Photography Is No Longer Photography. It Is A Socially-Shared Digital River Of Imagery. Part I. – A Closer Look At The Numbers Behind Professional Photography
March 25th, 2013 • Photo Theory, Photography
1 in every 2,000 people in the United States is now a professional photographer.
For the last couple years I’ve written down lots of notes with bits of information and thoughts I have about how the medium, process, and product, of “photography” is no longer what it use to be. That’s obvious of course to anyone involved in the medium for more than a couple years. But, I think very few people understand the scope of the change. Sort of like most of us don’t understand the scope of wealth in-equality in the United States.
According to the US Buearu of Labor Statistics there are a projected 144,750 professional photographers working in the United States in 2013 (based off of tax filings from 2010). For argument sake lets say that half of those ‘professional photographers’ are wedding, portrait, family, etc. localized photographers – so, 72,375. If you divide that by 50 states that = 1,450 localized (non-commercial/advertising, editorial, or fine arts) photographers in each state. Obviously some states like New York will have many more shooters than say Wyoming. Either way, that adds up to a lot of wedding shooters out there.
Now lets say that 25% of the total professional photographers out there are fine arts photographers (the MFA set) and the remaining 25% of shooters are commercial/advertising/editorial photographers. That = 36,188 for each category. Since my work over the last 7 years was commercially focused I’ll break that down further. If you divide that number by our 50 states you get – 724 commercial/advertising photographers per state. That might not sound like a lot, but when you consider the types and volume of jobs available to the commercial marketplace that number seems fairly high to me. Using my home state of MN as an example that number would mean that 1 in every 7,000 people in MN is a commercial advertising photographer.
Ok, great, but how does that play out in terms of jobs? Good question.
Again, using my home state of MN as a foundation for answering that questions here’s some more numbers to think about. For a number of reasons longer than I care to go into here – the Minneapolis/St. Paul commercial marketplace is the 4th largest advertising market in the US. In other words, we’re a huge economic and advertising market.
There are about 10 ‘big’ (in terms of revenue) advertising agencies based in Minneapolis. About 20 more big-ish agencies behind them, and we’ll say another 30 small-ish shops in town. Without boring you with a huge flood of numbers I’ll break down the available ‘jobs’ to commercial shooters in a less formalized way.
From my personal experience and relationships with art buyers at these agencies based in MSP each of the ‘big’ agencies calls in bids for anywhere from 20-60 good photo assignment ‘jobs’ per year. The mid-sized agencies maybe half that. And the little shops, for our purposes here we’ll say do 10 good shoots a year. So, lets add that all up.
On the high-side, our 10 ‘big’ agencies assign: 60 (jobs) x 10 (agencies) = 600 good commercial level ‘jobs’ per year.
Our mid-sized creative agencies assign: 30 (jobs) x 20 (agencies) = 600 good commercial level ‘jobs’ per year.
Our small creative agencies assign: 10 (jobs) x 30 (agencies) = 300 good commercial level ‘jobs’ per year.
So, our grand total of ‘good commercial level jobs’ at all creative agencies in MN (the 4th largest creative market in the US) = 1,500 – bam! Sounds great right? 1,500 big commercial jobs sounds great to me. However, we need to circle back to our number of commercial shooters based in MN, which = 724.
That means of the 724 commercial shooters based in MN (this number might seem high, but I’m personally aware of around 100 ‘commercial photographers’ based in MSP) there are 1,500 available ‘jobs’. (And this number is for sure high because I definitely over estimated the available jobs and these jobs aren’t just going to shooters based in our market, in fact, likely most of them are not going to shooters in our market.)
So, if the 1,500 commercial assignments available in our state were divided by the 724 commercial shooters based here each photographer would get 2 jobs per year. And again, we are the 4th largest advertising marketplace in the country. Getting 2 good jobs per year doesn’t sound like a very good business model to me.
Now to make matters worse lets apply those numbers to the 80/20 rule, which governs how the work is really spread out in our industry. What does that mean? It means that 20% of the shooters get 80% of the work, while 80% get the remaining 20% of the work. In MN 145 commercial shooters would then get 80% of the available work or 1,200 jobs. Which in converse would then also mean that 580 commercial photographers in MN get the remaining 300 jobs. Or 0.6 jobs… a half a job. Or in other words, no ‘good jobs’.
The conclusion is this:
In the state of Minnesota (the 4th largest advertising marketplace in the country) the top 20% or 145 commercial shooters based here each get and average of 8.2 high-level good paying commercial assignments per year. While the rest of the bottom 80% or 580 commercial shooters get an average of 0.6 high-level good paying commercial assignments per year. Or essentially nothing. So even if you’re a top shooter based here in MN you still get less than one good job per month. Which I can tell you via my personal relationships with many of the ‘top’ commercial shooters I know here is entirely accurate. In fact, the reality is much more so that a only a few dozen localized commercial shooters get most of the real work. And if you take Target out of the mix I can only think of less than 10 local commercial photographers who would survive as a business.
Ok, so what?
My point is this – (commercial) photography has become a bad business for simple economic reasons. There are now within the United States way too many available and capable high-level commercial photographers in relationship to the available number of corresponding commercial assignments. How this plays out in reality is that a few ‘named’ or essentially famous photographers get a majority of the work well the rest of everyone else fights it out for a job or few a year. Now that idea might seem sort of obvious. However, the underlying idea behind these numbers leads me to my second point. Which is, where this profession, business, medium, and art form has been headed for the last 10 years and where it’s going to keep heading…. (info. coming my next few posts).
Bottom line:
It’s supply and demand. There is a epic over supply of photographers for the returning demand of available work. It is really that simple.