Hitting the books

We’ve all heard that age-old adage that you can’t teach art. But in the modern age, photography is as much a business as it is an art. To get your career as a professional photographer off to a flying start, you not only need to know what you’re doing, from a technical and creative perspective, you also need a healthy dose of business acumen. We assess the pros and cons of committing to formal study versus learning while doing, and speak with renowned photographers to get insights into their paths of learning. Sam Edmonds investigates.

an array of working professional photographers about their academic backgrounds and you’ll be met with a very broad spectrum of answers. From PhDs to entirely self-taught, this wildly vast range confirms the idea that education is not necessarily a prerequisite for success with a camera. Today, hundreds of institutions around the world offer photo-based degrees, short-courses, and workshops, and indeed a number of Australia’s photographic professionals have “PhD” tethered to their name. Does this infer that education is more applicable to some genres of photography than others? What’s the benefit of shelling out up to tens of thousands of dollars for a degree? And does skipping the degree altogether offer an expedited ticket to getting hired anyway? On top of these considerations, in the social media age, it is becoming increasingly feasible to start a career based solely off of a very large