WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY IN AUSTRALIA?
It’s fair to say the last two decades have been pretty tough on professional photographers. The transition from film to digital brought widespread changes to every aspect of the practice and, over time, a significant contraction and devaluing of the market. It’s also fair to say that the profession has struggled to keep up with a lot of this. The new technologies have allowed many more part-time operators to compete in terms of their abilities and capabilities, but charge much lower prices. Over time the market has moved more towards a quantity model than a quality model. In many ways, photographs are now a fleeting commodity – quickly taken, shared via social media and then forgotten – rather than a thing of lasting value. The matted and framed print – for a long time the final product in many fields of photography and an enduring manifestation of the professional’s skills and creativity – is now labelled “traditional” as if that’s somehow a bad thing.
More recently, the last couple of years have been particularly tough on many areas of professional photography as the Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions prevented public gatherings such as weddings, corporate events, fashion shows, exhibitions, conferences and social occasions of all types. At the end of last year, the Australian Institute Of Photography ceased operating, leaving the country without any sort of industry body to oversee professional standards, provide a support network and community, lobby on behalf of working photographers, and offer on-going education through seminars and workshops. Over its 70-year history, the AIPP had absorbed all the other mainstream professional photography groups, including (in 2015) the ACMP, which had been originally established to better represent the interests of photographers working in advertising, editorial and commercial areas. Covid’s economic hit on professional photographers – especially in the wedding and portrait sectors – undoubtedly contributed to the AIPP’s demise as its membership declined, but so did the entry into the market of people who didn’t feel they needed to be part of a profession… in particular, the part-timers. Increasingly too, professional photography has become much more of a solo practice with big, multi-photographer studios also mostly consigned to history. This is, again, the outcome of how clients now use photography – assuming they hire a professional at all – and how much they’re prepared to pay for it.
Of course, it could be said that all industries have to evolve and adapt to new technologies, and that history is littered with those trades and skills that were made redundant by machinery, either mechanical or electronic. It’s a valid point, but what makes photography a little different is that the medium itself is actually thriving thanks to the digital technologies – with many, many more pictures being taken than ever before – but the role of the
