Professional photography expanded under conditions of limited access, high risk, and irreversible failure. Those conditions no longer define most photographic tasks. As they collapsed, professional involvement narrowed to a much smaller set of requirements. What remains is a persistent mismatch between task complexity and professional scale.
In most cases, photography does not require a profession. Not because image quality suddenly improved, and not because people became better photographers overnight. It does not require a profession because the tasks themselves rarely contain requirements that justify professional involvement in the first place. What looks like a market shift is better understood as a delayed correction. The barrier to entry stayed high long after the operational necessity disappeared. For decades, professional photography functioned as a form of risk control. When risk collapsed, the footprint of the profession collapsed with it.
This situation is often framed as a crisis of professional photography, as if something valuable were being taken away. That framing misses the underlying mechanism. What is disappearing is not the profession, but its historically inflated presence. Professional photography occupied far more space than the tasks actually required. That excess went largely unnoticed because access, rather than necessity, defined who could produce acceptable results. The profession did not shrink because it failed. It shrank because the mismatch between task requirements and professional scale finally became visible.
The Barrier of Friction
Photography looked professional not because the problems were inherently complex, but because access was constrained. Expensive equipment, limited circulation of technical knowledge, closed professional environments, and the absence of immediate feedback created a high entry barrier. That barrier exceeded what most assignments truly demanded. Professional involvement appeared mandatory because alternatives simply did not exist. In many cases, professionalism functioned as a proxy for access rather than expertise.
Complexity played a very specific role in this structure. It functioned as a gate. It regulated who could enter, not how well problems were solved. Most assignments passed through this gate not because they required professional thinking, but because there was no other path to a usable result. Difficulty protected access points. It did not guarantee better decisions, stronger images, or deeper understanding. The barrier did not raise outcomes. It raised prices.
The decisive shift arrived with computational photography. Decisions that once depended on experience with light, exposure, timing, and control were offloaded to software. Auto exposure systems, tracking autofocus, stabilization, HDR pipelines, computational denoising, and instant feedback collapsed entire categories of technical risk. Cameras stopped acting as obstacles. Photography as a language did not become simpler, but the technical filter that masked professional redundancy in most tasks disappeared. What had looked like expertise was often just friction.
From Insurance to Commodity
Historically, professional photography sold insurance. Failure carried a real price. A missed exposure meant lost material. A technical mistake meant lost time, lost trust, and lost money. Today, instant review, endless reshoots, forgiving post-production pipelines, and computational correction have turned failure into a rounding error. The cost of failure approached zero. Removing risk did not improve results. It removed the need to decide early. Where professional practice functioned as failure insurance, that insurance lost its value.
This pattern is not unique to photography. Typing used to be a profession for the same reason photography did. Not because writing required specialists, but because mistakes were costly and hard to undo. Speed, accuracy, and irreversibility created a professional layer. Once keyboards, undo, and basic automation made failure cheap, typing stopped being a profession and became an operational skill. Secretarial roles did not vanish, but narrowed. Voice input continues the same process. What disappears is not competence, but the need for a professional intermediary.
A single successful outcome no longer signals method or practice. It does not need to. One-off results are sufficient for the majority of assignments. A photograph can succeed without revealing how it was made or whether it can be made again. A one-off result can win attention, even awards. It cannot be priced as a method. Method becomes irrelevant when repetition is not required.
Outcome vs. Method
The attention economy reinforces this shift. Images are consumed quickly, on small screens, inside constant streams of distraction. Excess quality rarely survives the channel. High-end refinement flattens out under compression, scale, and speed. This is not a creative stance. It is a distribution constraint. "Good enough" outcompetes "perfect" because the medium rewards adequacy over distinction. Professional work does not become worse in this environment. It becomes harder to distinguish.
Professional relevance begins where deliverables and consistency matter. Clients pay for outcomes delivered on time, under constraints, at a predictable level. Briefs, deadlines, revisions, coverage, matching a campaign look, maintaining continuity across shoots — that demand exists. It is real. It is also narrow. Most assignments do not require repeatability. Without that requirement, professional involvement becomes unnecessary.
The culinary analogy holds without metaphor. Most meals never required a chef. They only appeared to because recipes, tools, and techniques were inaccessible. Once access became widespread, professional necessity contracted to its actual scope. Cooking did not collapse. It reorganized. Photography followed the same trajectory. Most photographic tasks were never professional problems. They were access problems.
Taste followed a similar path. Algorithms, AI tools, filters, presets, and ready-made looks now supply curated taste. This is not taste development. It is a menu selection optimized for reaction. Presets, filters, and AI "looks" turned taste into a dropdown. Visual echo chambers reinforce what performs inside a given bubble. Personal taste becomes optional when socially or algorithmically validated outcomes are preselected and amplified.
The industry continues to sell complexity because its business model depends on complexity. Schools, certifications, status markers, and process-heavy narratives formed a single structure. This is not a conspiracy and not a mistake. It is inertia. Incentives did not change as fast as tools. Complexity keeps getting marketed because incentives still pay for complexity, even after the barriers stopped performing their original function. This inertia explains why the subject still provokes anger. The system continues to sell what no longer regulates access.
The Identity Trap
What makes this shift difficult to accept is not economics, but identity. Years of learning, expensive equipment, and professional discipline were treated as proof of necessity. For many, they became a substitute for market relevance. When access collapsed, so did that guarantee. What remained was not expertise under threat, but an identity built on barriers that no longer regulate entry.
Professional photography is not disappearing. It remains where it is necessary. Everywhere else, photography returns to the category it always belonged to: tasks that were never professional problems by nature, only by restriction.
39 Comments
You've put into organized thought concepts I've been pondering for many years. Whether or not you studied micro-economics, you're implemented its tenants skillfully.
You’re right. I have a degree in economics, so combining business thinking with formal art training feels natural.
Well put.
Having recently taken part in a camera club tutorial by a professional wedding photographer, most club members started off with little clue as to how to arrange members of the average public, for the best photographic results.
The difference between a profession and a union is that a profession gains strength by excluding the masses, and a union gains strength by embracing the masses.
Mobile phone cameras are a tool of the union, in the hands of a professional one can become a precision instrument.
Strange opinion, I retired from exec portraiture in Toronto after 45 years and was astounded at the amount of requests for me to come back to work as new photographers and AI were not up to the job and the images produced were over processed. Just like this site now, it is not about photography it is about tech and AI. Glad I still have a darkroom to connect with what I love. Portraits are about people and gaining their trust, for example the first thing I do when a person comes in for a photo i say "you look prepared this will be a great session" immediately they are at ease and enjoy the experience. You cant do that with AI. We need a symbol like copyright that says this image is AI and people will know it is not real.
Your definition of a photographer and the tasks they are responsible for is quite narrow. You ignore the business and management responsibilities that are crucial to success. The purely mechanical tasks of lighting, exposure and camera operation are a tiny fraction of a professional workload. Any business operating beyond the scope of a sole proprietor delegates those functions to assistants.
AI and auto exposure may reduce image capture risks. But they don't find and cultivate new clients, develop create concepts, plan shoots, handle transportation logistics, manage schedules or build relationships. Those tasks are 99% of a photography business.
You’re describing the business side of running a photography operation. Those principles are largely the same in any industry. I’m referring to the profession, the competencies involved in camera-based image-making.
Without the business side there is no profession. A professional is someone who is paid to do a task. By definition, any profession is about being compensated for one's work. Someone producing images, even astounding ones, who is not getting paid is not practicing a profession, they're enjoying a hobby.
Yes.
Read the three books by Ansel Adams: The Camera, The Negative, The Print; and tell me again how a photograph was made without professional expertise. Alvin... you appear to have a love of writing more than a love of photography. I feel a cloud coming over an otherwise sunny spring afternoon after reading your articles. I read them because they’re something other than gear reviews. But every argument you make seems to strip photography of its wonder and beauty, while reducing it to an esoteric riddle.
Spot on Ed.
Adams’ books describe a time when technical control was the main barrier. My point is that this is no longer the case. The question isn’t whether expertise existed, but where it is still actually needed today.
If the question isn't whether expertise existed, I certainly misunderstood your article. Not for the first time, either. You said: "Photography looked professional not because the problems were inherently complex, but because access was constrained.... In many cases, professionalism functioned as a proxy for access rather than expertise."
If Ansel Adams's book on printing is not sufficiently complex, I don't know what is. Exercising complete control over the finished print required vastly more experience than simply following a simple recipe, which produces someone else's idea of what the result should be (like today's presets). And in many ways, nothing has changed. There is no substitute for experience... ever. An inkjet printer relieves me of having to understand chemistry, but it does not tell me where to dodge and burn a photo. Neither does software for that matter; it only gives me the tools. Presets are another person's rendering of a scene, not mine. There's an incredibly huge amount of bad photography, despite computational and automated technology, because technology in the hands of an inexperienced person can't rescue a poorly conceived image. A professional in any era will have complete control of his tools for superior results, with results unique to that artist.
The example you describe reflects the highest level of control, not the majority of photographic tasks.
The point isn’t that expertise has no value, but that it is no longer required in most cases.
In my opinion, that is simply not true. You're marginalizing photography, even going so far as to imply that the majority of tasks that Ansel Adams performed were the equivalent of shooting a Brownie camera. That's absurd. It fails to understand the interconnection between seeing, creating the negative (or digital file), and making a print. There's a lot I do not understand about his Zone System, but enough to appreciate that darkroom chemistry and limitations of printing dictated his exposure and thinking from the start. One task could not be separated from another. They were arguably more complicated tasks in 1950, but the objectives are still at the root of good photography today... just different tools. That's why I can read Adams' books and learn a great deal about digital photography. Expertise matters greatly to a professional or serious photographer. Even making mistakes gives someone valuable experience. And it can't be replaced by a machine.
(I mixed up the placement. My reply is below.)
My father's 1936 high school yearbook. The Tessar Formula mentioned in the last paragraph, or a formula of any kind, would probably be enough to discourage about everyone today from joining a camera club. Yes, we need to treat photography as a profession (at least for those who call themselves photographers), regardless of its relative complexity.
The way this article reads like AI slop, I'm not even sure he likes writing. It seems to me what he really likes is getting paid for "producing" (notice I did not say "creating") content that will result in engagement and clicks.
Maybe he's writing in a different language and it's the (AI?) translation that makes it read this way? Maybe not.
I'm aware of the fact that English is not Alvin's native language. So there could conceivably be some issues because of translation. But I doubt it. I also doubt AI is a factor. I suspect his mind works differently than mine. His background in business and economics drives an analytical approach... to the point of over thinking things, as some people have suggested. Couple that with a philosophical framework which tries to connect a lot of seemingly unrelated subjects, and we get articles which are confusing. Maybe that's the point too. I don't like being confused, don't care much for ambiguity, and I try to make my point perfectly clear. Other people seem to live in a perpetual state of mystery, getting pleasure from raising questions that have no answers. Questions that appear to antagonize or provoke, and for some authors, that's their intention. I call them academic arguments, and usually end up disappointed in myself for getting trapped in an endless loop of points and counter-points. I don't feel the need to analyze why I enjoy photography so much. Other people have to question or explain everything, and drive you nuts in the process.
That said, I admire Alvin and most Europeans who learn to speak multiple languages. Most Americans make a mess out of writing in English. With Alvin's articles, I can't really judge his motivation. I'm sure he enjoys writing because it's a natural outlet for the philosophical mind. I just need to learn to let go of trying to hammer out any sort of logical agreement, because our minds work differently. By the time we get through debating the article, I'm not even sure what we disagree about.
Thank you, Ed.
My first article was published in 2007, and since then, I have consistently used the Socratic method. My texts have never been about giving the right answers, but about raising the important questions worth asking. Whether you agree or not is secondary; what matters is that it makes you think. The only correct answer is the one you arrive at yourself, even if it turns out to be “not about you.”
The motivation behind my writing is very practical. These public reflections help me clarify my own position and refine the precision of my formulations. It is always a two-way process, and one I value highly.
Like so many other "professions" that still exist despite so many people participating in hobbies that are "profession adjacent" (private pilots, hobby carpenters, home cooks, et al), photography endures even though literally every person on earth now has a camera in their pocket. The reason? Quite simple, dedication and talent of those who consider it a profession. Everybody else simply wants to take snapshots, they don't want to commit themselves to learning the craft or the science behind it, and they may very well not be born with the eye needed to see and create at an elevated level.
Whist I take the author's points, I think he mistakes the full meaning of 'professional'. It has nothing to do with technical expertise or creativity and all to do with the simple fact that professionals run a business, in this case, based on one aspect of photography or another. Professional = 'makes money out of it' in a disciplined manner.
Businesses, in general, are happy to pay good money to reliably get images that are relevant to their needs. On time and to a budget. That's a professional - many skill sets beyond camera operation.
A common mistake is treating business skills as interchangeable with photographic skills. If you stop shooting and start generating images on a computer, the business logic doesn’t change; you simply remove the camera and the studio.
That’s why I isolate only the 10–15% of the process that depends on photographic skills, not the remaining 85–90% that belongs to general entrepreneurship.
Competency at producing images is not what defines a profession, though. A profession is defined by what someone is willing to pay another to use their competency. Profession, by definition, IS the business side of it whether one is talking about producing images, treating illnesses, repairing automobiles, or arguing cases before a court. What makes any of those activities a profession is the fact that the practitioner of the activity is being compensated for doing it.
That’s exactly why the article exists.
Many activities that used to define the profession are becoming unnecessary because the result can now be achieved without a photographer.
Speak to a wedding photographer and ask them what missed shots and technical failure does at a wedding. Definitely no opportunity to reshoot that.
The wedding case is exactly where professional involvement still makes sense, for now.
This is a specific situation, not the majority of photographic tasks.
By the way, on our local market, key wedding shots are often separated from the event and staged. This reduces the “no second chance” condition.
Missed shots and technical failure pervade every genre of photography. Sports, street, even landscapes are not perfectly recurring. Try getting the great lighting back that you missed. Try getting a busy executive to come back and sit for a portrait after failing to capture the honest personality of that person on your first try. And try getting the wedding party back together the next day after realizing you messed up those formal photos, or could have posed them differently had you been a little more experienced. Camera gear will probably never tell you when you've made a bad composition. There are numerous details to being a professional that far exceed simple camera settings or technology. Experience gained from years and decades of work... then, now, and forever will be a valued professional attribute.
Experience gained over years and decades only matters when it includes self-analysis and development. Routine should not be mistaken for growth. Without that, experience means very little.
Theoretically true but irrelevant. It's inconceivable to me that anyone would seriously work at photography for a significant amount of time, say 10, 20 or 30 years without reflection, thought, growth, or change in some manner. It's like the difference between intelligence and wisdom. We spend most of our lives getting smarter, and eventually, probably without even realizing it, we become wiser. That's experience, and it means a lot.
Alvin.. i get it, AI is here, it can be involved in probably every proffession. In this case, it can maybe be used as a tool to help a person that does not have any knowledge about photography, or has never held a proffesional camera gear in hands. But you just can not say or write things like this, as i believe you are an expirienced person. Maybe my 6 year old son would look at the world like you write here.
Photography is one of the rare proffesions that combine science and art, so yes the scienece and technology has improoved much, but what matters is the part tha you never mentioned - an that is pure humanity, bro. A person that makea the photo. The way that his mind works, and eyes see, and the wait for the right momemt when he clicks on that shutter button. That moment that he captured is pure gold. It can be some tears of joy at the wedding, or on the other hand tears of grief or anger in the middle of a protest, or a specific look in someones eyes, a goal celebration, love between mother and her child, ... man, i can go on and on.. but the point is, that action, and that documentary aspect of capturing the true emotion can never be replaced by an AI. AI is just a step, a moment behind, it can create an ok alternative of how would people look in the spesific occasion, but it must learn from the original photographs that people took, how to do finish the task.
Ai has a place in photography, but in some other place, maybe some comercial stuff, that does not envolve true emotions.
So, Alvin, buddy, proffessional photographers were here long before you and i, an the AI, and i am sure that the need for their work will continue to exist.
Stefan
I’m not arguing against emotion or human presence. Those moments are real and valuable. But they no longer automatically require a professional photographer to capture them. That requirement has narrowed.
And if photography is treated as art, the question shifts again.
How deeply do we actually understand art?
Can we distinguish cubism from abstract expressionism? Do we understand Caravaggio’s use of light as clearly as we understand “Rembrandt lighting”?
A picture can be made with a narrowing of professional skills, to the point of a machine driven by AI being able to manufacturer a picture. No argument there. And technology is getting better. If I had understood that to be your main focus of the article, I could have saved a few words.
But it's one thing to say that photography during its entire history never demanded exceptional skill and experience, making it easy for unskilled camera operators of today to essentially produce the same results with modern technology. The work of the old 20th century masters of photography, as I understood you to say, wasn't that difficult to begin with.
However, that's entirely different than saying the work of the old masters was difficult, but modern technology has overcome all that human skill, experience and dependence on understanding chemistry to produce comparable results. An incredible feat of engineering. And that process serves a purpose, although I would argue the result is more akin to computer graphics than photography.
Of course technology can manufacture a picture without much human input. And it's equally true that commercial advertising will use that approach because it's far cheaper to make a picture with text inputs than hire a photographer. We've already witnessed that evolution of services with the use of stock photography to replace authentic photography. It really frustrates me to no end when I call on local businesses to propose photography of their actual employees doing real work in their real place of business. The answer is nearly always no... their people will quit and be replaced eventually making it outdated, it costs too much, they've done fine without it, etc., etc., etc. I simply can't fathom how a business can deceive the viewer in that manner and feel good about it. That's the world we live in. And so, yes, the demand for professional photographer's work is shrinking, and the capabilities of machines are increasing. But I call that computer graphics, a product meeting the needs of graphic design, and purchased for low cost and convenience, not authenticity for which photography has always been known.
Technology did not replace photography because photography was easy, but because it found a home where authenticity doesn't matter. I suspect there will always be a place for both. A machine or unskilled camera operator can make a picture of a person, but will most likely fail at capturing the real authentic essence of me. No doubt a machine can make a picture of the Empire State Building in NY, and there will be plenty of businesses happy to save some money making one with AI, but photography serves a purpose by capturing real moments by real people... and there will always be a place for that too, even for professionals. Yes, photography can, and should be, treated as a profession for what it uniquely offers, no matter what else comes along down the road.
Treating photography as art is another deep rabbit hole. But since you raised the subject....
In the book called "Mona's Eyes," the little girl Mona in the story is brought to the Beaubourg Museum in Paris by her grandfather where they stand contemplating a metal bottle rack, attributed to the artist Marcel Duchamp. But it wasn't even made by the artist himself. It was apparently bought from a store. So.... asks the little girl: "Is it a work of art?"
Grandpa answers: "I don't know if it's a work of art. But I do know that, here, right now, it becomes one in our eyes." I myself would not have been so kind. Grandfather went on to say that "It's the viewer who makes the paintings." In that context, I might accept his first statement. "The child smiled. She loved the statement, thinking that she herself, a mere little girl, was playing a crucial role every time she went to a museum; thanks to her, the paintings, sculptures, photographs, and drawings kept inside the museums lit up, came to life."
So when does an object become a work of art? I don't recall that Marcel Duchamp ever answered the question directly. He seemed more intent on "blowing apart the classical image of art" as the book states. Kind of like yourself, Alvin, in some way, more interested in provoking the reader or viewer to the extent of outrage, than finding agreement from an answer. And we're presented with these questions about art... "Must it imitate something in nature? Or, on the contrary, differentiate itself from nature? Is a mere signature enough? Or that it be placed in a gallery? Does work need to have gone into it?" Criteria might never end. The question obviously hasn't resolved itself since Duchamp's installation of the bottle rack in 1914. No doubt, AI will only exasperate those who believe a human must be the driving force behind the creative endeavor. We can distinguish one form or genre from another, but that will never answer the question: "Is it Art?"
Ed, I see the consistency of your position and your sense of photography as a coherent whole. I respect that. I do not question the integrity of the practice from conception to a print on the wall. It is one continuous act.
As for art, the question remains open, but I have a framework for myself. Everything I create, in the studio or outside it, is my work with a clear intention to become an art object. It becomes art when it gains recognition, when that intention begins to be recognized from outside. So for me, the answer to the question “What is art?” is simple: what is recognized, sooner or later.
This is still a question I am exploring. It interests me as an artist, as a writer, and as someone who sees in art both art and business, not only grant-based support.
Only one little correction. I make prints to be held, touched and explored. Much smaller than wall art. Maybe one out of thirty prints that I make ends up on a customer wall. The rest are just for me. A seemingly trivial point, but gets to the coherent whole that you speak of. Preserving boxes of prints, and there aren't as many as you might think, is having a window into my life. Sort of like a visual diary. I don't know that it's art. My images might be considered no more than glorified snapshots. That isn't really important to me. Photography is the way I see the world, and paper is the manner in which it is preserved.
Could it be so true that the actual phenomenon might create photography's own survival cycle?
When there is loss of accountability and respect for the craft, doesn’t originality risk to trend down, become flat and ambition less? It becomes easy to repeat someone’s work or trend and simply alter it to appear being competent and AI reinforce that idea as a practical example. But then we are humans and our perception is somatic even if most of us don’t realize it. That’s when someone thinks out of the box and reintroduces a challenge. That’s the cycle.
Everyone has the same tools but only one person needs to use them differently to actually attract attention. Filtering the noise can be key to success and with it the opportunity to charge much more than the average. In reality it’s the same photographic effort but under a different perspective. I think this still exists. For example you can shoot video and stills, but can you be successful at both? I would say rarely. Because you dilute yourself, you can be good at both but most likely alternatively. In the end more technical tools availability to all is not proof of maturity. It’s more noise, more time processing how others do things differently. Being stuck with availability can be prison because it becomes the fluency, not the meaning
Friction is actually where meaning lives. And friction = choice
Thank you for a thoughtful comment.
You articulated the need for a new form of distinction very clearly. I’m currently finishing a text on this exact point, it should be out in May.
Your point about friction is important. When the technical floor rises, difference shifts. This is why it can’t be framed through Ansel Adams’s paradigm. The conditions have changed.
LOL, when i look at his insta account, completly agree, for this kind of photos you Need no photog. The AI makes a better Job. When we diskuss on this base, no problem for me!
Can you elaborate. I see a partial comment, I can't feel the depth of it.