Anyone that relies on technical skills to stay in the game is bound to lose out at some point. The light meter jockeys were the first to go. I remember a guy who thought his angle would be pano stitching. Before PT GUI was even around. He was basically replace by an app on a cell phone. All that will save you now is creativity and actual real life honest to goodness business and marketing skills. Sadly most photographers seem to have only one of the three.
Yes, you are right.
I believe that many of us are drawn to the photographic life exactly because it
offers offered(?)
many of us an outlet for our natural creative instincts (no, not necessarily sex, Joe, but possibly) to be followed and used as means to living a life worth the living. Being a wage slave in anything other than the thing you love is the price many have to pay for security. (Again, perhaps little of that exists today, either.)
I used to follow your old ad agency model of working for a while, too - in the 60s to early 70s - and in my case, it began to fall apart for me for two principal reasons: clients with agencies would sometimes pass their agencies by and come directly to me after a shoot or two, and that brought the dilemma: should I take the gig and risk annoying the agency or possibly lose both if I refuse? I decided to accept the work. Yeah, agencies didn't like it one bit. Also, the work itself began to fall away, and several large GP studios closed down. Being a man and wife team, we were slim and could ride some hardships because we didn't have the big studio overheads to pay. In fact, we closed our first studio (rented) exactly because studio work had pretty much vanished for us, and I earned our keep by doing location work, much of it abroad. In those days, if you wanted to do advertising you had to have your own studio. As it turned out, studio work made a comeback for me for a while, and so we decided to build our own alongside our house, and after some trouble getting plans accepted by the local authorities, we had one.
However, the decline in studio work returned, and as we were doing very little fashion anymore, and amost everything involved trips to the sunshine, we opted to get the hell out whilst we could. That was '81. We have lived here ever since.
Stock came about from the calendar shoots: a printer we used for some of our productions (Bemrose, at that time) introduced me to Tony Stone, the then supremo of British stock agents, and by invitation, I found a new outlet far better than my own half-hearted attempts to market my own stock had been. Stone was no romantic: he was all business, as he showed when he judged the time and read the runes accurately, and sold out to be Getty's biggest original agency purchase. He had what many in the crowd of us photographers who flew with him did not: a business head.
Digital did exactly as you described: it devalued photographers almost immediately. Trouble is that making the production of pictures simple is only one aspect: it has encouraged people working within companies to shoot their own stuff, and where once that work provided a living for many snappers of everyday ability or ambitions, that work has been removed from the external market, and "good enough" has become the norm for much photography that once saw a professional. Many, many of those cats have lost their livelihood.
The top echelons still survive and appear to do well, if they can avoid the Me Too movement, but they
always represented a minute percentage of working photographers. With luck they will continue to exist and provide the visible validity to dreams that so many other people have about photography. Take away our dreams and we may as well stop breathing.
