/ 4 May 2007

The demise of professional photographers

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.

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Just as film has been replaced by digital, professionals are being replaced by amateurs.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.

Twenty-one years ago, when he and I started together on the Independent newspaper — then famous for the quality of its photographs — the pictures that could sell newspapers could only be produced by professionals.

Not only did photographers need the cunning, determination and eye for a story that journalists admire, they also needed quite simple equipment and considerable technical skills. It took years for them to learn to see the world in black and white, and to get the best out of their cameras. It took years, too, to learn how to develop film and print it so as to bring the best out in every picture.

The first blow to this world was the adoption of colour photography. Colour film is so much harder to develop that it is all done by specialists. There is no longer room for the individual photographer to refine his own style. And colour requires a much less specialised way of looking at the world. To make a striking black-and-white picture, you need an eye; to make a striking colour picture, all you need is a patch of striking colour.

Black-and-white photography makes the world look strange, and new; colour makes it look vivid and familiar, so colour photographs of much lower technical accomplishment became acceptable in newspapers.

As the demand for technically accomplished photos was shrinking, technology was making them easier to take. You now have to pay quite a lot to find a digital camera that will even allow the photographer to make any of the decisions once demanded for every photograph. And the digital camera, left to itself, will get these tricky decisions right. It will adjust itself, focus and even search out the face in a picture. My cellphone takes better pictures than a snapshot camera would when the Independent started.

These developments may have diminished the value of a professional photographer’s skills. But they couldn’t eliminate the need for professionalism: the difference between a professional and an amateur is not that the amateur never takes really good pictures. It is that the professional will always come up with usable ones.

A talented, hardworking and lucky amateur can produce wonderful pictures on the best days. But that will be one picture in a hundred. A professional can produce something that is nearly as good as their best 50 times in a hundred. That’s why they are worth employing.

News photographs don’t have to be technically accomplished. They sell on their captions. But many professionals make their money from photographs that are no longer news — the stock images sold by picture libraries. This is the market that the web will devastate. It is already damaging it: when I went round to see my friend, he was looking at a pile of 4 500 stock transparencies returned to him by a well-respected agency that had just gone bankrupt.

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 1,5-million 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.

Perhaps none of these people could make a living as a photographer, but few want to. Any money they make is gravy for them — and bread taken from the mouths of professionals. — Guardian Unlimited Â