As most of you out there know, I make my living as a commercial photographer. I love my work! I often have a hard time imagining doing anything else with my life. I find the creative challenges of this line of work very sustaining in a way. But something has been troubling me now for some time: is my line of work actually sustainable? Socially? Economically? Environmentally?
As a visual artist, I know that this medium has value. But looking at the commercial industry as a whole, I'm not so sure. We're throwing away our tools for the sake of expedience & creating work that has very little chance of surviving the test of time. We're buying what they're selling and we're not questioning it at all.
But this is probably just the tip of the iceberg for me...
There aren't too many people out there that can do what I do, but there is a decided decline in the demand for this type of custom work. I mean, have you see the product shots from urban outfitters / anthropologie recently? They are scanning (yes i said, scanning) their product to put in the catalog. And while its an interesting look, it doesn't take a genius to execute.
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