This is not a ‘flip’ question or article. It is serious. I write it as someone who has been engaged with professional photography for over forty years. I am someone who cares about the photographic medium.  Someone who has earned a good living from photography. I am writing on the basis of some knowledge, a lot of conversations and even more listening and observing. I am also directly engaged with trying to find an answer to a problem, that I am not sure many photographers are willing to openly accept or solve. Although they know that there is a problem.

We are living in a time of geopolitical insecurity, financial hardship, economic challenges, political upheaval and technological revolution; all of which impact upon our lives. These situations are beyond our control, leaving us in a position of reacting to circumstances, rather than implementing, controlling or instigating change in our own lives. I’m sure that you agree on this. However, let’s consider these from the perspective of the macro and the micro environment. The macro is beyond our control, global change is a juggernaut that few of us can inform or slow down, but it is on the micro level that we can try to retain a sense of control over our personal lives. It is not easy, but I suggest that it is possible.

If you are a professional photographer, by which I mean, you earn a living from photography. All of the macro conditions I have outlined impact on your engagement with the medium. In reality a professional photographer is reliant on clients. Those clients are impacted by the macro conditions the world faces, and in turn this impacts upon the micro climate within our lives. There is no great revelation in anything I have said so far, and yet I still hear photographers deny these obvious truths by continuing to stick with ways of working from the past. So, let me open a door to where professional photography is today.

My wife works within a digital marketing department for an international luxury brand. It is the largest department within the company, and every member of her team is expected to make stills and moving image to ensure online and social media brand awareness. To do this they use their phones and none of them have any training in photography or filmmaking. They are all self-taught. Now, before you start becrying this situation, which I do not, please take another look at the title of this article. My wife was previously the editor of a magazine. She had worked in television and is a published writer of both factual and fiction books. She had never worked in marketing before her current role, and she is in her early fifties. She has a Degree and Masters Degree in Journalism, but now finds herself building narratives around luxury products, and appreciated for her ability to write. As such her career progression is one of transferable skills. Digital communication based on the traditional skill of writing.

She has had to accept where journalism is today and pivot. Something she has done successfully. I believe that this is the challenge for photographers today, how to accept where professional photography is and how to adapt to it. I have written a number of articles addressing this challenge because I am constantly questioning both the problem and the answers I consider. However, I do think that I am coming to a conclusion.

My conclusion so far is this. The first way to deal with a problem is to accept that there is a problem. Just as someone joining AA has to admit their alcoholism, so a photographer has to accept when something is not working. The next step is to do something about it. I am not suggesting that all photographers are alcoholics, but the AA 12 step programme could be a useful tool for many photographers to adopt. Here are the 12 steps: Step 1: Honesty.  Step 2: Faith. Step 3: Surrender. Step 4: Soul Searching. Step 5: Integrity. Step 6: Acceptance. Step 7: Humility. Step 8: Willingness. Step 9: Forgiveness. Step 10: Maintenance. Step 11: Making Contact. Step 12: Service. Now, I am not going to go through all of these and attempt to come up with some photographer related reinterpretation of the original meaning of each step. I will leave that for you to consider if any of the steps connect with you and your photographic practice.

However, I am going to cherry pick a few of the steps to help explain my conclusion to the problem that photography has. They are honesty, integrity, acceptance and humility. My suggestion is this, firstly we have to be honest with ourselves and fellow photographers that the medium has a problem. In my opinion, that problem is clients who are increasingly unwilling or unable to pay for photography. That photography as a medium is under valued and misunderstood. That it is seen as easy and throw away and rarely valued. The traditional platforms that paid for photography such as newspapers and magazines are rapidly disappearing and finally, that photography is no longer solely in the hands of photographers. It is in the hands of everybody.

You can argue with me, and whoever else you wish to argue with, that the old days were better and that they will return. They will not. You can try to sell prints at exhibitions and self-published books at fairs and through your website to fellow photographers and you may have some success. I hope you do, but that will never replace the incomes that professional photographers once enjoyed. On this we need to be honest.

It is essential that you retain your integrity and make work that cannot be produced through AI. It has never been more important to bring your personality to your work. The work you make has to mean something to you, more than the process of making photographs, for the sake of making photographs. If you can acheive this you have a chance that your work will mean something to someone else. You will then be giving a reason to commission to someone tired of the photographic wallpaper that we are all met with on a daily basis. This is a positive step towards addressing the problem, but not a solution.

The next two words are I think the key to solving the problem. The first is acceptance. Having acknowledged the problem we need to accept the nature of the problem. We have to accept new terms of referance for photography and show some humility, despite our years of knowledge and experience. Smartphones are fine, being described as a content creater is okay, making moving image is exciting, collaboration is a positive experience, AI needs to be understood and not dismissed, technical skills are not to be seen as proof of professionalism and neither is the type of camera used. Lighting techniques are not important and neither are post-production skills. They can be useful, but not essential. I say all of this because this is what I see and hear, not from photographers, but from clients, and it is they who are shaping the future of professional photography, not photographers.

It is great to visit museums, galleries and festivals to view the history of photography. Images from the past, by the great and the good of the medium. This work does sell in galleries, auctions and books providing an important visual history of the lives we have led, but it is history created under different rules of professional engagement. Times have changed and it makes no sense to think that photography should not change with them. Let’s think about the evolution of jazz from Swing and Big Band in the 1930s, to Bebop in the 1940s, Cool Jazz in the late 1940s-1950s, to Hard Bop/Modal Jazz/Latin Jazz and Brazilian in the late 1950s and 1960s, to Avant Garde/Fusion in the late 1960s-70s. Then from the 1980s until the present day a continual evolvution that reflects musical trends, borrowing elements from other styles of music from classical to Hip-Hop and electronic music. The styles and traditions of past eras of jazz can still be heard in their traditional forms as well as being re-contextualized and re-imagined. Can we say the same of photography? I don’t think so. Yes, styles have come and gone, but is there a same willingness to evolve through an open-mindedness of what could be rather than of what was. To do this would be a true synthesis of the macro and micro climates.

Now it’s time for the difficult final paragraph and conclusion. Is professional photography as we knew it dead? Yes. Is the role of the professional photographer as we once knew it dead? Yes. Is there a future for professional photography? Yes and No. For the majority there needs to be a serious mindset shift. For the very, very few there will be high-end, above-the-line commissions, but there will not be enough to keep any photographer working more than a couple or few days each month at best. So, let’s deal with the majority. The majority will have to change and accept that photography will only be part of what they will do, and if they want to be paid they will have to either set up their own companies, or work within one as an employee. They will need to focus on their soft and transferable skills as writers, communicators, filmmakers and networkers. Maybe within a marketing department, a design group or a media organisation. They will not be employed as freelancers, based on technical ability, or the singular ability to capture an image. Photographers will no longer be photographers making only photographs. They will need to be visual communicators, visual storytellers and visual problem solvers, with whatever tool or skill is appropriate. Most importantly they will have to evolve to survive.

*Whilst writing this article it was revealed that Meta had made 8,000 of its employees redundant (10% of their workforce) with with a detached-sounding memo that emphasized that “success isn’t a given” in the AI race from Mark Zuckerberg. As part of the restructuring, 7,000 employees were also set to be moved into AI-focused roles. “AI is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes,” Zuckerberg said in the memo. “The companies that lead the way will define the next generation.”

Further Reading and Listening
https://unitednationsofphotography.com/2025/08/31/ai-needs-photographers-creatives-more-than-photographers-need-ai/
https://unitednationsofphotography.com/2026/04/19/photography-connection-and-avoiding-the-fakery/
https://unitednationsofphotography.com/2023/12/27/podcast-a-photographic-life-episode-plus-3/
https://unitednationsofphotography.com/2023/05/15/is-ai-the-end-of-stock-photography/

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 foto8 magazine, 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), What Does Photography Mean To You? (Bluecoat Press 2020) and Inside Vogue House: One building, seven magazines, sixty years of stories, (Orphans Publishing 2024). 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.

© Grant Scott 2026