Rob,
Not everyone in the world of photography is starving, not everyone worries about what is clipped from the internet and not everyone wants to see Kodachrome, labs, cv's, and Triumph Spitfires come back.
For everything that went sideways in our industry, about 12 billion more opportunites appeared.
It's a new world and tomorrow it'll change, overall for the better.
Life is good if your breathing air.IMO
BC
That’s an easy, flip throwaway from a place where life is indeed a good thing. It won’t fly in the cities where people starve, where they have bars on their windows and bolts along all the edges of their doors; it means precious little to the guy standing in the dole queue, little to the bum crouched on the park bench and even less to the doctor whose patient is dying because he can’t buy the drug he needs to stay alive.
Yes, there are people in the business doing well; of course there are, always were and possibly it may continue that way, but I wouldn’t bet on it, certainly not that the industry will grow. You must surely remember a time when every photographer in business had a studio? Even little old Scotland worked like that; now, in London too it’s the exception - how is that ever a measure of standing still? It isn’t; it’s a measure of decline, of work not being well enough paid to sustain the business. (I think you yourself say that you now work much harder for about the same reward.)
Was a time Kodak stood for pretty much everything you needed in photography; they produced great product, printed beautiful and useful brochures, booklets and leaflets on Applied Photography; there was a rep. at hand to offer you all the information or assistance that the company could give you; where are they now? Thousands of people who built their lives, homes and dreams around the photo industry are left playing solitaire. Others built the same dream around ships and cars. Their plants have been flattened and the prospects of a return to their expertise is practically zero in many if not most cases.
No, that’s not really all about competitiveness or lack of it either. What we lost in the UK and you in Detroit wasn’t simply because the home product often sucked; it was because foreign meant cheaper, despite whatever the real cost of production might have been, so Japan jumped into the breach and rode the wave while it lasted. Now, where’s Japan going? Who owns Nissan? Who owns Rolls-Royce and Bentley, for that matter… it rumbles on, and at the end of it, you come to realise that every dog does indeed have its day, but that it lasts a very short time and that that period appears to be getting shorter by the year; it's always going to be the turn of the next cheapest nation, the next cheapest product.
I’m afraid that the easy response to all of this is the charge of being a Luddite; facile, and often politically convenient way to quell any voice of concern at the devastation being wrought across humanity. But then we just pick another sucker to sack: bankers will do for the moment. They are rich, nobody loves them because of that and they are mostly personally unknown to the population at large. Their reputations now get kicked
because they no longer want to place suspect loans; their own deep personal purses get locked down because they fear conspicuous consumption will get them killed. It’s all chaos; it’s all ass over elbow and it will remain that way until the time comes when the population realises that new isn’t the only way, that durability and sustainability count for more and that everything needs an extended life in order for it to thrive and grow. Madcap ‘progress’ has seldom produced anything that’s lasted.
But my cough’s killing me, so I shall retire for the evening.
;-)
Rob C
