Photography has a long way to go. Compared to other digitized creative forms, like music, it is light years behind. And, for once, that could be a good thing. Like the youngest brother of a family, it can learned from it’s elders. For once, it has not yet been touch at full impact by the whole free file sharing tsunami that hit music a while back. Certainly the dams are leaking and breaking, but we are no where near what the music industry has experienced.
We have done a bad job. A terrible job. If picking a photograph is all about its price and not its quality than we, the photo industry, have made a terrible job at selling our work.
Every time an editor, whether from an ad agency or a magazine decides to use an image because it is cheaper than the others, that means we have all failed to advocate for the real value of photography. We have failed, all of us, Photographers, agents, photo agencies to make the new generation of image buyers see the real value in our images. Thus the current situation.
Photography should
be a revolutionary act. It should be a kick in the establishment, the
common, the mundane. It has to be an act of revolt against banality and
conformity, a powerful explosion of new ideas. It should be as violent
to the mind as a thousand thunderstorms. It should rip apart the
accepted social fabric . It should denounce, point, accuse and solve.
In one frame. It should be a declaration of war to everything we take
for granted and accept as obvious.