The suggestion that things started to go pear-shaped around forty years ago is, in my experience, fairly accurate. I had left the UK in the very early 80s armed with two London contracts: a stock photography one, and a second, with the same huge agency, where they had offered personal representation in London to find commissioned work for me.
The second one, for personal representation, was abruptly cancelled, and I was left with no explanation and no portfolio of my best, printed, calendar covers and pages, which I’d had a friendly printer arrange for one of his binding suppliers to put together in the form of a wiro-bound calendar. The person who’d been introduced to me as my new representative at the agency vanished from my view, never to be heard of again, just like that newly created and irreplaceable portfolio of mine.
On subsequent return visits to Scotland, I was to discover that most of the established studios I knew were no more.
Nobody, not even those who never had a stock agent represent them, is unaware of how the stock photography market was reduced to skeleton status. So yep, create anything and you are on a hiding to nothing.
It’s true: collectively, professional photographers etc. are our own worst enemies because just as the shamateurs always have, we do it for the love of it. Oh boy, what an exploitable weakness!
