Should You Become a Pro Photographer?

Making candlesticks when electricity came in

Should you become a professional photographer? This question has haunted me for two years. When I began Art + Math it was among the first ideas I jotted down. How would I advise a young person interested in a career in commercial photography?

I’m torn.

Ambivalence kept me from addressing the topic. I was never sure how to answer the question.

But I am now.

The question itself hides a nasty little implication. If you have to ask, something must be amiss.

I became a photographer at age 8. Dad built a darkroom not long after. I joined the yearbook, worked for the school newspaper, and studied photography in college and beyond at a respected (now defunct1) photography school. Degrees in hand, I got my first job as a photographer and maintained a side hustle interviewing amazing photographers for 20 years. I even taught photography — “commercial applications” — for a decade.

All of that is to say, I love photography. I am dedicated to photography. I am, through and through, a photographer.

So it pains me to say this.

Should you become a professional photographer? No, you probably shouldn’t.

How We Got Here

I recently wrote that photography is a terrible hobby. It was a tongue-in-cheek love letter to the medium. This is not that. If you think photography is a terrible hobby try making it your career. It is, unironically, becoming more difficult by the day.

The prospects for a professional photographer in 2025 are a fraction of those available when I graduated with the last of the darkroom-trained Gen-X-ers. The trend ever since has been clear and consistent.

It began in 2000. With the release of the Canon EOS D30, digital SLRs became affordable and good enough.2 Soon, a lot of “low hanging fruit” assignments disappeared. These were the jobs that didn’t require much expertise but went to professionals in the film era because clients wanted their pictures to be sharp and well exposed. All those assignments disappeared when clients could do sharp and well exposed themselves.

Next came the iPhone in 2007. These pocket supercomputers would become the primary portal through which we’d engage with every aspect of culture — from music (another upended industry) to movies (which became short clips made by children and the unemployed).

That one-two punch set the stage for the real culprit: social media. First Facebook implemented a program of enshittification to decimate publishing. Then in 2010 Instagram changed the calculus for how photographs are shared, viewed and, ultimately, valued. Authenticity (or its stylized approximation) usurped production value, and the pipeline required a lots of imagery as quickly as possible. A firehose of content, in fact.

It was a perfect storm. Photography was now commodified: more ubiquitous than ever, less valuable than ever. The law of supply and demand remains undefeated.