No Room for the Generalist Photographer

Two centuries of photography prove some pictures are timeless, but today photographers are forced to pick a lane. Or are we?

Johannes Brahms’ Sonata No. 1 vibrates from the speakers. Opus 38. I’m told it’s in E minor. Any unsuspecting passersby down below can surely hear it leaching out from these open windows.

His genre may have been classical, but that style sure as hell is Brahms.

The oldest known surviving photograph made with a camera is nearly 200 years old now. It’s a faded pewter plate housed in a massively thick, gold-gilded frame. The image is barely discernible.

I’ve viewed it firsthand at the Ransom Center down at the University of Texas in Austin.

To be honest, it’s wholly underwhelming. That is, unless you have a good handle on what you’re looking at and what it means to this thing we call photography.

The Wild West

I think about the early days of photography as the “rules” themselves were being written; the Wild West days of full-bore beta testing when the medium itself was akin to magic.

Whether or not those times were better isn’t for me to say, but one thing I certainly notice is that many pioneering photographers photographed, well… anything… everything.

The foundations of photography were laid down by the generalists; they had to be.

I’ve been to Point Lobos and I’ve been to Yosemite. Carmel-by-the-Sea is fine in summer.

These were the places of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, of Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange.

Those photographic giants seemed to be taking pictures of as many rocks as they did faces.

You’ll find pictures of Weston’s landscapes alongside his peppers and seashells. Ansel made photos of eggs. Cunningham's lilies occupy the same museum walls as her painterly nudes.

For them, photography was relatively new, and new technologies always find their natural level, eventually.

In light of these savage thoughts, I pose a question for us in our immensely vast photographic world of 2026: is there still a place for the generalist photographer?

The Rise of Genres

All things evolve. Refinements are made. Subsection upon subsection stack atop original ideas and technologies. When it comes to photography, evolution manifests in infinite ways. 

Most notably, we see how the fragmentation of the generalist approach to making photographs brought about the rise of photographic genres.

Genres are nothing new, especially in the world of art, visual or otherwise. For photographers, we like what we like and photograph what we like… usually.

In a strictly subjective sense, it could be argued that true expression through photography arises directly through enjoyment or, in some extreme cases, raw creative compulsion.

From this constantly morphing directional pull rose subcategories of a once globular medium.

Make a lot of photographs of the natural landscape? Boom. You’re a landscape photographer.

Take a lot of pictures of people? You’re a portrait photographer.

Find yourself stomping the pavement through the concrete jungle with your camera? Congratulations, you’re a street photographer.

And the beat goes on.

Whatever a photographer happens to have in front of their camera most often must be the type of photographer they are, yes? This is an enormously dangerous idea. It’s a quiet danger, and it’s slow and creeping, but it’s real. I’ve seen it.

I’ll say it now and I’ll say it as loud as a keystroke can speak: the easiest way for a photographer to lose interest in the craft they once loved is by thinking they have to shoot within the ring of a singular genre.

Photographic genres themselves are absolutely wonderful; they are self-chosen and wholly natural offshoots of a love that most photographers can’t verbalize. That’s why we make the pictures.

However, the trap opens when we feel as if our pictures must be made within a particular genre simply because that’s what we’ve done for so long.

This is not to say an absolute juggernaut of a wedding photographer should be expected to throw away a booming business because one morning they wake up feeling like photographing rocks in the moonlight.

As someone who cut their teeth covering weddings three lifetimes ago, I simply don’t know how you noble heroes do it. My hat is off to you all.

The point to be clamped onto is that you are allowed to make photographs of anything, everything, whatever you want, even if that goes against an established brand. 

For a broader exploration of working across photographic disciplines, The Well-Rounded Photographer: 8 Instructors Teach 8 Genres of Photography examines eight different genres through eight instructors.

How public you wish to make that deviation is wholly up to you. Big fires still catch from the smallest sparks.

Saturation… No, Not That Kind

Modern market saturation can make it feel nearly impossible to “be” a photographer. The reason: there are so, so, so many of us out in the world now.

It’s a weird sensation to be part of a profession, or an obsession, that has become so widespread among visual mediums.

A camera is a camera is a camera, and if the chisel chooses its stone, then it must be the same for photography. Right?

Yes? No?

Not every person with a brush is a painter, but anybody with a camera is a photographer. It’s an interesting thought.

High-grade digital cameras and lenses, at least from a standpoint of relative quality, ease of use, and affordability, are seemingly more attainable than ever.

My first DSLR was a Canon EOS 7D spitting a whopping 18 MP. I shot professionally with it for over three years. Today, my Sony a7R III packs 42.4 MP along with more technological wonders than I could have imagined 16 years ago.

I paid roughly the same price for both cameras. Now, even my Sony is considered antiquated by some lofty standards.

Cameras that might have been the cream of the photo-making crop in terms of professional accoutrements a dozen years prior now pale next to even “consumer-grade” systems.

I suppose these things happen, but I see far over the horizon into the light and the darkness of such accessibility. A camera in every hand lends itself to marvelous and terrifying potentials. 

In whichever direction, the ultimate outcome ends with the generalist choosing where to presumably nest their photography for all time.

We are left with a genre to pick, a brand to tailor, and a course to choose out of sheer need for survival.

In this wide world of photography we occupy, is there any room left for the photographer who shoots everything? I know there used to be, but these days the answer is less definable.

Is that even the question we should be asking? Or perhaps a more accurate query is whether or not the generalist photographer has evolved into the “hobbyist” photographer?

The craft is the same, the tools are the same, but somehow the title has morphed into something less than professional.

If a photographer shoots a real estate listing on Monday, a maternity session on Tuesday, then wraps the week at the base of a local waterfall on Friday, are they a professional generalist, or are they a commercial photographer who dabbles in portraits?

You Are Unique, Just Like Everybody Else

There’s something to be said about being first. One could argue that functioning as an originator, albeit imperfect, counts as much as being a more efficient practitioner later.

Given enough time, what was once fresh and new can become stagnant and ordinary. This is a problem faced by many artists and creative types, especially photographers.

Perhaps that’s what lies at the heart of the question concerning the uncertain place generalists find themselves in today: the necessity of being viewed as unique, or at least presenting yourself as such.

Be it through sheer luck or earnest effort, arriving first in line at the onset of any artistic medium often proves beneficial, at least in the long run. 

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that each new idea will start a movement, yet a select few can when gifted enough time to stew. Van Gogh might have an opinion on this.

There was a time when a stable, visible, reproducible photograph was a feat unto itself, subject matter be damned. In the beginning, everyone was a generalist because being a generalist was all there was; uniqueness baked into every plate, every frame a new experience because the act of making a photo was precisely that: new.

Have some of us lost sight of that childlike joy in making pictures?

Generally Speaking

Brahms is winding down. It’s raining now, but the windows are still open. The music creeps between those early-morning drops.

I am still a generalist photographer. There’s nothing else I feel right being because that’s how I started. 

My earliest photographs weren’t made because I was dying to work, and they weren’t born from some injected desire to fit into a category, not at first anyway. I just felt the music in everything around me, and a camera felt right for sharing what I felt with other people. 

Nothing else mattered. I suspect some among you feel the same.

Regardless of where you happen to be in your own photographic trip through life and no matter how long you may have been on your particular road, I urge you to allow yourself to become a generalist again, if only briefly. 

It doesn’t matter if you’re a career professional or simply enjoy making pictures with your phone.

Lean into those hard corners. Remember to reserve some fuel for what you truly enjoy from time to time. It’s why most of us started and why many of us continue to sling these cameras.

There’s still room.