Is the Work of Photographers Truly So Worthless?

Last week I was surprised to find a photo I had posted to Instagram was being featured on the Tourism Australia Instagram account. Before long it had 30K likes, but nobody asked me for permission to use it. Other business accounts have also used it in their advertising without asking me.

This was the shot in question. It was taken on a Sony a99II with the 70-400mm f/4-5.6 G SSM II lens. It's a combination worth about $7K AUD. I usually have 2-3 other camera bodies and lenses at the same time. The expectation it seems is the photographer bring 30K of gear along, paying their own expenses along the way, then hand the results over royalty-free. It's quite bizarre and astonishing.

Here it is featured on the Tourism Australia's Instagram account:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B2RLoICIeI1/

One newspaper reports that Tourism Australia's annual budget for the 2017 year was $129 million dollars. Yet even a photograph shot with $7K AUD worth of equipment should not be remunerated even a cent. That's not even to mention the cost of the software used in post-processing, the filters, the dual 256GB memory cards. It took months of shooting before I eventually captured that moment.

It seems today that the attitude is that the labour of photographers is worthless and that photographers should not be paid a fair living wage for their work.

There will be the usual dubious counterarguments:

1. "Exposure" is an adequate substitute for a fair living. Nonsense
2. It's on the internet so that means that it passes over to collective ownership and the photographer forfeits all rights to ownership of copyright. Nonsense.
3. Everyone owns a camera (eg a phone camera), and anything taken on these devices passes over to universal collective ownership. Nonsense.
4. All images uploaded to the internet (eg onto social media platforms) pass over into collective ownership

Perhaps after the Communist Revolution erupts these things may become true but under the current capitalist system, photographers need to be paid a living wage for their labour. Photographers deserve to be paid a living wage, irrespective of whether the person who took the image is an amateur with a phone camera or not. If an extraordinary and unique moment has been captured by sheer luck on a phone camera, the image should not be considered to have passed to collective public ownership by the mere fact that it has been uploaded to social media. A camera is like a paintbrush, it matters little how cheap the brush is, the resulting image is owned by the creator.

Yet these large corporations like Facebook and Instagram are worth billions of dollars. They rely on a constant stream of interesting video/photo material to which they do not own the copyright. The billions are stolen off their owners who get nothing back. It is mass theft on a vast scale run by capitalist crooks, and we haven't even started on the theft of private data.