they ate.

That is powerful imagery that makes you want sit and stare at a blank wall rahter than that crap!

Photography is now a means to say look at me with no underlining current of depth and individuality. 

The ease of taking pictures now diminishes the need for originality. We are creatures of habit and we copy the actions of others as if we were herded cattle. 

The new camera technology makes snap shooting so easy that one can get addicted to taking pictures of everything.  

When you are starting out this is a good thing, because you don’t know what your inner likes and dislikes are. You are just beginning to see subjects that perk your interest. The key to success is to flow with these inner intuitions and practice your compositions and your exposure to bring into the light your unique visual senses.

Everybody is a photographer and no one is a photographer. Technology is the addiction and the pictures let your ego brag about where you were and what you saw.

Well, a snap shot is not really seeing, it is taking from the scene nothing but a surface reflection of your ego. To see a subject you must immerse yourself in the scene allowing time to reveal to your inner intuition the details that will eventually become your inner image externalized.

Ego shooting doesn’t allow you a personal relationship with your subject, you feel nothing toward the subject but a few seconds of your attention and then you disappear to another subject that appears to you as too dull to even take a picture. You are missing out on the real value of photography and that is being present in your vision with the millions of possibilities you have to narrow down to integrate into your frame the image being formed.

When you come upon a scene do you feel the excitement of your intuition that informs you that there is an image present to be made.

Stop moving, just look, really look deep into the scene seeking details that are present that are inciting you to explore even deeper into the forest of your vision.

If you hurry through life you are only living on the surface of a deeper reality.