It's Just Pressing a Button: Devaluing Photography

I used to work for a watch company you've heard of. Which one isn't important. I was their in-house photographer and ran their photo studio. Once every six months or so, a frantic guy from Sales would come by the studio late in the afternoon with a fist-full of watches, begging me for some 'down and dirty' product shots for a sell-sheet or whatever. I always turned him down. And his response was always some variation of "Aw, c'mon! It won't take long. It's only pushing a button, right?"

He'd given exactly zero thought to what goes into doing Product photography for a multi-national corporation, and concluded "how hard could it be?"

A number of things factor into the pervasive assumption that photography is easy. One: it looks easy. When you look at a finished photo, you don't see the lights, stands, cards, cables, etc. usually involved in producing a studio photo. That's part of the artifice of photography. You're meant to forget about that stuff. But in addition to all the gear, there's a lot going on in a photographer's brain that most people aren't aware of. When I'm shooting, one half of my brain's composing the shots, one half's doing the exposure math and what's left is trying to give direction to the model. The fact that--more often than not--this juggling act works out is part of the reason why it doesn't look like we're working very hard.

Two: everyone's taking photos all the time now. You probably pull your phone out of your pocket to take a photo at least a few times a week, right? But the 'ubiquity of photography' has almost nothing to do with taking pro-level pictures all day every day, and that fact is lost on an astonishing number of people (no small number of whom work in the media business).

Three: three is what I call the 'if you were any good, you wouldn't be working here' phenomenon. This watch company I used to work for once paid an amount equal to my annual salary at the time to have six (six!) new watch models shot by 'the guy who shoots for Apple.' The fact that they couldn't even remember the guy's name, and only referred to him by this quasi-shamanic title of 'the guy who shoots for Apple' [plus the amount that they happily agreed to pay him], should tell you alot about how badly they hoped a little of Apple's... je ne c'est quoi would rub off on their products just by virtue of the association. It should also telegraph where I'm going with all of this. Namely, that the value of photography is subjective.

Last week's news that the Chicago Sun-Times had fired all of their Photographers and that, going forward, they would be equipping their Reporters with smartphones, should demonstrate just how subjective that value is.

Fast forward to today. I work for a national magazine. Which one isn't important. In my career, I've repeatedly seen publishing execs throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at bad infrastructure investments, unnecessary senior staff hires, etc. while simultaneously crying poverty and claiming cuts would be "unfortunate but necessary." The fact is that firing all the Sun-Times photographers was neither unavoidable or inevitable. It comes down to spending money on what one considers important. And the honchos at the Sun-Times voted with their wallets. After all, it's just pressing a button, right?

More to come...