September 12, 2021

Photography Is Easy Money In The Shareholders

Photography used to be creating personal work, now you are herded cattle being told what to shoot.

Creativity is reduced to redundancy of vision doing the same subject over and over again.

Originality is not in the stock agencies vocabulary in today’s run and gun mentality of snap shots.

Photography once was a career now it is a free for all, everybody is a photographer and the cameras basically does all the work.

Point and Shoot and hope you get a picture so/so but accepted by the agency and see the pennies role in!

Who would have thought that photographers would revert back to the era of snap shots. Weren’t those images put into their family albums as momentous of their lives. 

Now our lives are exposed through billions of people snapping pics of their family and posting them on web sites that exploit the suppliers of their personal lives.

Do we even live a private life now when we are lost in a reality based on taking pictures of an external object whether it is of a portrait, a landscape, city lights, objects, night shots, violence, riots, wars, deadly hurricanes, temperatures rising, pollution destroying lives and we insist that these subjects are necessary to guide the people not into an awakening of ones duty to protect this planet for future generations but force human beings into a maze of self doubt and fear for ones life.

Photography as it stands now is not an art form. Photography is a consumer product just like anything else you would buy at a store.

What once was a great way to earn a living now is a living hell just to survive.  Photography in the past could make you a great living wage doing the thing you love most creating images of substance and beauty and getting paid a nice size paycheck.

To buy an image for an ad, editorial usage or personal use now it is much cheaper to go to a stock photo agency. There you can pay pennies on the dollars to get a professional image while the creator of that image gets 20% of the pennies for an image that cost the photographer days of hiking, days of being persistent in finding that one composition that can enlighten the viewer, creating images in violent protests, paying for his own travels only to see his images being given away for almost nothing. 

Welcome to the new stock photography life in the twenty-first century where the photographers give their images away just so their egos will feel better over their lost income.

Money has always been an addictive, self satisfying for the elitist’s that control the flow of cash away from the photographer that made the image and into the investors big pockets, all in the name of good business tactics.

I would say that is a crock of shit and the ones that make images need to be paid for the profits they allow go to the photo agency and we should get back to a 50/50 split and not these bank robbing thugs taking almost all the profits away from the image contributor.

What keeps one coming back for more losses of profit while the 4 big agencies take and take from the naive photographers making great images but getting a poor share of their efforts to make a great photograph, when the agency didn’t do anything more than take a bigger slice of your hard earned payment.

These companies have one thing in common they are in the photo business for profits and more profits and couldn't care less if the photographers that do most of the grunt work making their classic imagery and can’t earn a decent living wage.

Yes, these mega giants of the stock photo industry do pay photographers for imagery but these photographers are a professional breed that know what to create and how to curate it for profits.

These photographers are portrait photographers, food photographers, travel photographers, war photographers, nature photographers, animal photographers and they have one thing in common they are known to produce sellable images that make money for the photographer and the photo agency.

In the old days, 1980s to 2010s I was one of those photographers that made a good living making images for my agencies. I had 13 agencies selling my images and then changes began to flourish!

Getty began buying up other photo agencies, consolidating their power base and branching out into sports, hollywood movie stars, editorial photos, videos, music and of course stock images.

There is a transition happening in stock photography and that is a lessoning of ones insight in creating a personal image with meaning and purpose and now following the stock agencies needs. So in a sense we are not creating our own internal vision of the subject present in front of us but are pawns moving around a chess board taking images for someone else needs and purposes.

We seem to enjoy being herded cattle feeding on dry ideas and just being closed minded of your talent to make photographs that are original.

What we have now is a leveling off of images with depth and emotion and have replaced them with the ordinary, redundant clichés, copycat images of smiling faces and beautiful homes where the rich live and play while the rest of us suffer!

On a side note I have been with Photo Researchers in New York for decades and they are great people to work with. They still believe in a 50/50 split but they too had to adapt and move a lot of their imagery into a niche where science related photographs are in demand.

I am also with Alamy a good photo agency to submit to but as time passes they had to lower our slice of the pie and it seems are moving toward an all Royalty Free Agency just like Getty did to compete with Shutterstock.

What we have here is a melting away of ones purpose. Photography is now taken over by corporation beholding to their share holders. We are pawns to be manipulated by a force of wealth that doesn’t have our best interests in heart but their own bank accounts.

In the old days, in the days when the agency was our friend and we new the owners and had meetings with them and our fellow photographers, making new friends and feeling that we were being in the forefront of something special in stock photography.

And we made a good living traveling and making images from our unique perspective by experiencing the beauty of mother earth.

Now stock photography is not about image creation, respecting the photographers that went to the ends of this earth to create in their own personal style iconic images of life on this planet, but selling imagery  cheaply in mass quantities without respecting the efforts of the photographer by giving away his unique style for almost nothing.

Photography is not art but a commodity. And these millionaire owners will sell our hard fought battle to get the best image possible for their files by undermining our ability to make a decent wage and have a decent family life.

It is a photographer’s purpose to show the world what our reality is made of, both the beauty of our lives and its ugly, murderous side, profits off war, pollution, greed, poverty, racism, hate, as these rich cons ultimately will destroy the true purpose of photography and that is to give the viewer a since of our reality created by visionaries world wide trying to document the powerful forces of greedy billionaires destroying our economy for profit by exploiting young photographers to shoot and submit and get ready for that big pay check, income you can’t make a living with.

It is now a commodity like celery on sale in a super market. But if you think about it the celery would probably make more money than your images.

We hike, we fly, we wait for the good light and then we create the image. We send our hard work to the stock agency and we wait patiently for the sales to come in. But they don’t, they can’t! There is just too much excessive imagery being circulated to make even a modest living in this collapsing photo market because of copy cat imagery and the brutal low pricing of our hard earned efforts to create an image worth more than just pennies on the dollar.

Soon photographers will realize that their unique ability to be present in the photograph both mentally, physically and creatively is now in our past life as image creators, for snap shots, out of focus subjects, lighting issues is trying to become the future of  photography.

But it is more than just the impatient photographers running around out in the world taking images of redundancy, with new technology increasing the ability to take images without worrying about composition, light, exposure and a personal perspective, we find that the saturation of imagery being uploaded onto photo agency sites undermines the artistic nature of photography and its deep expression of the human condition.

What do the photo agencies want, what subjects do they ask for more often? They don’t ask for that unique image that shows the good and bad side of our environment under attack but they demand happy, smiling faces, a love nest of actors being paid to sell the all american products you don’t need, corporate products that become distractions from the underlying bait and switch, to take your minds away from pollution, climate catastrophes happening right now, keeping people buying, buying as the world begins a nose dive into climate meltdown!

Photography is your eye on the world. Photography’s importance has been lessened by the amount of imagery being produced with a major percentage of these snap shots, copies of someone else’s vision.

Good photographs have emotion and a deep bond with the subject before them. A photographers perception is enhanced when they can immerse themselves in the scene, letting go of stereotypes, preexisting notions of what a good photograph should look like and just be present in the moments leading up to your composition that gives you solace in your ability to have patience in those moments that bring your subject to fruition. 

In today's world of photographic overload, where everyone now is a photographer, and communication is not personal, one on one, but a means to say look at me on social media, giving your images away for free allowing anyone to repost your work undermining photographers that are trying to make a decent living making images with meaning and visual necessity.

As this planet erupts in violence, enormous storms and heat waves beyond comprehension the oligarchs shy away from the truth of their pollution and want to show only a facade of the good life that is now deteriorating!

Photography was a means to earn a living wage by selling your unique style through the photo agencies that were your friends, your mentors and for a few years everything was going well for the photographers and the photo agencies and then wealthy business men arrived on the scene to destroy the trust between photographer and editor, photo agencies began to go on sale and the corporations of greed bought these agencies and welded them into a price scheme that benefited the agency and investors and not the photographers.

Breaking apart the very fabric of the copyright laws that were made to protect artists from losing control over their hard earned work.