This is an article for those who are not photographers, for those with no engagement with photography. It is an article to be shared with those people, by the people who are.

As Bob Dylan requested during the political upheavel in the US in the early 1960s, “businessmen, congressmen please heed the call, don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall!” Today, those same people need to hear another call and wake up to a new reality. That is that their lives do not exist, without photography. Their careers do not exist, without photography and their business’s will not exist, without photography. It really is that simple. I have previously written on the need for photography to be understood by both photographers and those commissioning photography. Not the technical stuff, but the contextual stuff. The ‘how and why’ it is used. But this article is going to take this message a little further.

As someone who has worked within business for over forty years, I have been part of its evolution. Primarily from the perspective of technolgical advancements. I started with a knife and a pot of glue to make magazines and now I find myself typing into a keyboard and moving a mouse around a rectangle to make things happen. I have been willing to change, because I have had no choice. It is the same with photography. Analogue to digital was a commercial decision made for me by my clients. However, as I have changed, so has business. Where once there was an even spread of knowledge and experience involved in decision making, in my opinion, today, too many decisions are made by the masters of the Excel spread sheet and the data forecast. And that is a problem for photography, as it doesn’t fit into either catagory.

The data forecast is a collection of facts from the past attempting to predict the future and the Excel spread sheet is a collection of boxes looking for numbers to fill them. Both are used to open, close, fund, and defund, to propose, defend projects, campaigns, initiatives and in effect, peoples lives. That is where we are today. Business can survive without both of these considerations, but it can’t survive without photography, whatever its business module may tell it.

The reason is that photography is its principal form of communication. Its message deliverer, brand identifier and retail provider. Without photography business would be unable to reach an audience. You could say the same about writing and you would be right, but photography is the universal calling card. You don’t need to speak a specific language or read at all to understand a photograph. You can write that a boy is eating a biscuit, but show me that action and I get it in one!

Photography not only needs to be understood and respected, it also needs to be funded. Not just arts funded, but commercially funded. This is something that business needs to understand. However, I get the sense that I am speaking to a brick wall here, just shouting into the wind with no impact or affect. The guy at the end of the bar, in the early hours of the morning, talking of the end-of-the-world to an empty room. You may feel the same if you are the sharer of this article, but if you are the person it is being shared with I recommend opening your ears and eyes. That guy may just know what he is talking about.

It may be too late for those so deeply embedded in their beliefs that the future of business does not need creativity. I fear that it may be. The bottom line has become the only line that matters. The balancing of the spread sheet the only outcome that matters. This may seem like a negative reaction, to what I see and hear, and you would not be wrong in reaching that conclusion. It is negative, but it is not without hope. I am by nature an optimistic realist. However, for a bright future for photography to develop, it will require those in business to remove their blinkers and see that there is more to the future than numbers and statistics. More to a brand than a logo, and more to communication than what they think.

Further Reading:
https://unitednationsofphotography.com/2026/06/04/photography-today-is-misunderstood-that-is-why-it-could-die-as-a-profession/

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