What is the difference between a business and a profession? The extent to which the two have become interchangeable suggests what I am after here.
Recently Business Week engaged in a design “competition” to launch a new magazine called “Inside Innovation.” They fielded submissions from top firms, all of whom under various guises agreed to do this for free. A long discussion has ensued on various design blogs about the ethics of this tact, to design “on spec” and its ramifications for creative industries as a whole. The relevant links are at Design Observer and at DesignView.
One comment got me in particular, it was a link here. I’ll cut to the chase, it says we are all doomed if we allow the commoditization of design. Which brings me back to the title, Business or Profession. What is photography, a Business or a Profession? Is it neither? Photography has always existed in the grey area between the two, depending on the practitioner. I used to like to say, Photographers are to Art as Chiropractors are to Medicine. That is until my mother found significant relief from one! So I guess I retract that.
While this has been going on for a long time, it seems like recently the pace has quickened. Photography has really become a commodity and images are called “assets” or worse, “IP,” and the photographer has become a business person and not a professional. Again, the distinction? Well, a professional orients towards individuals, a business orients towards customers. This distinction of orientation is crucial, as photography has become more the process of asset generation and management for international media companies as part of their marketing and branding, and less a professional service or graphic art. Photographers are not artists working with art directors to conceive ideas and produce artwork. They are simply vendors, streamlined into a vendor billing system with preset values and expense categories. Just another asset to manage.
So who to blame? Lots of people it turns out, many of whom, in my opinion have done more damage under the guise of protecting photographers rights: ASMP, EP, APA, for three. How-so? Well for years photographers have been told to be better business people and protect their rights and fight for usage based fees and write better contracts. In other words, to be lawyers and accountants and salespeople. Well guess what? Those international media conglomerates, they have REAL lawyers and accountants and salespeople who are so much better at this, sort of like how much better a professional photographer is than “Aunt Mae” at photography. And they had this figured out a long time ago. They said, sure, lets write contracts that specify how and where and when we can use your images, and then steadily, over time, we will erode that while you complain about it, all the while never addressing the real issue-compensation. Why have editorial rates not gone in in over two DECADES? Simple, we have no negotiating power because we are negotiating an issue which was over ten years ago, the issue of usage. To the media giants, photography is a commodity and the usage is immaterial, they just want to deploy it across all their titles in all markets whenever it suits them. And why shouldn’t they when they created the problem in the first place. Magazine advertising down because it has flocked to the internet? Simple solution, buy the internet. Reorganize and redeploy. Wherever the consumer wants to consume, be there.