On the day that an image library licensed one of my historic pictures for just a little under $6 to a well known publisher for use in print and on-line in perpetuity I have been thinking about the value of photography.

We all take pictures on our phones on a daily basis. It’s easy, it’s somewhere between cheap and free and because of that very few of us truly value many pictures. We all have sentimental and meaningful photographs that we have taken and those that have been shot of and with us but do they even have a monetary value? Rarely.

The ability of pictures to influence and even directly alter our mood or play with our aesthetic sensibilities and emotional states is inarguable. It should be those things that make the images that we produce, view and consume on an industrial scale that that give them their true value. I’ve made a living, a pretty decent living, for almost thirty-seven years from photography and I have been lucky enough to find clients (and an employer) who largely understand what the right pictures are actually worth. I’ve been commissioned to shoot many interesting, funny, sad, dramatic, terrifying and downright mundane things and I hope that it is my ability to produce the most eye-catching, informative and memorable images from them that has a real value.

Photographers talk about their skills and their abilities that produce the value in what we do. That is true. Quantifying what our experience, technical prowess and creative abilities are worth has been the subject of a lot of soul-searching for so many of us. A saturated market does no favours to the seller and the photography business is necessarily about sales. Undercutting goes on too often and too aggressively to benefit anyone who exists on my side of the camera. We professionals charge for our labour with more than a nod to the commitment, time and energy it has taken to hone those abilities as well as reflecting the eye-watering cost of the kit we need to own. Commission rates can still be negotiated that reflect the true cost of being a freelance photographer but it can be a struggle.

When it comes to library images all of that goes out of the window.

Long after the death of Tesco founder Jack Cohen whose concept of “pile it high and sell it cheap” could have been invented for the stock photography market we find ourselves shocked by how little our never-to-be-repeated images fetch in a market skewed by the inability of the stock agencies to understand the true value of the work that they represent. Selling a license to a photograph taken many years ago should result in the library and the creator receiving fair recompense but it rarely does. Relying on my back-catalogue to be substantial part of my pension is looking more and more like a pipe-dream. I love creating new work for wonderful clients and it looks as if that’s how I will have to pay for my retirement when it comes along.

Having my work undervalued hurts. Having to acknowledge that the market has been in a downward spiral for as long as I’ve been part of it hurts too. What hurts the most is what artificial intelligence and its ability to create images might do to the value of images but that’s a whole different blog post.