Death of the Photographer?

Social Media has created new challenges for many different industries and professionals. As more and more “amateurs” have become empowered to create, publish, and distribute their own media, it’s flooded the marketplaces with both new sources of talent and new sources of material.

It must be frightening as a member of one of these groups. Sentiments such as this probably don’t bring much comfort either:

Half a dozen lurid and splodgy pictures in the local paper brought home to me the death of an honourable profession this week. I took them. I am in my small way responsible for impoverishing an old friend, because he, not me, is a professional photographer, and his living has been more or less abolished by the changing world. Just as film has been replaced by digital, professionals are being replaced by amateurs. The changes are partly technological and partly economic, but the final blow to his profession has come from Flickr and similar Web 2.0 sites.

[…]

A picture-sharing site like Flickr contains the work of tens of thousands of talented amateurs, all of them capable of producing one or two photographs a year that could be published anywhere. A British photographers’ site, EPUK, has calculated that if only 1% of the pictures on Flickr are publishable, that would mean 1.5m usable pictures uploaded there every year. Most of the drudgery of identifying good, relevant pictures is also done here - by the photographers themselves, who tag them, and by the other users, who notice them and have their interest recorded by the software.

Source: The Guardian, “We all helped to speed the demise of professional photographers”

The irony is that, usually, the little guy is the one being pushed aside by the incumbent. We’re seeing a reversal in many ways, though. I venture the underdog has always had a sting to them, however small that might be, especially when there’s tens of thousands of them.

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