Have you ever felt like you’re trying to play a kazoo, whilst banging cymbals between your knees, a tambourine under your armpit, and hitting a bass drum on your back with a string attached to your foot? Me too! Metaphorically anyway. The demands on a professional photographer today are multiple in number and skills. They also have no respect for each other, often coming all at once, like a line of buses after a long wait in the cold.

Most of us have accepted this reality, one that has become even more real since the advent of digital capture. Digital workflow is rarely a one person practice. However, many photographers are now strapping on even more instruments to their overloaded bodies. Again I am speaking metaphorically.

Photographers are now making podcasts (guilty), vodcasts (not guilty), becoming publishers of their own work and the work of others (once guilty) and writing books (very guilty). This makes sense to the photographer fully engaged with the medium with time on their hands between commissions and personal work. It also makes sense to anyone looking to evolve their photographic practice and storytelling in different forms for both creative and financial return. There are also a number of photographers from the commissioned environment looking to get into teaching. Perhaps more than ever before in my experience.

All of this makes sense but such multi-tasking requires a high level of transferable skills and excellent time management. This in turn requires a well developed understanding of priorities and self reliance.

Like any good one-man-band there is no point in knowing the tune if you can’t play it. Hitting, blowing and shaking might indicate willingness but it doesn’t evidence professionalism. Mastering more than one skill takes time but it also takes awareness. An awareness of our need to learn new things and accept when we are not very good at them!

The singer Leo Sayer famously announced that he was a one-man-band “Nobody knows nor understands, is there anyone out there wanna lend me a hand?” Well Leo, there is but the responsibility is always going to rest with the player not the song. It is up to you decide if you can handle all the instruments at one time or if you need to look out for some fellow band members.

Dr.Grant Scott
After fifteen years art directing photography books and magazines such as Elle and Tatler, Scott began to work as a photographer for a number of advertising and editorial clients in 2000. Alongside his photographic career Scott has art directed numerous advertising campaigns, worked as a creative director at Sotheby’s, art directed foto8magazine, founded his own photographic gallery, edited Professional Photographer magazine and launched his own title for photographers and filmmakers Hungry Eye. He founded the United Nations of Photography in 2012, and is now a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, and a BBC Radio contributor. Scott is the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019), and What Does Photography Mean To You? (Bluecoat Press 2020). His photography has been published in At Home With The Makers of Style (Thames & Hudson 2006) and Crash Happy: A Night at The Bangers (Cafe Royal Books 2012). His film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay was premiered in 2018.

Scott’s next book Inside Vogue House: One building, seven magazines, sixty years of stories, Orphans Publishing, is now on pre-sale.

© Grant Scott 2024