The Good Fight, Business Practices and What’s Next

Rick Smolan is known for his book series A Day in the Life of …, a project that started decades ago. He was recently interviewed by Scott Galloway of L2 to talk about those books, his newest project The Good Fight: America’s Ongoing Struggle for Justice and the business of photography.

Smolan pulls no punches here – the business model is not working anymore. But as I sat through this, thinking about how we old timers lament the days of re-licensing work and sustainable day rates, I started to wonder how we should teach the business of photography going forward and whether we need a zero-base approach to it.

Day rates aren’t what they were, clients want more rights than before, their needs are different due to emerging platforms and so many of us still talk about holding on to the business model of the 20th century … maybe, just maybe, we need to think about a different way of doing sustainable visual storytelling.

I have no idea what that way is, but it seems like something we should talk about at least.

(Thanks to Michael Schwarz for the link to the Michael Zhang piece on PetaPixel.)