Ian Furniss Photography » Blog Archive

The Price We Pay

A couple of days ago I came across an advert, posted by a photographer, who was seeking an assistant/s to help him out with an up & coming photo shoot. Nothing unusual there, except the advertised rate for doing this was exactly $0. Now this isn’t the first time that this happened (won’t be the last either) and I seem to remember heated discussions around the net a while back about a similar thing where a well known photographer offered internships for the same $0 rate. The usual defence I heard in relation to that applies here also. “It’s valuable experience from a seasoned pro and you need to pay your dues if you want to succeed as well”. To that I say “Rubbish!”. I actually say a few other things as well but i’m keeping this one polite.

Despite that rather adamant standpoint I can certainly acknowledge there are times or situations where you might want to work for free (and experience is one of them) but the idea that this is an acceptable norm is where I start to take issue. I’ve heard it said many times that microstock is killing the stock photography market and i’d go along with that. No way am I going to sell my photos at 1p a time or even £1 a time when the cost of living is like it is. Only recently I heard great laughter surrounding a Greek man whose image is being used to advertise Turkish yoghurt and how this wouldn’t have happened if companies had been prepared to pay up and use professionals with all the relevant releases etc.

Then there’s the recent examples where photographers have posted images on Flickr and these have been taken without authorisation or payment. Photographers have been up in arms, protesting, screaming from the rooftops about how their rights have been abused! I can list more and different examples of similar cases but they all come down to the one thing, photographers quite rightly get upset when they do their work and don’t get paid for it.

Well, that being the case, why on earth are people still going around advertising positions for no pay and the industry sees it as par for the course?! It’s flat out wrong and 100% hypocritical!

As I mentioned before, there are times i’ll be quite happy to work for free such as for a friend or to do a favour for someone I know & like (i’m about to start producing a wedding album for gratis for that very reason), but the idea that not paying staff is an acceptable and normal way to go about things is something I just can’t get my head around. As photographers, can we really be surprised that the market takes advantage of us when even we take advantage of ourselves?