The United Nations of Photography

, , ,

Photography Today is a Toxic Siloed Matrix and That’s Not Good!

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that the photographic community today consists of a series of silos bought together as a confused and argumentative matrix through social media platforms. This is not good. Let me explain why.

In the past those who made photographs for fun would share them with their families and perhaps a local camera club. If they were interested they would look at photography magazines which alongside the usual technical tips and camera reviews would introduce their readers to new and established photographers of some merit (I’m thinking of the old weekly BJP, Creative Camera and PDN News here amongst a few others). Those who studied the medium at college would also be introduced to the great and the good of the photographic world. They would go on to work professionally and have their work published. Simple. Two seperate areas of practice one understanding that if they paid for their film and processing they may have to be slightly more frugal in how often they used their cameras whilst professionals had clients paying for their costs and a fee for their time. Both having had some introduction to the greats of the medium, its context within history and a developed respect for the makers that had gone before them.

As more and more people engage with photography thanks to smartphones and digital cameras of every price, shape and form it is natural that their pathways to the medium will be vast and varied. Today anyone with a social media account can publish their images and digital takes away the previous costs associated with non-stop image making. I’m not saying anything new so far I know. 

However, whereas we once had two silos we now have multiples and this is why. The enthusiast today may pick up their photographic knowledge from many sources, maybe YouTube, Instagram, online or ignore any knowledge of the past and make it up for themselves. I have no issue with any of these approaches although I do see a lot of nonsense being spoken on all of these platforms by photographers with little, none or very narrow experience of the professional world outside of social media. Therefore, if you have gained your knowledge from these people it is distinctly possible that you are either ill-informed or not-informed at all and you will be unaware that this is the case. Working as a photographer is an insecure world and it breeds insecurity. Sadly, insecurity also breeds defensiveness and aggression when challenged. I’ll count these photographers as a new Silo 1.

Silo 2 are the photographers who still make work for their own enjoyment with no intention of ever getting published or paid for their photography. I refer to these as hobbyists as I have no issue with that term but others prefer the term enthusiast and that’s fine. However, they are also potential prey for Silo 1. Silo 1 photographers seem to like selling or promoting their knowledge whether it has value or not. Through YouTube, workshops, courses and plug-ins. Silo 1 can be agrressive in their promotion and views. They are right and everyone else is wrong however experienced others may be. They can be very persuasive when it comes to Silo 2.

Silo 3 contains the photographers who have studied the medium at college and university and have hopefully received a well-rounded and informed understanding of photography. Sadly, this is not always the case as there is today and has always been a tendency for photographers who teach on these courses to be overly focused on their own work and likes which can result in the creation of replica students and work. I have much first hand experience of this so I know it to be true. Therefore, if they have received little training in how the broader professional photography environment works they are also prey for Silo 1 misinformation.

Silo 4 contains perhaps those most at threat. Those with extended experience alongside deep practical knowledge. These photographers exist across the photographic medium. I’m not going to categorize them, however they are most likely to be those who are not spending their lives on social media as they are too busy making photographs, working with clients and creating personal bodies of work. Sadly, these are exactly the people that the other silos should be queing up to hear from, to question and to listen to. What they say may not align with a lot of the ‘news ‘advice’ out there but it will be based in lived reality. As George Orwell said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” I will add to that by saying that what you dont want to hear may be the most important things you hear. If they come from an informed source.

Dr.Grant Scott
After fifteen years art directing photography books and magazines such as Elle and Tatler, Scott began to work zas 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 book Inside Vogue House: One building, seven magazines, sixty years of stories, Orphans Publishing, is on sale now.

© Grant Scott 2025

Discover more from The United Nations of Photography

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

9 responses to “Photography Today is a Toxic Siloed Matrix and That’s Not Good!”

  1. Doug Avatar
    Doug

    Why did a thoughtful piece on photography need to be opened with a terrible AI illustration?

    Reply
    1. gscott2012 Avatar
      gscott2012

      Because I liked it

      Reply
  2. Simon Ford Avatar
    Simon Ford

    I would add—while remaining aligned with your organising framework—that photographic practice can broadly be approached from two interrelated perspectives: one concerned with how photography functions, whether philosophically, technically, or both; and another focused on what photography is capable of achieving, particularly in terms of its activist or socially engaged potential. This is not to suggest these approaches are mutually exclusive; indeed, for myself and many others, the most meaningful engagement with photography lies in the mediation between these dimensions.

    Reply
  3. Rob Campbell Avatar
    Rob Campbell

    The answer that works for me is to stay well away from standard social media platforms. Silos can look cool in wabi-sabi Americana photos.

    I enjoy posting the fairly regular snap on an external photography site, but my main photographic interest (today) lies in the doing, the shooting of something, and recording the ultimate result in my website. It’s my personal catalogue, all in one place, where I can tune in when I feel like it, which is surprisingly seldom, probably because both my iPad and iPhone no longer work smoothly with it, though the desktop computer works just fine.

    I use the computer and PS, but as it lives in my wee office, I far prefer the other two viewing options, recent glitches with both notwithstanding. The office has no couch.

    I think that as photographers, we have to accept that other people seldom give a damn about our “work”, a term that always sounds so pretentious to me when used outwith a professional situation. (Guilty, too, m’lud.) My advice is simple: liberate your mind and follow your own inclinations. Basically, nothing else matters. One step further: if for personal fun, forget cameras: buy a reasonable cellphone and conserve your back and future posture. I haven’t used a Nikon, though I still have a couple, in zonks.

    Reply
  4. Pete Gardner Avatar
    Pete Gardner

    As an old dog who has been both a professional photographer and a hobbyist/enthusiast/whatever term you like for not getting paid for the images you make, for over 40 years, I recognise all too well the categorisations you make. I think there is maybe also a fifth silo, occupied with the ‘gearhead’ tribe of photographers – who, I suppose, despite their misplaced belief that the better the camera gear the better the image, are to be applauded for keeping the traditional camera manufacturers in business and so I certainly have no beef with them for that. What I do wonder, though, is if all this hasn’t, in principle, always been the case?

    For sure, digital technology, social media, Ai, smartphones, et al, have made the sheer ubiquity of the medium an almost mind-numbing experience – your average thirty-something who engages with the internet and social media will likely be exposed to something in excess of 1,000 images on a daily basis; as a race we take over 5.3 billion photos every day; Google Image Search indexes 136 billion images and in 2024, smartphones accounted for over 94% of all photos taken – all astonishing statistics, but I can’t help feeling that the impetus to create the majority of these images is little different to the explosion in personal image making that occurred following the launch of the Kodak Brownie in 1900 when George Eastman coined the infamous slogan ‘You Press the Button, We Do the Rest’ – isn’t that exactly what Instagram and Tik-Tok, etc., with their algorithms promise today? – and aren’t all those faces on youtube or IG reels earnestly peddling their wares and advice, so you can make your iphone shot of the local park look like an Ansel Adams print of Yosimite, only fulfilling the same function of those little Focal Press technical booklets of the 1950s, or the even more condescending publications by manufacturers like Leica explaining how to properly use their cameras?

    Modern technology may have made the scale of the activity inordinately greater over the last twenty years or so, but think the reality now is what it always has been, that photographers who engage with the medium as a serious endeavour are a very small niche within a much larger diaspora of more general and utilitarian photographic activity – and I question even if there is really ever a genuine ‘photographic community’? – like painting, ‘serious’ photography is a mostly solitary activity and as with the traditional fine-arts, there are often periods when groups of practitioners explore the same or similar modes of expression, and so ‘movements’ or ‘groups’ are born, often as a result of some external impetus – as Impressionism clearly was, once photography had liberated painters from the chore of verisimilitude – but often ‘groups’ or ‘movements’ are labels applied by history in hindsight – a true photographic community is probably a tenuous idea at best and, at worst, just a bunch of opinionated individuals getting their rocks off trolling others in comments on Threads and in forums.

    I think that if there is a malaise in contemporary photography, as a creative form of expression (I’m sidestepping the term ‘artistic’ here, as that’s a whole other can of worms), it is that in this avalanche of imagery and opinions we are daily subjected to, there is an almost total (and highly competitive) obsession with either subject matter or some external conceptual idea, where photography functions only as a recording medium, as the mere depiction of specific objects, places, persons or events – and often where any formal qualities of an image are predicated on traditional painterly tropes that do all they can to subvert the the true nature of photography – if it ain’t HDR, optically corrected, super-sharp and oversaturated it ain’t any good! – what seems to be lost deep in the creative snows is the fundamental core-strength of a photograph, as something in and of itself, to be appreciated holistically as a unique form of imagery.

    Making photographs, where the intrinsic optical qualities and unique formal potential of the medium are an overt and indeed celebrated quality of the image are certainly no longer generally a popular form of photography. It hasn’t always been so; the work of the vast pantheon of what we mostly hold to be the world’s best photographers, who had their heyday in the four or five decades spanning the middle of the 20th century, from Brassai and Kertesz through to Eggleston and Shore, exemplifies this primacy of the photographic DNA. Why that approach has fallen so much out of favour, I have no idea. Hopefully, when the vast majority of the images we all encounter eventually acquire the same lifeless veneer that most Ai images exhibit (because, surely, generative Ai will start devouring itself as it scours an internet that is increasingly full of Ai images), then, like Gen Z folks who are now buying Vinyl records and coveting 1970s analog equipment, there will be a reassessment, a questioning of why the work of all those 20th century photographers still have so much resonance today, and then perhaps the realisation that it’s not what they saw and what they photographed but their deep understanding of the medium itself and how they saw and how they photographed.

    oh, crap – I meant only to post a quick paragraph of general agreement and it’s turned into a major rant – you must have touched a nerve!

    Reply
    1. gscott2012 Avatar
      gscott2012

      Excellent! That’s the point!

      Reply
  5. gone.ish76 Avatar
    gone.ish76

    You write about toxic silos, and that’s an accurate diagnosis. But I see something even more damaging that is rarely addressed: the system of curatorial and academic castes. Closed hierarchies where only ‘their own’ — students and protégés — are promoted, while anything that challenges the master’s dogma is ignored or marginalized. I observe this also in Poland: the most renowned masters of photography surround their protégés with a hermetic curatorship and support, while others remain invisible. This is not dialogue, it is a filter that cuts off voices outside the system. Photography then loses its critical potential and becomes an illusion of freedom.

    Reply
    1. gscott2012 Avatar
      gscott2012

      Thanks for the insight. I am not sure this is the case in all territories

      Reply
  6. Dimitris Avatar
    Dimitris

    Hi there. I would add another silo. This is the professional, noteworthy,well educated photographers who besides their usual activities offer seminars , workshop or counsel mainly because the fees are now lower. It is quite bad for them , but quite luckily for those of the silo1 – those at least who are interested . As an amateur, hobbyist photographer ( I adhere the term enthusiast, it seems too silly going ,if I am expressing this correctly) I was lucky to meet one or two of those wonderful characters.

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Rob CampbellCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Trending

Discover more from The United Nations of Photography

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading