Whenever I read about lowball pricing at the low end of the photography market, inevitably someone in the discussion says some version of “What’s the big deal? Those cheapskates aren’t your customers.” The big deal is that pricing at one level of the market affects pricing at all levels of the market. I’m no economist, but I understand this.2

Consequently, I’m trying to figure out ways we photographers can fight back against an influx of preposterously low paying, high-demanding, rights-grabbing requests, and an influx of inexperienced photographers looking to build their portfolios who are unaware that these requests are far below market rates, borderline predatory.

If establishing a minimum wage won’t suffice, perhaps we should fight fire with fire. Counter the unfortunate effects of supply and demand unscrupulously.3 What if it becomes more of a pain in the ass to spend time looking for a way-too-cheap photographer who never materializes? Maybe then cheapskate clients will cease such fruitless efforts and return to offering a decent rate so decent photographers will want the gig.

Perhaps this is naive, but it’s my dream. Here’s how I see it.

Our skulduggery starts with a misinformation campaign, manifested in a simple response to egregiously terrible requests. And it goes like this:

“My friend Paul does this.”

Someone posts on Facebook along the lines of, “I’m looking for a photographer to capture headshots of 600 people in 90 minutes on Sunday morning two states away and we have $200 in the budget.” Instead of mocking them publicly (which they deserve) or ignoring it (which is, of course, the mature thing to do) perhaps we should try responding as follows:

“My friend Paul does this.”

Paul, of course, is an AI chatbot. He’ll answer whatever question this prospective client may ask. They’ll respond affirmatively, pleasantly, helpfully. It’ll be great. The client, surely, will see that their ship has come in. And they will choose Paul and book the gig.

The problem, of course, is that Paul is an AI chatbot so he can’t actually show up to photograph the gig.

Paul: 1
Lowballers: 0

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You see an offensively low request? A ten hour day barefoot on hot asphalt for $75 plus two pee breaks and a work-for-hire rights grab?

“My friend Paul does this. In fact, he’d be perfect.”

In response to offensive, practically criminal, low-rate requests — or better still, any request for free work — don’t say “That’s a really low rate no self-respecting photographer would consider.” Instead, just refer them to your friend. Paul is his name.

I don’t want to be rude, but I feel like it’s pretty awful that a business in 2026 is asking photographers to work for free or minimum wage. I think the only way to combat this may be to fight fire with fire. We have to sow doubt that these criminally low rates actually lead to the work getting done. We need such customers to start booking with flaky photographers — incredibly flaky, actually. As flaky as my friend Paul.

Perhaps these requests will begin to disappear after enough no-shows. Perhaps we can train the market that there’s a baseline rate — heck, maybe it’s even The Photographer’s Minimum Wage™ of $100/hr — and when they drop below it they risk the job simply not getting done. Or, worse, we send ‘em to Paul.

What could be flakier than an AI that thinks he’s a photographer but in fact possesses neither camera nor corpus?

If we want to play fair, we could give them a last chance before we send them to Paul.

“This rate is offensively low,” we’ll say. “Please consider raising your budget to a more reasonable standard of $100/hr.” If they insist that their low rate is fine, well then it’s time to fight fire with fire. Tell them you only know one photographer who might even consider that.

“Well, what’s his name?” they’ll practically shout.

“He’s called Paul. And I think he’d be perfect for this.”

Predatory business practices are no joke. And desperate times call for desperate measures. They’re spending $200k on their event but they can’t come up with $1,000 to hire a photographer? That’s not a budget, that’s a decision to exploit. They don’t deserve a human with a camera to cover that event.

Straight threats. That’s what it’s come to. If they won’t play fair, if they insist on driving us one-by-one out of business with such egregiously low rates, knowing that someone is bound to be desperate enough to accept it… Well then I think our response is clear. We need to call in a favor from a friend. That friend — every photographer’s friend — is Paul.

Now if someone could just vibe code an AI chatbot who thinks he’s a helpful photographer ready to book in any location a client needs, that’d be great. Who’s with me (and Paul)?

These people deserve to be drawn and quartered. The audacity to ask for such low rates with a straight face. Shameful.

Here’s the real issue: somebody’s going to do it. Somebody’s going to say, “Well I wanted to go to that event anyway… I’ll take it!” And the going rate for all manner of photography sinks another notch, settling solidly into the territory of unskilled labor.

It’s not the asker’s fault that they are on the beneficial side of supply and demand. But short of naming and shaming, photographers (and creatives of all kinds, frankly) don’t have a lot of firepower when it comes to fighting back against unsustainably low rates.

What if such low rates were illegal?

Of course I’m not optimistic we could get 50 state legislatures to pass a minimum wage specifically for photographers. But maybe we just need one congressperson? Rashida Tlaib introduced the Living Wage for Musicians Act, so perhaps there’s precedent?

Regardless, maybe we could just get photographers, across disciplines, to consider a theoretical minimum wage? Like a baseline rate that nobody ever works below? If so, what should that rate be?

Maybe this is a fruitless exercise, because sometimes it seems impossible to get three photographers to agree the sky is blue. Perhaps self-preservation instinct would kick in and we could all agree never to do anything for less than ___.

My gut reaction is that nobody should ever take a picture (in the U.S.A.) for less than $100. Nobody. If you’re a high school kid and you first picked up a camera last Tuesday, you’re worth $100. If you can turn it on, get that Benny.

It’s not $100 for any job, mind you. I mean $100 is the baseline for the smallest job you can imagine. If it takes 30 seconds and you shoot two frames, $100. If it’s not a hundred bucks, it’s not worth your time.

Most jobs, of course, will be worth much more. (Even tiny ones, once you have experience.) But we gotta start somewhere.

If you’re a new photographer looking for experience, or more images for your portfolio, you’re the perfect audience for this minimum wage. Because you’re also the audience most likely to be taken advantage of.

The minimum wage would of course need to scale for bigger jobs. So $100 becomes $100 per hour. There’s a decades-long track record of rudimentary photography costing more than that. So why should we backslide? Is the day-one rate for any photographer doing anything for a client $100/hr? I think it should be.

At $100/hr, a half day session is $500, a full day $1,000. These are not amazing rates, so to any reader who thinks “Wow that would be wonderful!” allow me to reassure you it’s not. These are low rates suitable only for the most low-hanging of fruit. When I started working commercially 25 years ago, knowing nothing about the real world or the photo business, I was charging more than this. I think my “day rate” in those days was $1,200.

Whatever kind of photography you sell, it’s worth $100/hr. The family client wants a photo in the park? Spend two hours and charge them $200. Yes there are clients who can’t afford this. But, unfortunately, you won’t be able to sustain a business if you charge less.

Let’s say you charge $150 for what amounts to a half day of your life (by the time you factor in file handling, processing, retouching…) If you book two shoots a day, five days a week, 50 weeks out of the year… That’s $75,000 gross. That may not sound awful, but now deduct $10k for your camera and another chunk of change for your computer and your software subscriptions and your insurance and your web host and… Don’t forget that you won’t be booked all the time. Let’s say you’re magically booked half the time, now you’ve cut your annual gross to $37,500. And pretty quickly you see how this is unsustainable.

Enforcing the minimum wage should be fairly easy. After all, it’s the law.

“Sorry, that request is below minimum wage,” you’ll say to a prospective client.

“What are you talking about?” they’ll retort, confused because minimum wage in their state is $15/hr and they’re offering $17.

“I’m sorry,” you’ll say. “I meant The Photographer’s Minimum Wage™. It’s the creation of this brilliant photographer who realized that we are collectively too nice and possess not nearly enough business savvy, and because of a massive influx of supply that’s outstripping demand, we’re broadly being taken advantage of. So, I’m sorry to say, that request is just too low even to consider. But if you can come up to The Photographer’s Minimum Wage™ of $100/hr I’d be happy to work with you.”

I think we’re on to something.

I hope this helps the inexperienced among us start to understand what their skills are actually worth.

Though, now that I say it, maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we are being offered what we’re worth, and it simply isn’t what it used to be? It’s possible I’m stubbornly refusing to see the forest for the trees.

Perish the thought!

Photographers deserve a living wage.

“I’m sorry, but this request is below The Photographer’s Minimum Wage.™”

Also, if this is a terrible idea for reasons of collusion… Well then, this is all just satire.

As a society we are really into purity tests. Nuance is dead, but impossibly high standards are alive and well. If I agree with 99% of a candidate’s platform, for instance, that candidate can go to hell.

Perhaps I’m too practical to be an ideologue.

Hank Green failed the purity test when he confessed to imperfection. Allan Peters failed the purity test when he didn’t achieve online fame in a way his detractors prefer. When each fell from grace, there was much rejoicing.

Because of our modern embrace of the purity test, when this very publishing platform released a new tool to allow writers and readers to test the purity of the words we’re writing and reading, you’d think the high standards crowd would’ve been all for it.

Imagine my surprise when the announcement was met with vocal opposition.

I don’t get it.

Substack’s new purity test relates to AI. The platform partnered with tech firm Pangram, whose tool is used to detect AI-generated content. Built primarily for use in classrooms, the tool has been integrated into Substack’s publishing capabilities so now, before I click publish, I can run the AI checker on my words to see how many were human made.

Spoiler alert: it’s all of them.

I have seen essays and tweets and notes and all sorts of commentary decrying the introduction of this tool, and I genuinely don’t understand it. I’m not being coy when I say I must be missing something.

If I’m brutally honest, my gut reaction is there are only three reasons to be against a tool like this:

1. False positives. Your writing has been incorrectly attributed to AI in the past, or you’re sure this is going to raise the specter of tainted work in the future.1

2. You’re seriously anti-AI, so you don’t like the use of AI even in cracking down on the use of AI. A hard line approach, but logical. Anti AI is anti all AI.

3. You’re a “writer” who uses AI in your process and you’re upset everybody’s gonna know.

I must confess, my cynical assumption is that most of the outrage comes from group #3. People don’t want to get called out for using AI.

I have occasionally run my writing through AI checkers and have yet to receive a false positive. It’s possible this is giving me an undeserved sense of superiority, and skewing my belief in the accuracy of these tools. According to my limited personal experience, however, they work.

Another interpretation is that I’m a bad writer. Technically poor, especially. I still confuse adjectives with adverbs and I love nothing more than ending a sentence on a preposition. See?

I made the mistake of spending much of my photography career aiming for technical excellence to such an extent that I forgot to spend sufficient time on the intangibles that make better pictures. In my writing I take the opposite approach. I spend very little time on technique and hope the charm makes up for it. Rules be damned, I’m going for greatness.

The AI doesn’t do this. Which is why I’m unbothered by the idea of AI evaluating my writing. And, more importantly, why I think it’s silly to rely on AI for writing anything you care about.

Maybe it’s silly to rely on AI for doing anything you care about.

I’m no hardliner, but for me, increasingly, the use of generative AI signals, “I cut corners.” It’s faster and easier, but those aren’t the metrics I’m interested in. The use of AI in creative endeavors is a great way for me to determine whether something is likely to be of interest to me.

If you can’t bother to write it, why should I bother to read it?

Author Colson Whitehead says that if you want to give over all those writerly tasks to the machine, perhaps you’re not actually interested in being a writer.

“Some people say, ‘I just use it to brainstorm ideas,’” he wrote in The New York Times. “If you don’t know what to paint or compose or write, you’re in the wrong job. Art is the business of making up stuff — go make up some stuff.”

The signal-to-noise ratio is all out of whack. There’s so much shit being pumped into the system, keyword-stuffed, search-optimized blather and slop. If I can use an AI detector to skim this layer of dreck right off the top, my experience as a consumer of words and pictures is immediately improved. It allows me to filter what I’m looking for in much the same way as changing the channel on TV.

I’ll take something real and human and imperfect over whatever the homogenized word averager thinks an interesting essay is supposed to look like.

I agree with Colson Whitehead. My favorite parts of being a writer are doing the things the machine offers to take away. And I think once I give those up I stop being a writer. Sure, I may be a producer of efficient, optimized content. But whatever that is — content creator, prompt engineer, coder — it’s not a writer.

We managed to do fine without AI writing until about four years ago, so I don’t see why I should worry about dismissing it out of hand. If I stick to reading the ideas of humans instead of machines, what’s the issue?

The machines are outputting content for other machines to input. I’ll embrace any tool that safely removes all that shit from my field of view.

There are exceptions, of course. Like the story of the debut novelist’s $2 million book deal that was just rescinded after suspicions arose about the veracity of his authorship.

“The book itself is genius,” his agent wrote. “However it came to be drafted, it’s amazing.”

Maybe it’s naive to want to read what individual humans write rather than what the machine interpolates. Maybe AI-augmented writing really is the future. Maybe AI could’ve made this essay better?

Maybe. But whatever it would be, it wouldn’t be mine.

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Poetry

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.” Ezra Pound’s beautiful imagist poem. Paints a real picture. Alas, not a photograph.

Painting

Chuck Close, Big Self-Portrait. Larger than life. Immensely powerful. A work of genius and technical supremacy. Amazing as it is, it’s not a photograph.

Film

Lawrence of Arabia, cinematography by Freddie Young. A masterpiece of visual filmmaking. Incorporates photography. Essentially photographic. Yet, somehow, a different medium altogether. Photograph-ish, absolutely. Photography? No.

Fishing

Was there confusion about this? I’m surprised. Because fishing is closer to photography than some things oft-mistaken for photography. For instance, it occurs in the real world and is a physical action facilitated by a mechanical device. So in a lot of ways, it’s meaningfully closer to photography than AI is. Strange but true.

Sculpture

Another one that people don’t seem to be confusing with photography, but I’m not sure why. Some sculptures are incredibly photorealistic, like these Rodin pieces (beautifully photographed by Emmanuel Sougez). They even possess three-dimensional shape! That makes them actually more realistic than any two-dimensional image ever could be. Still… Not a photograph.

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Trees

Trees are in an awful lot of photographs. Are we sure they are not actually photographs too? Correlation does not equal causation. We’re sure. They’re not.

People

This photograph of a person sure looks a lot like the real thing. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, the photograph is not actually the person himself. The photograph is a photograph, the person depicted isn’t. Seems like it should be straightforward.

Music

Songs don’t even enter your head the same way as photographs. It’s ears versus eyes. This one should be obvious. Lots of great imagery in songs. Incredible artistic value, too. Am I sure they’re not photographs? I’m sure. They’re not.

Cameras

Wait, are we positive about this one? Yes, we are. Cameras are crucial for the vast majority of photographic imagemaking, but cameras are not photographs. Weirdly, this one gets confused an awful lot, particularly in the photoblogosphere. Too many of my colleagues are cameraists, which kinda proves my point. Proximity to photography is not photography.

Birds

Be serious. Birds aren’t real.

Photograms

A bonus eleventh item? Amazing! But wait, this isn’t photography either? Just kidding. This one totally is photography. It’s made of light in the real world, reacting with physical objects, fixed and made permanent by everyone’s friend, Man Ray. Indisputably photography, whether it uses a camera or not. Way more of a photograph than anything a computer ever generated.

Can you think of anything else that is not photography? I bet I can.

These AI advocates — or, on occasion, AI pessimists — say photography is doomed because AI image generation eliminates the need for photographs and, by extension, the photographers who make them. We’d best pivot, they advise, to typing our most vivid wishes into the automatic copyright-indifferent water-sucking transmogrifier machine.2

If typing prompts satisfies your personal artistic or commercial needs, go for it. Truly. But don’t expect me to appreciate it, or chastise me for not being visionary enough to see the inevitable future. Regardless of what the output may appear to be, this is not a thing I’m interested in. There are lots of things I’m not interested in. People are allowed to cheer and jeer at whatever they like. Even AI.

AI shortcomings aside, the thing I really can’t abide is misinformation caused by careless language. What’s happening when someone uses AI to generate a photorealistic image from whole cloth is more akin to painting than photography.3 Some folks incorrectly refer to machine-generated images as “AI photography.” Which to me sounds a lot like “vegan beef.” It might taste fine, but let’s be clear about what we’re ingesting. If it’s one thing, it’s not the other.

If you’re having trouble understanding the difference between a photograph and something that merely looks like a photograph, consider that the former carries the baggage (and meaning) of originating with a camera aimed at the real world. That documentary power is why we hire wedding photographers and not wedding sketch artists. It’s why school picture day is unlikely to involve painters or essayists. There is a unique value in recording reality with a camera.

Beauty is only skin deep. The meaning of a photograph, its power, comes primarily from elements beneath the surface. Connected, yes, but distinct. An AI-generated image does not contain these associated meanings. It has no evidentiary nature, nor any of the “reality” that deepens a photograph beyond its surface.

If the source of the medium’s unique power is its ability to record light reflecting off of real world objects, if the image is not generated from ones and zeros, there is both a documentary and sculptural nature inherent in photography. Photographs4 translate the three-dimensional world into two-dimensional facsimiles, relying on the associated baggage to impart, or alter, meaning. Take away the baggage and you’ve got only the thinnest veneer of similarity.

Photorealistic AI images are optical illusions, garnering at least some of their power from the mistaken association with a “real” photograph’s evidentiary nature. The way an image is perceived is directly tied to its origins — or to what we believe those origins to be.

This is not an assertion of value. I make no claim that this difference makes photography superior to other art forms, or even superior to AI image generation. My personal preferences are simply a matter of taste. But what’s not subjective is an image’s DNA, which imparts meaning. Without the DNA, we’re back to the surface, devoid of what makes a photograph special.

I bristle at being told that AI images are photographs. This happens deliberately, with an aim at deception, and accidentally, where language has not yet caught up to the technology. We need a more accurate language for describing images, and ultimately understanding them. There is plenty of room for refinement, and at the moment seemingly little call for it. If we can’t discern what these images are and are not, however, we will be powerless to counter egregious deception. In other words, confusing AI-generated imagery for photographs is more than just an annoyance. It shakes the foundation of any basic attempt at discerning fact from fiction.

If I read the phrase “AI photographs” one more time I’m gonna lose it. Oxymoronic.

Whether you’re an AI fanboy or an AI hater, let’s at least agree on the facts of the situation and use language that makes them clear. One is a photograph, the other is an illustration. That distinction, small as it may seem, contains multitudes.

Photography is unique. No other medium can do quite what it does. We must refine the language we use to talk about it, and AI-generated imagery, to better discern our feelings about the meanings and uses of each.

1. Copyright law is the wild west. Even intellectual property attorneys will tell you this. It is tricky and challenging and sometimes seems to contradict precedent in the screwiest of ways. That’s partially what makes copyright so interesting.

2. You don’t have to declare your copyright, or display the copyright symbol © to receive its protection. However, displaying the symbol does help to counter a potential “innocent infringer” defense, which could have a meaningful impact on a judgement or settlement.

3. People who talk about copyright online — present company excluded, of course — are incredibly wrong with frequency. This is particularly true on social media. Why? I think it’s because copyright law is complicated and weird in ways that don’t seem to make much sense.

4. When it’s created, it’s copyrighted. This is my favorite copyright rule of thumb. You don’t need to do anything to have the right to control how your creation is used. What copyright registration does is provide the creator with legal leverage should they need to involve lawyers in a dispute.

5. You can register copyright at two different times: prior to publication (with a three-month grace period) or after. Inclusion in an online portfolio does not necessarily amount to publication, as far as the copyright office is concerned. But the sale of prints, or the licensing or public display of images, would constitute publication. It’s always best to register copyright prior to publication, because registration changes the equation with respect to compensation should an infringement occur.

6. A lawyer may be considerably less likely to take your case if they know the damages will be capped at a few hundred dollars. Registering copyright before infringement changes this equation by making a potential victory much more lucrative.

7. You don’t need to get lawyers involved to defend your copyright. Because “when it’s created, it’s copyrighted,” you can contact an infringer directly at any time requesting that they cease and desist the unlicensed use of your work, and to request a licensing fee for the usage that has already occurred.

8. Be careful, though. There is a thin line between demanding fair compensation for the unlicensed use of your work and what may be perceived as extortion. The best way to avoid that is to allow the infringer to suggest a payment for the use, as photojournalist Todd Bigelow explained to me in our 2017 interview: “I don’t send them a demand for money, I let them ask me for a license. Essentially, I say, ‘At times I will offer a retroactive license to cover the use on your website although that discretion is left up to me and decided on a case by case basis…’ I don’t make a threat; I put things in vague enough terms so that they can interpret what they want from that. Oftentimes I get, ‘What would the retroactive license be?’ and that’s a request from them to provide a license.”

9. To involve lawyers and sue someone for infringing upon your copyright, you need to have registered the work with the U.S. Copyright Office, but this doesn’t have to happen prior to the infringement. That said, registering after the fact unfortunately caps the potential award to actual damages — essentially the fair value of what the licensing fee would have been had the infringer played by the rules. If the work was registered prior to the infringement, however, copyright law allows for the awarding of statutory damages up to $30,000 per registered work. Significantly, if the court determines an infringement was willful, damages can be raised to $150,000 per work.

10. There is a copyright version of small claims court, originated via the CASE (Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement) Act in 2020. It established the CCB, the Copyright Claims Board, which offers expedited proceedings before a three-person panel and does not require a lawyer. Damages in CCB cases are capped at $30,000, and an even simpler version allows a claims officer to make a determination in cases under $5,000. The CASE Act and the CCB make the process of defending copyright much more attainable for artists and creators without the means to retain an attorney for a protracted legal dispute.

11. It typically costs between $45 and $85 to register your copyright (though there are many variables that can increase the cost for certain types of work). The good news is, you can register all images from one body of work in a single group application.

12. You can register your copyright — which I have done — and the work can be infringed — which has happened to me — and still not be able to secure recompense. How? I have learned to my sorrow that if the infringing party declares bankruptcy or dies, you’re out of luck. Blood from a stone and all.

13. Just because you hold the copyright does not mean you are the only party who has a say in how an image is used. If you take a picture of me, for instance, you can’t license that image for commercial purposes without my consent. This is known as “publicity rights” because we are each permitted under U.S. law to determine how our likeness is used commercially. This is why you can’t take a picture of Tom Cruise on the street (where you’d be well within your rights to photograph him) and slap it on a toothpaste ad. Just like the rest of us, famous or not, Tom gets to decide that for himself.

14. Model releases exist for the above reason. They are essentially evidence to demonstrate an agreement was reached and the subject of the photo was made aware of potential commercial use and was fairly compensated in exchange.

15. Fair compensation, courts have ruled, has to actually be fair. You have to offer “valuable compensation” in exchange for the signed model release, and that compensation cannot be just a dollar. Well, it can be, but this is legally precarious enough that best practices dictate you should provide more (cash, prints, etc).

16. Using an image in your online portfolio or social media does (or at least might) constitute commercial purposes, since it is effectively being used to promote your commercial photography endeavor in a way that a set of three printed portfolios privately shared would not.

17. Fan fiction is copyright infringement. Technically. Typically. Because it is an unauthorized derivative.

18. If an entity pays a licensing fee to use your copyrighted material — a song, photograph, poem or painting — this does not mean the entity now owns your copyright. The particulars of the usage are spelled out in the contract, and they can be as specific as you and your client care to make it. For instance, a photographer may license a newsworthy photograph for one-time print-only use in the state of New Hampshire. Or a commercial photographer may license their tabletop product photo worldwide for a three-year usage term for online-only uses except for paid advertising. Or an amateur photographer may license their landscape photo to a calendar printer for a one-year usage term in North America. There is no established “standard” usage, and it’s up to the artist and client to reach an agreement amenable to both parties.

19. You can sell your copyright. This happens by default in “work for hire” contracts which are, unfortunately, becoming increasingly common in the photography business. This is occurring, in my opinion, because there are more photographers than clients, so if you don’t accept our lousy terms, they imply, someone else will. It’s a terrible predicament, and I fear it’s only going to get worse. The ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers) standard advice used to be to charge 3-4x a limited usage license fee for the sale of a copyright, should the photographer choose to offer it. I’ve done that with success, but we’re sure to see more work for hire requests coming in because our leverage (scarcity) is disappearing.

20. Work for hire is bad for photographers because it limits our ability to be fairly compensated for exceptional work. Think of every amazing photograph you can from the 20th century. Chances are, the photographers who made those pictures retained the copyright and were therefore free to sell and resell the images in myriad ways. Work for hire and copyright transfer simply removes the photographer from that equation, allowing the client to reap the rewards of all those additional sales.

21. Work for hire contracts aren’t the only way to transfer a copyright. Two parties can agree to sell a copyright at any time. You could call your friend with the amazing work and draw up a contract offering them $100 for the copyright to your favorite picture from their portfolio. Should they accept, you’re then free to license that image anywhere and everywhere you can. It is, for all intents and purposes, yours.

22. You can copyright choreography, but not individual dance moves. You can copyright software code as a work of literature. You can copyright a smell (think perfume) and you can copyright an architectural design if it’s unique. You can’t, however, copyright an idea.

23. AI-generated images cannot, at this point, be copyrighted. It is one of the natural limiters likely to keep brands and businesses from employing AI-generated imagery for high-profile uses. My guess is, AI companies are lobbying hard — or soon will be — to get this standard changed. For now, they’ll have to settle for registering whatever human-made contributions are evident in an otherwise AI-generated work.

24. There are major carve-outs from copyright law to provide artists wide leeway in the use of previously copyrighted works, even including the likeness of identifiable individuals. For the former, study up on the cases of Richard Prince (an appropriation artist known for copying Marlboro print advertisements and enlarging Instagram posts, and getting away with it in the legal sense if not the moral one) and Lynn Goldsmith. For the latter, see Philip Lorca diCorcia and his case that proves there is no expectation of privacy in public and the sale of your image in an artistic realm does not constitute a commercial use.

25. While courts have a long and demonstrable track record of loosening limits on appropriation in the context of artmaking, they do not seem to consider the music business artmaking. When it comes to music appropriation — sampling, for instance, or the copying of an identifiable melody — the original artist must be compensated. They may even be named as the songwriter (or co-songwriter) of the new piece. Many interesting examples of this exist, including the famous case of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards receiving sole songwriter credits — along with millions of dollars in royalties — for the Verve’s song “Bittersweet Symphony” which sampled a small section, not of an original Rolling Stones song, but of a symphonic recording of the song. The rules are different for music. My best guess is it’s because the music business is seen as a commercial endeavor, first and foremost.

26. If an artist graffitis on your building, you would have to get their permission to remove it. Really. (But only if it’s recognized as art in the eyes of the court. Local tagger? Clean it off. Banksy? Better wait.)

27. If you are an employee who creates an artwork in the normal course of your duties — a photograph, a piece of writing, a sculpture — the copyright defaults to the business who employs you.

28. Copyright runs out 70 years after the death of the artist. If the work was created by a corporate entity — Walt Disney, for instance — it’s 95 years after first publication.

29. There are exceptions to all of the above, known as “Fair Use.” Things like commentary (a review of an artist’s work in a blog or magazine, for instance), parody (or satire, in cases such as Weird Al Yankovic’s song parodies of obviously recognizable copyrighted songs), news reporting (if an image is of profound public importance), research and education about copyrighted works (art history class, for instance) do not require the permission of the copyright holder. If a work is transformative, or non-commercial, has no effect on the market for the original artist’s work, or uses only a small portion of a copyrighted work, it may also be fair use. (The aforementioned Richard Prince, for instance, typically gets away with his appropriations citing fair use, because his work is deemed transformative — taking an image from the advertising realm and transforming it into a work of art.)

30. Credit is no substitute for permission. Many, if not most, of the works you see shared online would, in the eyes of the court, constitute copyright infringement. The terms of service of most social media companies can alter that, however. For instance, if I upload an image I made (i.e. for which I hold the copyright) to Facebook, because I agreed to the Meta terms of service, the image is free to be shared and re-shared by others on the platform. However, if I saw a wonderful image in the newspaper and decided to share that image on Facebook, I do not hold the copyright to the image therefore sharing it likely constituted a copyright violation, as does every subsequent re-share (re-publication) of the image. No money has changed hands as far as the copyright holder is concerned, but the social media company has profited handily from the engagement with its platform against which advertisements are sold. Just because it’s standard operating procedure doesn’t mean it’s fair or legal.

31. A more concise way to say that is, “Just because you see an image online doesn’t mean you can share it.” And just because you credit the photographer doesn’t mean you’re in the clear. Nor do those silly statements found under YouTube videos where people have shared music videos or TV shows and write, “No ownership is being claimed!” Doesn’t matter. The copyright holder gets to decide how their work is shown, period.

32. Just because you modified a work doesn’t mean you’re not infringing on its copyright. For instance, if you took this post and changed a few words here and there and shared it as your own, you’d be infringing on my copyright. And you better believe I’m coming after you. It’s the best way to make a buck in the arts these days.

Do you have any favorite memes? I have a long list, and near the top is this man, in a star-spangled bandana, standing near a protest, offering his own counter protest, holding a crudely made cardboard sign that hilariously undermines his point. It reads, in an act of sublime irony, “Get a brain, morans.”

The joke, of course, is that he spelled “morons” wrong. Inadvertently providing a delectable laugh.

He’s just a meme, sure, but also emblematic of something I find meaningfully problematic in modern life: the fact that being a dummy yourself is immaterial when shouting at strangers about what dummies they are.

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I recently had an experience on social media in which I found myself defending the causes of fairness, truth and justice, if not the entirety of the American way. It was about something rather inconsequential, but I didn’t like seeing the spread of half-truths (and potentially deliberate lies) when I knew the opposite to be true. So I dipped a toe in and experienced what’s known in some circles as “a shitstorm of idiocy.” It was so complete as to have ruined my afternoon and a considerable chunk of my faith in humanity.

The whole process taught me something about the situation we’re in [he said while gesturing broadly at everything].

The cause of my righteous indignation was a rumor about a client.1 I happened to have just enough inside information to know it was grossly inaccurate, borderline slanderous, the kind of thing that can damage a reputation. So I pushed back, gently, only to find myself piled on by a flood of intellectually dishonest vitriol that I’m sure felt gratifying to the emotionally stunted malcontents who spewed it.2 Before I knew it, I felt like the lone voice of sanity in a virtual public square that was actively discouraging it.

Sawalich’s axiom: access to a microphone is more powerful than knowledge, expertise or experience. In other words, it’s better to be loud than right.

I know, I know, don’t feed the trolls. That’s the modern version of the famous Twain misattribution, “Never argue with an idiot, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.” I got to witness that firsthand, as I found myself straining to avoid penning inelegant comebacks along the lines of “Nu uh!” and “So’s your mother!”

The only tool that proved remotely effective against the loudly outraged was the calling of bluffs. (I think I won. They backtracked and deleted their loudest, wrongest comments.) What bothered me wasn’t that they were wrong, but that they seemed to be powered by some sort of mass hysteria. They’d share these rumors even though their own personal experience contradicted them. How do you counter that level of intellectual dishonesty? It’s a cousin to the “leopards ate my face” thing. Not “I didn’t believe it would happen to me,” so much as, “I refuse to believe the thing that happened to me, and instead will gossip about what others say they heard.”

It must say somewhere in the terms of service that “factual accuracy” is discouraged on social media. What matters is engagement. You’ve heard of rage bait? It’s effective, even though it is based on a lie.

Even more than engagement, what really seems to matter online is virtue signalling. That terminology is often used to discredit things as empty gestures that are actually quite useful in a healthy society. Signifying one is an ally, for instance, or that one’s business offers a safe space for members of marginalized communities. These are signals of virtue, yes, but they are real and meaningful. What I’m talking about, the issue I experienced, was a type of virtue signalling that is empty and hollow. Like ensuring there are no plastic straws on your private jet.

The thing about such hollow signalling is it can be damaging. Telling a lie in support of the truth is still lying. Let’s stick to the facts, shall we?

When it comes to the attention economy, any audience is valuable. And what pulls more supporters to your corner than righteous indignation? It cultivates the outrage that powers the algorithms that attract the attention that is monetized at every turn. It seems to me it might be at the core of most things that are wrong with life in the 21st century. Now that I’ve had a tiny little experience on the receiving end of a small sliver of that outrage, I realize just how awful it is.

We don’t operate in an attention economy. It’s an outrage economy, full stop.

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Outrage has been a tool of politicians for centuries. Those who willfully cultivate outrage don’t care about us, or our well-being. They’re serving a system that only wants more outrage, more eyeballs, more revenue. If you’re not paying, you’re the product being sold. And when you’re mad about it, your selling price goes through the roof.

So if there’s a moral to my story perhaps it’s this: pay attention to how you are being manipulated when you engage online. The easiest answer, of course, is not to engage at all. But for those of us trying to do anything — sell books, build a brand, cultivate an audience — engagement is necessary because all of the other methods no longer exist. Nothing reliably works, it seems, except for social media. It’s up to us to put up our respective guards and ensure, before we get out the torches and pitchforks, that we aren’t being manipulated in an effort to sell deodorant.

There certainly are plenty of things worthy of our outrage, but plenty more that seem like it at first glance then don’t withstand scrutiny. Which means we have to be discerning. When we get big mad, we can’t turn into a meme, some idiot, actively disproving his own point, shouting at the world, loud and proud, “Get a brain, morans.”

When two people are on stage, and one says “It’s really hot out here in the desert,” it is their scene partner’s duty to agree, then build upon the sentiment. If the partner instead says, “No, we’re in a submarine!” the process halts, the audience is lost and the scene is dead in the water. Agree, and add to it: yes, and. Simple as it is, this sentiment sums up much of what being an artist is all about. Building, not tearing down. Openness to new ideas, no matter how illogical. Acceptance, affirmation, addition.

Whatever the opposite of “Yes, and” is, it’s on frequent display on social media. The comments under any post, no matter how mundane, are filled with discussion killing, migraine-inducing contradictory comments that often begin, “Well, actually…” You’ll note how such comments are often the turd in the metaphorical punchbowl, absolutely derailing conversation, ensuring nobody ever arrives anywhere helpful, productive or even remotely interesting. This highlights, I believe, a general closed-mindedness that is spiritually opposed to “Yes, and.” See how it kneecaps the creative spark? Hijacks any further pursuit of common interest? It sets the participants at odds, stifling whatever magical garden may have grown there. Next time you’re on social media, keep an eye out for the comments that affirm and add to the discussion versus those that derail it.

In my own work, whether writing or photography, I frequently put this openness into practice by seeking juxtaposition (the correlation of two unrelated elements) in hopes of surprising and delighting myself. If I have an idea, a jolt of inspiration, it is not my obligation to critique it, to edit it, to vet it for factual accuracy. All of this kills the vibe, arrests the momentum before it’s begun. It quashes the possibility of building… anything! Later we can critique it and shape it and decide if it’s any good. For now, our only job is to build it, to build something.

There’s a reason writing and editing are two different jobs, deployed at different stages of the process, often by different people.

“Yes, and” thinking has taught me to follow my foot and trust inspiration enough to see where it takes me, even when it doesn’t make any sense. It might take me to a place where I make something out of nothing. Grab ahold — of whatever! — and start heading down a path. See where it leads. Wherever it goes, I probably haven’t been there before. Maybe I’ll love it, maybe I won’t. But I’ll never know if I don’t go see.

Maybe this all reads as too touchy-feely, or too broad to be broadly useful. Or maybe you just think, “Well, duh!” But for me, this revelation has been invaluable. I spent decades dreaming and planning and imagining, thinking I had to do things “the right way.” Then one day I woke up and I was 40. And then I blinked and I was 50. Jeebus, I thought, I’d better get busy.

So I followed my foot. Now I have a thriving Substack (creatively thriving, if not financially) and an even fuller life. I’ve never felt more creatively, artistically fulfilled. I feel as if everything I touch turns to gold. Not because it’s amazing, but simply because it exists. I made this. I sat on the porch on a beautiful afternoon and wrote this very sentence out of thin air, for no reason other than I followed my foot. And now it exists in the world, rather than as some vague plan in the back of my head, remaining fully nothing along with all the other nothing that exists in there.

See that sentence? Practically nonsense. But also sort of perfect, right? I trusted it, went with it, and now I love it. Because it’s weird and wonderful to me. That’s the other thing working this way does: it helps you embrace your voice, to be yourself. That’s something nobody else can achieve. They might get close, they can bite your style, but if they want to be something great, chances are they’d get there more reliably by embracing the most unique aspects of themselves. Be yourself, let your you-ness through. It’ll resonate with whatever audience it was meant to.1

That’s not to suggest abdicating all editorial responsibility, or that we stop trying to make things of quality. For someone like me, “Yes, and” simply means I worry mostly about the doing before I worry about the improving. The other way around, nothing gets done but boy are my secret ideas refined.

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On his outstanding podcast “Good One,” Jesse David Fox interviews comedians about jokes. In a recent discussion about storytelling and the magic of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” Fox says part of what makes that show great is its messy energy. Yes, the show is scripted, but its essence is close to improvisation. Things are written quickly, in the days and hours before the show goes live to a worldwide audience. We see the actors reading their lines, in bad wigs and holding silly props. It’s all a bit chaotic, which absolutely adds to the charm.

“If it was better,” Fox says, “it would be worse.”

What an amazing sentence, representing an even more amazing idea. This is the power behind “Yes, and.” My goal is not to make messy work, but to make something great. Imperfectly, humanly great. And sometimes, messiness is integral to that. I’ll take delightfully messy over perfect and inconsequential any day.

“If everyone was nailing their beats it would be unwatchable,” Fox continues. “Especially as all the internet is AI content, the fact that there’s a show where people mess up on live television is legitimately thrilling.”

You can’t reliably plan your way to thrilling — well, I can’t, anyway. The big budget Hollywood approach certainly works, but it’s infinitely more expensive and time consuming, and legitimately unattainable to most of us. What we can do, however, is get started making something great right now. Why not just do it? Can’t that be enough? Isn’t the atomic habit approach to becoming a great writer inevitably going to start with writing a single sentence?

One of the things I’ve learned from writing this Substack is you can’t predict how an audience will respond to anything you create. What you think is wonderful — something you’ve meticulously crafted over days and weeks, refined to within an inch of its life, unassailable both philosophically and technically — may be met with a collective “meh.” The audience shrugs it into the dustbin of history.2

By the same token, when it’s late at night and you’ve got a 6am deadline, few words on a page and even fewer good ideas, you follow your fingers and get to typing. Next thing you know you’ve got 800 words of barely cohesive thought you’re sure will cause a cascade of nasty letters. You click “Publish” through gritted teeth, immediately filled with regret. You manage to fall asleep and, after a few fitful hours, wake up ready for the inevitable backlash.

But what’s this? Your audience has doubled overnight and you’re touted as the next Hemingway? “A genius among men,” new readers shout! Subscriptions spike. The piece is shared far and wide. You’re interviewed on a morning show, asked about the genius essay that, you’re embarrassed to mention, slipped from your brain like a stifled belch. Met not with revulsion but universal acclaim. Dear god, what is happening? How did we get here?

Who knows how we got here. But it happened, at least partly, because we let it. In the immortal words of 38 Special, “Hold on loosely, but don’t let go.”

When your approach boils down to “just do it,” you learn to avoid overthinking. Put pen to paper and get started. Follow your foot. When you have an idea, any idea, see where it leads. Greet it with a technique that reliably works for, well, almost anything. Accept it and add to it. In other words, “Yes, and…”

That’s all for now with respect to “Yes, and…” but do stay tuned
for more exploration of my favorite little concept in future essays.
If you enjoyed it, or found a shred of helpful information, I hope you’ll share it.

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Do you have a personal mantra? An operating principle, perhaps, or a unifying theory of everything? It’s helpful, I find. For the longest time I possessed nothing of the sort and was perpetually floundering. But in recent years, I began to organize my creative endeavors, from writing to photography to painting to gardening, around a central premise. Some might call it wandering. Others might refer to it as “trusting the process.” But I tend to think of it as a form of deliberate spontaneity. The mantra I use to guide my thinking is a kind of cousin to the stoic theory of radical acceptance. But it comes from a surprising place, the world of improvisational theater. And it’s summed up in just two words: “Yes, and…”

Twenty-ish years ago, I was invited to photograph a friend of a friend. He was (and remains) the incredibly talented actor and improviser, Bill Chott.1 As a thank you, Bill invited me to attend his improv class. I didn’t want to be rude so, despite having never acted, I went. And I loved it. So I kept going. And eventually it rewired my brain.

Before you roll your eyes, this isn’t an essay about improv. It’s about a life skill I learned from improv, about a fairly simple technique for staying open and moving forward. I remain uninterested in being a performer, but I’ll be forever grateful that brief experience taught me a new way to engage with the creative process. I don’t need to understand it in order to trust it. I just need to accept it and build on it.

In improv, the performance is unplanned. It’s made up on the spot. That’s not to say the stage is chaos. A framework is established, rules of the game, and within this the story is discovered as the performance unfolds. Not discovered by the audience alone, mind you, but discovered by those on stage as well.

Stephen King explains a similar creative process in his book On Writing, describing it as setting loose an interesting character in an peculiar situation in order to see what happens.

“The writer’s original perception of a character may be as erroneous as the reader’s,” King writes. “I want to put characters in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety… but to watch what happens and then write it down.”

“I am, after all, not just the novel’s creator but its first reader,” he continues. “And if I’m not able to guess with any accuracy how the damned thing is going to turn out, even with my inside knowledge of coming events, I can be pretty sure of keeping the reader in a state of page-turning anxiety. And why worry about the ending anyway? Why be such a control freak? Sooner or later every story comes out somewhere.”

If that’s not improvisation in action I don’t know what is. He sets the process in motion and watches what happens.

Pulling on a thread and following where it leads. I believe that’s where much creative greatness comes from. Interest. Surprise. Curiosity. The electricity that results is a function of improvisation’s spontaneous nature. When it works, it’s like magic.2

King’s approach alone should provide a clue for those of us making creative work in any discipline. For those of us who plan and plan again and iterate and try and fail and start over and plan more and… It works or it doesn’t. I’m not suggesting this method is wrong; there are plenty of examples proving it works (the Sistine Chapel seems to have been fairly well thought out, and George Seurat was known to be meticulous when it came to his pointillist masterpieces). I’m tapping into something that took me years to fully understand, which is that planning and refining are not the only way to make something great. In fact, people like me use planning and refining as an impediment to actually making and doing. I need look no further than the improv stage or Stephen King’s writing process to see how wonderful it can be to jump in and discover what happens.

In improv, there’s a principle called “follow your foot.” As you’re waiting in the wings, watching a performance unfold, you are inevitably inspired to step in — your foot knows the urge before you do. But you question it, unsure of what to say or do. Were every actor to remain paralyzed by doubt, no scene could ever progress. In order to function, it requires agreement among the participants that we shall be brave, we will feel the urge to step in and, even if we don’t know why, we’ll go for it. This is another way of saying “trust your instincts” (at least for now) and “don’t be an editor” (at least for now). Instead of perpetually watching and waiting for the sure thing, waiting for this, waiting for that, waiting… Just do it. Step in. Follow your foot.

In life, in art, in the making of things, waiting for a better idea, waiting for the perfect idea, ignoring the creative impulse, disregarding the spark of inspiration… All of it means you don’t ever actually do anything. It means you keep making plans but never make work.

In his BBC course on time management, author Oliver Burkeman explains why, for some people (like me), planning becomes an obstacle rather than a preparatory aid. “Plans are something we do to make ourselves feel better in the moment.” Boy, does that ring true. Planning, in my case, is often the enemy. I would argue, per Mr. Burkeman, it’s better to do a little something, to make some small amount of actual progress, than to make big plans you never get around to implementing.

An example he provides is for aspirational screenwriters. One approach to becoming a screenwriter is to make big plans — save money, move to Los Angeles, take the right classes, buy the right software, lay out the ideal plan for all the things you need to do… So what if the planning takes months or years or, unfortunately, an entire lifetime? A different approach is to spend 20 minutes today to start writing a screenplay. Then, in one sense, you’ve done it: you’re a screenwriter.

This way of thinking has a lot to do with overcoming the crippling power of perfectionism. There are plenty of sayings that reflect this idea — ”done is better than perfect,” for instance, or “perfect is the enemy of good” — all of them, taken seriously, do a fine job of the most important step in creation: getting off your butt and actually getting to work. It dovetails nicely with another guiding principle in my life, this one brought to me by the advertising geniuses in charge of the Nike account: “Just do it.”

“Just do it” fits well with “follow your foot.” Both, of course, are designed to keep the perfectionist from stalling. Are you noticing a theme? I wouldn’t argue that I’m a textbook perfectionist, but years of schooling taught me there was a right way to do things, and if we aren’t going to do it right we shouldn’t do it at all. Nonsense. Who’s to say what “right” is, particularly before you’ve done it?

Like an invasive weed taking over a garden, perfectionism can crowd out everything else. You need to know where to draw the line, what to be a perfectionist about and when to get out of the way. Some folks use their perfectionism, deliberately or subconsciously, as a way of stalling. Fear of failure, perhaps? Fear of rejection? Maybe just fear of not being good? Some form of fear, in my case, that’s for sure. Thanks to “Yes, and…” I decided being paralyzed by fear was significantly worse than doing something that wasn’t perfect. So even if the results aren’t great, or even good, I’m doing the work. I’m putting things out into the world instead of making plans. And I owe this big change to the power of two simple words: yes, and.

The devolution of the photo business was rapid. Between 2019 and 2023, magazine readership fell by more than 50%. Fewer readers, fewer advertisers, lower ad rates, lower editorial rates, less work for less money to the photographers who powered both the advertising and the editorial that the publications required. If you learned how to sell photography as recently as 2018, you’re likely looking around and wondering what the hell happened because it’s all so unbelievably different now.

Why is our beloved industry not dying? Because of content. A lousy word that to my ear sounds like quantity over quality. If you don’t see opportunity in quantity, in literal demand for the thing we provide at scale, then I don’t know what to tell you.

My epiphany was this:

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That’s not to say the outlook is rosy. Particularly if you have, say, 20 years worth of context. For those with experience, it sure seems like commercial photography might be in its death throes.

I’m here to say: fear not.

Over the last several years I have personally experienced downward pressure, if not outright decline, in fees. My colleagues report the same. It’s not a consequence of AI (though that’s sure to have an impact soon enough). It’s the fault of social media, a result of enshittification. Toys became tools that became the central hub of advertising and killed print — the engine that powered the commercial photography industry. Social media is now the core of all marketing, and social media has little need for high cost, high value imagery.

Commercial and editorial photographers are dealing with a perfect storm — social media, a skittish economy and AI — making many of us wonder if our beloved industry is circling the drain. An optimist might say it’s evolving, but I’m not that generous. It’s a real problem, and I’m worried. But not so worried that I think our business will evaporate. Professional photography is becoming something new. Not better. Likely worse. Definitely new.

First, a quick recap of ways to make money with a camera.

Wedding photographers aren’t going away. Social media has actually been a boon to their business. And nobody’s going to choose an AI illustration to commemorate their big day. Same goes for family portraits and event photographers. They all trade in authenticity. They’re paid to capture actual moments of real things. They’ll face increased competition and downward pressure on rates (supply and demand) but will not disappear.

Photojournalists have smooth sailing, as well. (Because nine out of 10 entities that used to hire photojournalists went belly up, “smooth sailing” is relative.) Their options may be limited, but neither journalism nor the role photographers play in it will disappear. I’d argue in a world of fake photorealism, photojournalism will become more valuable than ever.

It’s the commercial photographers, at both the high and low ends of the market, who will suffer most.

At the top end of the range, where assignments run into six figures and involve scores of people to plan, execute and implement campaigns, the cost-savings of AI are going to prove irresistible — unless, for some reason, the advertiser requires actual authenticity or possesses an excess of both money and taste. If the masses decide they won’t accept AI imagery, that’s good news for advertising photographers. But the meaningful cost savings, in an uneasy business environment dealing with economic uncertainty and spiraling costs, will eliminate a lot of work at the higher end of the market.

This is a consequence for which photographers are partially to blame, for a surprising reason: aesthetics. When we wielded Photoshop to make pictures increasingly perfect — unrealistically so — photo-based advertising drifted farther from the authenticity from which photographs derive their power. If the “reality” of an image doesn’t matter to an advertiser — demonstrably true for quite some time now — said advertiser is perfectly positioned to allow generative AI to take over.

But if, as is the case with photojournalism, photographic authenticity matters to that advertiser, they are less likely to rely on the shortcut machine. Recent examples of this include campaigns like “Actually, it’s Ikea,” Polaroid’s “Sand Between Your Toes,” or The New York Times’ “It’s Your World to Understand.” They’re trading on a visual essence only reality can provide.

At the other end of the spectrum, the low end of the market, clients use photography because it efficiently fills a need. Unconcerned with high-minded considerations of authenticity and subtext, they simply require readable images of their widget. If the AI can generate them, inexpensively and immediately… Problem solved.

In the middle of the market, however, there will continue to exist a sweet spot for which authentic photography will remain necessary. Demand is even increasing. It will be made by smaller crews with leaner budgets, but it’s real. Photographers will serve a growing variety of needs in the content marketing industry that prioritizes volume over production value. In other words, quality is giving way to quantity.

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As big a threat as generative AI may be, it’s 15 years of social media domination that’s really done us in. Corey Doctorow’s “Enshittification” is a great place to learn how we got here. Suffice it to say, publishers were wooed by digital connectivity and gave over their audiences to the platforms, which then hijacked those audiences and rug-pulled the publishers right out of business.1

When I say “publishers” what I really mean is “any entity which previously paid photographers.” Magazines and books, of course, but also industry newsletters, educators, video makers, websites, brochures, direct mailers… And most of all, advertisers. All of it, print and digital alike, took a backseat to the number one connector of any entity with its customers: social media. The tech companies have captured a meaningful percentage of eyeballs and the ad dollars they garner. Social media accounts for a whopping 80% of all ad spending worldwide. Any customer you want to reach, whatever you might be selling, is accessed via a handful of Silicon Valley servers.2

When print all but died, the need for high production value photographs dropped precipitously. We benefit from an increased need for photographs and videos for social media, but it’s not nearly enough — because so many of those social images are user generated. High production value photographs had long, high-profile lifespans. Social media photographs have a short shelf life, living for a day before disappearing. What’s the value of an image with a lifespan of hours? And what’s the value of a still photograph on a tiny device that’s better suited to displaying video?

The industry has been turned on its head. But I see a path forward. It’s not the one I would have chosen in an ideal world, but there is light at the end of this tunnel and it’s not an oncoming train.

For those curious about how I am changing my approach to the business of photography — something I think my colleagues will find themselves doing eventually — Part 2 reveals my plan. This will be a post for paid subscribers.

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In April, the Danziger Gallery in New York displayed a large print of an AI-generated colorized version of Ansel Adams’ famous photograph, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.” You’ll no doubt recognize the original, and the AI version is an exact replica in garish color. The print was accompanied by a price tag of $10,000. Which is necessary, it seems to me, to really dial up the crass commercialism.

When we discussed it on the pod, it hadn’t yet received much coverage. (I’d seen a solitary tweet and that was it.) But since we recorded, there’s been growing outrage. Which seems reasonable. Key points:

• The Ansel Adams Trust released a statement which concerned itself not with the image’s AI nature, but rather the preservation of the artist’s (i.e. the Trust’s) valuable intellectual property: “No one should trade on another person’s name, reputation, and labor for private commercial ends without consent and candor. The unauthorized exploitation of Ansel’s actively stewarded legacy reflects a gross failure of ethical and professional judgment.”

• A photographer represented by Danziger, Jim Krantz, has, in protest, severed his ties to the gallery and will be seeking new representation. “Having experienced the appropriation of my own work — most notably Richard Prince’s use of my Marlboro imagery — I understand how important authorship and artistic integrity are to the creative process.”

• In the podcast, I mentioned that one of the gallery’s artists was credited with the piece, but I was incorrect. Gallerist James Danziger himself has since taken credit for the idea and its execution. (Well, inasmuch as typing the sentence “Colorize Ansel’s Moonrise” amounts to an execution. The death of irony, perhaps?)

• Danziger responded not to the public outcry but to the Adams Trust’s IP-based critique with a statement of his own, saying he believes the image to be in the public domain.1 He also strongly implied that he believes Ansel would’ve approved, and cites an Adams quote about the “astonishing developments” that await in electronic imagemaking.

• I asked Chat GPT to critique Danziger’s statement. “The black-and-white print is not a deficient version of a color reality waiting to be restored,” the machine said. “It is the artwork.” Pretty good! Maybe AI isn’t so bad all the time.

• Childish, hilarious people, such as yours truly, have been doing things like the above, and the series of Insta posts below, to bring a modicum of attention to the preposterous nature of the whole cheap thing. If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.

The whole thing is a bit of a poke in the eye a’la the work of rephotographer Richard Prince, or Maurizio Cattelan’s banana on the wall. The banana, to my way of thinking, is actually considerably more artful than this, because at least it represented an original thought. But that’s just personal preference. I find breaking new ground inherently interesting, and why my personal reaction to the colorization of Moonrise was largely, “Of course they did.”

I keep coming back to my prevailing feeling, which is best summed up as ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It’s not exactly “who cares,” but I’m just unsure if there’s any lasting, meaningful consequence of this beyond the further cheapening of AI visuals as art.

I fault no artist for pursuing whatever mode of creative expression suits them. But, frankly, I’m just not very interested in AI imagery. Maybe that will change when I see it used in a way that I find interesting. It’s hard, though, because when I can’t find the artist’s hand I can’t connect very well.

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Or is it that I don’t want to? Hard to say.

Did you see the guy who posted what he claimed to be an AI-generated Monet painting and asked for a detailed critique of the work? The cognoscenti tore it a new one, and in so doing walked right into the troll’s trap. He gleefully revealed, actually, it was a real Monet. He just wanted to see what we losers had to say on the subject. Or words to that effect. Now that is top-tier trolling.

I am not interested in being a hater just for the sake of it. Do your art, even if that means acquiescing to the machines. But I don’t have to like it, or appreciate it. I’m certainly under no obligation to respect it.

Neither are you obligated to respect me or my work, when I walk around pointing my camera at dirty parking lots or looking for beauty in my house at night. You’re free to dismiss my bullshit as I’m free to dismiss yours.

It’s when I can feel the rudimentary trickery, the shortcuts, that I balk. If it seems like you’re just trying to serve me chicken shit and tell me it’s chicken salad, I’m not likely to be intrigued. There remains an all-but-inherent positioning of this kind of work that keeps it, often, in league with deception. It’s used by unscrupulous salesmen, hoping to saddle me with a lemon and cash my check before I realize, miles down the road, I’ve been had.

In art, particularly in the places where it overlaps pop culture, matters of taste are going to be huge factors in the acceptance of AI. I can’t help but notice we seem to be, collectively, assigning a negative value to the ways it’s currently used. You see this in the slop-riddled comment sections of social media and in the backlash against anyone who employs an obvious AI “shortcut” to creative work that was, until a couple years ago, handled 100% by humans.

As I predicted (okay, in fairness, “wondered”) nearly 18 months ago, AI imagery could become so reviled as to doom it from the start. Like a high school cafeteria, if the right kids decree it’s uncool, soon enough the masses will fall in line. Then it’s too late. Once the prevailing wisdom becomes that AI art is slop, it’s a tough sell.

The question remains: will the masses get tired of the slop before they tire of hearing people like me complain about it? Too soon to tell.

Each week1 join me and my friend and colleague, Jay Fram, as we try to figure out what the hell is happening to the photography business. (Spoiler alert: I can already tell, we’re totally gonna solve it.)

I’m proud to introduce Continuous Agitation, a podcast in which two longtime photographers talk about the peculiar challenges of trying to earn a buck with a camera in 2026 and beyond. Between us, Jay and I have 50+ years of professional experience (and we’re nearly 13 feet tall). You’d think that would mean we’d have it all figured out by now but, believe it or not, it’s a perpetual work in progress.

As I told Art + Math’s paid subscribers in their sneak peek last week, “Our industry has been experiencing seismic changes, and literally every working pro I know is wondering what the hell is going on. Jay and I will attempt to figure that out. Or at least talk about it, and the consequences, and what (if anything) we can do about it.”

We’re working hard to make sure it’s as upbeat and entertaining as it is informative, and I would be thrilled if you would check it out. Even more thrilled if you liked, subscribed and rated it five stars on Apple podcasts.2

Listen to the podcast via your favorite app, or via these helpful links:

Continuous Agitation on Apple Podcasts

Continuous Agitation on Spotify

Continuous Agitation on Amazon Music

Continuous Agitation on iHeart

Credit where it’s due, the podcast was Jay’s idea. It sprang from our regular conversations in which we help one another out, trying to determine how to bid an assignment, solve a problem for a client, or deal with a problem client. We talk rates and fees and costs, of course. But we also discuss copyright and usage licensing and the imminent takeover of AI.3 If you are trying to earn your living with a camera, as Jay and I have each been since 2000, you’re bound to find the conversations pertinent and engaging. If I do say so myself.

I’m the reason we didn’t start the thing sooner. Jokes aside, there are so many podcasts, and so many bad podcasts, and so many middle aged dudes making podcasts… There are so many outside reasons not to do a podcast. But I finally realized I can’t help any of that. I only know that I am endlessly fascinated by our medium and this business and even more intrigued by the changes that present new challenges every day. And I wanna talk about it.

I can’t say that we have big plans, or even that we have a well-developed road map. But I can tell you we do have several ideas I’m excited about. And, most importantly, we’re taking seriously our obligation not to waste your time. I hope you give it a listen, and I hope you enjoy it even half as much as we’re enjoying making it.

Thank you!

– Bill

It’s possible that I am the one who’s too sensitive, actually, but that seems awfully revealing so I’ll ascribe the trait to photographers broadly so I won’t feel so alone.

See? I’m really sensitive.

So when a client said to me the other day, “I don’t love this,” it bothered me.

It wasn’t the entire shoot they were complaining about, or even a big chunk of it. We did a dozen different shots. “I don’t love this” was directed at one in particular.

What can I say? They can’t all be winners. It wasn’t like it was unusable. It was fine. It just didn’t have the wow factor I’d managed to jam into the other images. So they just wanted to ensure I understood clearly: “I don’t love this.”

The problem, I have realized, is that my identity as a human is too closely intertwined with my identity as a photographer. Probably because this photographic practice has been part of my life since childhood. If you’ve always been “the guy with the camera” then what does it mean when you aren’t very good at using the damn thing? Or when, after all this time, you’re still not perfect?

That’s how the little dig felt, anyway. The client didn’t say I’m not moved by this picture. Maybe they meant to, and just wanted to be sure I knew for some reason? What I heard was even simpler: “You are bad.”

Am I wrong to find something sort of passive aggressive in the phrase? What’s to be gained from expressing mild but cutting displeasure? It’s a reasonable critique, so why am I so annoyed?

Because photographers are way too sensitive.

Aside from this short essay serving to blow off steam about something that irks me — irrationally, I know — it does make me wonder, what are people thinking when they say this kind of thing? When they go to dinner and order baked chicken and steamed broccoli, are they expecting to be moved to song? This was that. The client very specifically ordered, among other dishes, the photographic version of baked chicken and steamed broccoli. I cooked it perfectly and they remained unmoved. Should they ask to speak to the chef to let him know they were unimpressed?

It would be one thing if I’d seriously dropped the ball and the shot was unusable. But no, it’s just “Hey, I wanted to let you know, I don’t love this.”

They don’t want it fixed, they don’t want a discount1 They just wanted to make sure I knew they weren’t 100% thrilled. They were 7% mildly unimpressed.

But isn’t 93% still an A+?

The bigger question is, why does petty stuff like this bug me so much that I’m willing to rant an essay about it?

I think it’s because photographers are too sensitive. I don’t love this.

Post-pandemic, most of my travel is regional — drivable distances a few hours at a time. The nice thing about driving to a gig is you can load up the van with all the same junk you’d take across town. So you can have all the stuff you know you’ll need, the stuff you think you might need, and some other stuff just in case.

But when you’re boarding an aeroplane it isn’t quite so simple. Especially if you want to travel light. I like to do that, because it takes a string of tiny trips to get anywhere: home to parking, shuttle to terminal, bag check, through security and to the gate, from the gate to seat 5C, up and down to Dallas, seat 5C to baggage claim, hike a mile to the remote rideshare pickup spot, Uber 30 minutes at 125-miles-per-hour to the hotel, to the front desk, up to the room, finally arriving at the location where you’ll get out the camera. Then reverse it all when it’s time to go home. Each of those stages represents a confrontation with baggage, so I find less is most definitely more.

If you’re traveling with a crew, of course, you can divide a dozen cases and bags between a handful of people and keep the heavy lifting — as well as the baggage fees — to a minimum. But when I’m being a one-man-band, I don’t like to burden myself with more gear than I know I’ll need.

This desire to travel light conflicts with another of my closely held beliefs: the importance of backups. “Two is one and one is none,” is a mantra of mine. I believe it wholeheartedly, just like I have faith in Murphy’s Law. I’m running a business here, so I carry two cameras because I want to get paid. If one camera breaks, I can keep working. Same goes for lenses, batteries, SD cards, strobes, triggers, cables, et al.

The secret is to ensure you can do the job even if the airline loses your bag. So when I fly, my carry-on is a smallish shoulder bag stuffed with the bare minimum necessary to do the job.

For this week’s trip to Dallas, that meant my shoulder bag held the following:

• 85mm lens2
• 55mm lens (in case the 85 was too tight for a location I hadn’t seen)
• five camera batteries (two in camera, three spares individually wrapped because I’m a rule follower)
• two monolight strobes3
• strobe bracket
• radio transmitter
• extra AA batteries for the transmitter
• gray card
• pen and paper
• phone charger
• USB-C cable
• four SD cards (2 in camera, 2 in bag)
• gaff tape (little wadded up roll, plus a few strips strategically adhered to the bag)
• ear buds
• lens cloth
• lip balm
• chewing gum (one stick, Big Red)
• Immodium pill (you never know)
• one packet Splenda (for coffee, because you never know)

Late additions to the above included a banana and a granola bar4 in case I didn’t get lunch, which I didn’t, so good thing.

The only reason I was able to travel light was because of the light. This particular client prefers natural light for their portraits. So I take strobes only in case I wind up working in a cave, which happens roughly one quarter of the time.

This is also the reason why I didn’t simply hire a Dallas-based assistant and rent their lights. Nine out of ten times that would’ve been the move, but given the very specific style this client prefers, I was willing to risk it.

I could’ve carried out the shoot, in a pinch, with nothing more than the camera and the lens. In the checked bags, though, there was more good stuff that I did end up using. A pop-up diffuser (roughly 5x7’) a pair of light stands, an arm to hold the diffuser, two Pony clamps, quarter- and half-CTO gels, an empty reusable grocery bag (to be filled with water bottles acquired on site for use as a sandbag) and a shoot-through umbrella. I used almost all this stuff.

After spending the afternoon of my scout day trying to find just the right spot, the plan was upended on the morning of the shoot when my client greeted me with every photographer’s favorite phrase: “Slight change of plans.”5

Turns out this change was no big deal. Interestingly, though, the area we’d scoped out was off limits, because the hotel was so desirable ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that they actually charged extra to take pictures in the atrium. (Even if, apparently, your company is renting several meeting rooms as part of a two-day conference.) Thankfully the corner in which they shoved us managed to be simultaneously out of the way while not so far from the meeting that subjects would get waylaid on their way to the spot.6 Best of all, though, the location was backlit with beautiful morning light. A natural edge and a bit of sparkle on the concrete, glass and fiddle leaf fig in the background.

All this backlight meant I needed a whole new key. A bounce could’ve worked in a pinch, but I went with an umbrella’d strobe straight through the diffuser for a soft key that still had direction. I handheld the second monolight for on-axis fill — my top secret tip for adding production value to any portrait. It was a bit of a handful, but it worked really nicely for a minimalist approach.

After all was said and done we did ten portraits in a quick little window and I managed to deliver a couple of crucial selects while in line to board the plane. I was even able to catch an earlier flight home. Not quite in time for dinner, but close.

Some part of my brain really enjoys the puzzle-like challenge of tackling logistics. Solving the riddle with some scrappy ingenuity (luggage as counterweight, for instance) and ultimately doing more with less. It’s something I’ve been trending toward in my portrait lighting for quite some time anyway, so having a practical reason to keep it simple amounts to an excuse to work in the way that I like.

Younger me relished the idea of a big production with a dozen different lights and a forest of C-stands manned by a flock of assistants. Middle-age me really likes the idea of self sufficiency, keeping it simple without compromising the results. This was a fun exercise in putting theory to the test in the real world and, blessedly, it meant the travel was not remotely the most challenging part of the job.

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I’ve got a foot in two worlds. I’m a photographer, but sometimes I’m also a client.

Photographers are my people. So it feels a bit gross when I find myself opposite them at the negotiating table.

It’s not an everyday occurrence, but I wouldn’t call it rare, either. When I hire a photographer to cover for me, for instance. Or when I reach out in my role as magazine writer to license someone’s images. In each case I have a budget, but it also benefits me for these photographers to receive the highest rates possible. Because what’s good for other photographers in the short term is good for me, a photographer, in the long term. It’s always nice when self-interest aligns with generosity.

Still, I often wish I could pay photographers more.

When I hire someone to photograph on my behalf — a second shooter at a corporate event, perhaps, or a portrait session for a client who needs a particular date when I’m already booked — I pay that photographer a reasonable rate and mark it up (to account for my role in the process, now limited to pre- and post- production). It does me no good in the long run to pay a photographer an unsustainable rate, because we have a symbiotic relationship. I need their help, so I want to ensure they earn enough to continue working and — selfishly — keep helping me going forward.

I’m not suggesting this is altruism. It’s just that I have a vested interest in the long-term success of my cohort. And, selfishly, it seems like good business to ensure the people you rely on earn enough to continue being reliable. Call me a socialist, I guess?

When it arises, I take the opportunity to increase the fees of the photographers with whom I work. (Did it just yesterday, in fact.) When I get more, they get more. I don’t like the idea of taking advantage of anyone, but especially not photographers. Because they’re my people.

I periodically reach out to photographers with good news: “We’d like to profile you in a magazine.” Twenty years ago, that request included news of a decent payday, too. It was good news followed by better news.

But in the intervening years, as magazines have dwindled, the usage fees for the ones that remain have declined. Significantly. Which means the conversation has become slightly less exciting and, because photographers are increasingly wary of being taken advantage of, puts them mildly on the defensive. I find myself in the position of a client offering a photographer too little money. Not “too little” as in I’m keeping more for myself. “Too little” as in, there simply isn’t more available. The market, it seems, has recalibrated.

I’m not sure most folks understand quite how thin the margins in publishing are these days. (Or maybe you do since you haven’t bought a magazine in five years.) A 100-page publication that had 35 pages of ads in 2015 might now have five. And, given that advertisers spend most of their money on data-rich digital spends, those five print ads don’t garner the fees they once did. Fundamentally, anyone who was paid for anything in a magazine ten years ago is now paid significantly less for the same work.

In actual dollars, when it comes to the publishers with which I have experience, you used to be paid…

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Doesn’t a working photographer need the newest best thing? Sometimes. But not all the time.

In my case, I acquired a new version — well, a used version, but new to me — of the camera I’ve been shooting primarily since 2019. It’s a Sony A7R3. And it’s a solid two generations behind the state of the art. About to be three. Ancient, by professional standards.

This one was a good deal, and that contributed to the equation. It is in mint condition, barely used in fact with only 1500-some shots on it. (For reference, I used it on a shoot last week and now it has 3,000-some shots on it. And it will replace a body with 240,000 frames on it, and usurp another with about 150,000 frames on it. That’s the one I still think of as “new” but now it’ll be the old one and the old one will be a goner.) And it cost just over $1,000.

Why would I do such a thing?

Because I love the camera. I don’t love it like people love their Leicas and Fujis and whatnot. But I love that it seems to be reliable and dependable and it performs wonderfully for what I need it to do. I don’t have to think about it and I love that, too.

Second, I don’t need more resolution, or tighter pixel pitch, or giant-er image files. In fact, I actively don’t want giant image files. I don’t need 60 megapixels. I like the idea, in theory, but I don’t need to have it in reality.1

And C, I wanted to replace an aging and inevitably ailing camera without the cascading side effects that come with big file size upgrades.

There’s only one thing this camera doesn’t do that I wish it did, and it’s not a big deal. It doesn’t have a fully articulating LCD screen. I have a recurring photo shoot that often finds me outdoors, laying on my belly or hoisting the camera high overhead. The tilting screen is helpful for this, but it falls short at certain angles. This feature would be a “nice to have,” not a “must have.”

If I was going to upgrade, I’d make it count. A medium format camera, like a Fuji GFX or a Hassy X2D. But I am not looking to make that kind of investment at the moment. I need some nice, comfortable status quo.

Plus, there’s this: if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Wise words. I believe them, too. So I put my money where my mouth is.

Ultimately my camera is a hammer. I need it to work, to be comfortable in my hand, to be effective at its task, to allow me the freedom to not have to worry about its capabilities. There are plenty of reasons to justify an upgrade. But not every purchase must be a game changer. Sometimes a hammer is just a hammer. Sometimes the status quo works perfectly.

In my case, that status quo still managed to be an upgrade of sorts, because I effectively reset the clock on a camera with a quarter-million shutter releases to one that is all but brand new. And, depending on how much I get for it, when I sell the old camera this mild “upgrade” will have cost something in the neighborhood of a few hundred bucks. Not bad.

In short, this camera purchase was a practical choice. And an easy one. I’m being somewhat cautious and making choices with an eye toward prudence in the current business environment. My old hammer was about to break, so I bought a new one. That’s about it.

There’s another theory about camera upgrades that makes a lot of sense even though I don’t practice it. It goes like this:

You buy a new camera, the latest and the greatest. Let’s say it costs $3,000. You use it for a couple years and the manufacturer announces its replacement. The day it comes out, it costs $3,200, and the old one is now $2,800. You can sell it for, let’s say, $2,500. If you do that and buy the new new one, you’re out $700 and you’ve got the latest, greatest camera. It’s not a bad outlay, especially when amortized. If you always buy the new thing and immediately sell the old, after the first one you’ll only pay the cost difference between the new camera and what you can sell the old one for. It’s a great way to ensure you always have the newest camera.

There’s another, even better reason for this approach: It ensures you’re never left holding the bag on outdated, obsolete hardware with such insignificant monetary value you don’t even bother to sell it. After enough time, your closet is full of once-expensive cameras that are now, effectively, doorstops. It’s frustrating to see equipment you paid thousands for garner $150 on the open market. If you want to avoid that, try the “buy new and replace immediately” approach.

I’m not smart enough to learn that lesson, however. So I’ll keep buying practically obsolete cameras until they turn into worthless doorstops. If it happens with this newest purchase… Well, at least this camera will sit nicely on the shelf, surrounded by other obsolete devices I once loved. It’ll be in good company.

But one advertisement really caught my eye. I didn’t know they advertised for this sort of thing back then; I assumed this innovation came later.

It was an ad from the Goerz lens company, for which the headline read “Goerz Catalogue-cover Competition.”

“We want a new catalogue,” the advertisement began. “We want a photographic cover for it that will render it valuable to everyone interested in artistic photography, not only for its contents but also as to its appearance.”

Hey, maybe this is for me!

“But we want the very best only,” the ad went on, “and in order to obtain this, we have decided to make that cover the subject of a photographic competition, open to all, amateurs or professionals.”

The prize offered (aside from the publicity, of course, and the prestige of being published) was $300 cash.

That may not seem like very much money. But in 1905, according to my inflation calculator, that amounted to the 2026 equivalent of… wait for it… $10,000.

Can you imagine a business — any business — offering a $10,000 prize for a catalog-cover-photo-contest in 2026? No way.

I was ready to roast the Goerz Optical Works for this blatant predatory business practice. Turns out I must celebrate their generosity.1

I searched as best I could but found no evidence of the company’s subsequent catalogs having photographs on their covers. Perhaps they simply didn’t find anything that rendered it valuable enough to those interested in both the appearance and contents of artistic photography. Or maybe they just didn’t want to shell out the dough.

I did discover the interior of the company’s 1906 lens catalog did contain this stunner of a portrait that, apparently, was the winner of a Goerz professional photo competition. Whether Mr. J.H. Garo of Boston, MA collected his $300 is anyone’s guess. Does Mr. Garo’s name ring any bells? No? How about his apprentice, Yousuf Karsh.2

I don’t know if I was heartened by the discovery that the earliest examples of this scheme included actually meaningful compensation for the winning photographer, or disheartened to learn that this sort of thing is much less valued now. I suppose I’m comforted by the fact that the same things that motivate photographers to enter photo contests today were shared by our compatriots more than 120 years ago.

“Creativity capitalism.” The idea that the fastest way to make a buck in the arts is to convince a wannabe that the only thing standing between them and greatness is you and your nominal fee.

Regarding the Goerz contest, I do wish I knew how it all panned out. Was that $300/$10,000 a pie-in-the-sky, never-gonna-happen ploy designed to attract photographers far and wide for a prize with no actual payout? Or was it true, and evidence of how far the value of photography has fallen in the century since the medium was really coming into its own? I’m not sure which would be worse.

I haven’t entered many contests myself. I recall submitting to Communication Arts in my youth. Surely there have been others. But it’s not something I’ve ever been terribly interested in. Maybe I would be if I was a better photographer, the kind whose work wins contests.

I have been asked to judge a few photography competitions over the years. It’s surprisingly challenging. You feel pressure to come up with a reason for why you like what you like. But if the instructions are limited to “choose your favorite” well then that’s a real task. Do you reward excellent technique? Creativity? Uniqueness? Something else entirely?

Here, try it yourself. Which of these three photographs is best?

Is it the Eggleston, the Prince or the Leiter? Whatever your answer, I can’t prove you wrong (or right, for that matter). Because there’s no accounting for taste.

You like what you like, and maybe you’ll like something different tomorrow. This applies even if you’re judging a photo contest.

If I were smarter, and more cynical and profit-driven, I’d be telling you all about photo contests as a sort of sideways sales pitch for the first ever Art + Math photo contest! But alas, no such thing. No sales pitch, and clearly no profit.

I probably should start a photo contest, because it’s certainly a demonstrably profitable way to pay the bills. Publications and galleries and organizations host these contests all the time. For the most part, I see nothing wrong with a for-profit contest — or what I’ll call “creativity capitalism.” Nobody’s required to enter, and if the winner gets actual prizes and prestige, what’s the harm?

In one particular type of contest, the harm is in the form of a rights grab. I’ve encountered many organizations using photo contests as a way to get around hiring a professional for their photography needs. It’s diabolical, frankly.

Let’s say you run an organization dedicated to the preservation of architecture in a major American city. You need photography for your website and social media. You could hire a professional, sure. Or you could pick literally any dollar amount — let’s call it $500 — and offer that as the grand prize in the first ever “Major American City Architecture Appreciation Photo Contest.” Every entrant signs over full usage rights to their photo, and at no cost to your organization (beyond the $500 prize and the marketing of the contest) you get a stack of entries to use as you see fit. It’s the perfect solution if you don’t want to do any work and don’t want to pay a photographer. You won’t get the benefits of hiring a pro, but with enough entrants there are bound to be some decent shots. Infinite monkeys and all.

So a photo contest it is. And now, for $500, you’ve got your photography needs covered. Everybody wins. Well, almost everybody.

I work with a business publication that hosts networking events. They’ve become so popular that these events have actually surpassed the publication itself in terms of profitability. Now the events that were once a side hustle actively support the publication. The tail wagging the dog, as it were.

The same thing seems to be true for many photo contests. If a publication or a gallery or an arts organization holds a photo contest as a way to keep the lights on, it may feel a little icky (so much of “creativity capitalism” does) but where’s the harm? I saw someone refer to these contests as scams, but I don’t see it. If you don’t want to pay $20 to enter, don’t. As long as they aren’t stealing your rights, what’s the problem?

Some photo contests (and painting contests, writing contests, et al) charge entry fees not for profit motives but to cover costs of hosting the contest, or even simply as social engineering. If you’re paying a judge a stipend, or if the goal of the contest is ultimately marketing outreach, that funding has to come from somewhere. And if you don’t want literally everybody who sees the contest to enter it — a logistical and clerical nightmare — then a nominal entry fee is a great way to select for those entrants serious enough about their work to put a little money where their mouth is. No harm, no foul.

All this talk of profit has me reconsidering my photo contest idea. The problem for the entrant, of course, is that there’s some risk to entry. So I’ve got a solution: Send me $35 and a picture you like, and I’ll tell you it’s great and name it an official “Art + Math Photo Contest Award Winner.” I’ll even publish it or something? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maybe I’ll have some ribbons printed up. For sure there’ll be a logo you can use on socials. What a brilliant idea! And all for the low low price of just $35. Hell, make it $50 and I’ll call it the Palme d’Or. In fact, for $100 you can tell me what to name it. For that matter, at the $250 donation level I’ll name the award after you! Ain’t capitalism grand?

I’m starting to see why galleries and publications and clubs hold photo contests.

Maybe I’ll publish a “Best of Art + Math Photography Annual 2026,” which should sound familiar to anyone who entered (and, surprise surprise, managed to win the Best of College Photographers annual competition.1 As a winner, of course you’ll want to buy the commemorative book containing your name and photograph. A fine leatherette edition can be yours for… let’s call it $65. Add a slipcase for another $30. Think of the prestige!

I’m really onto something here. Step one: photo contest. Step two: profit!