Should You Shoot for Free? Sure You Should. Maybe. It Depends.
I have always had opportunities come from the gigs I take “for free”. You gotta recognize opportunity and be able to filter it from being taken advantage of.
Ahh, the interwebs. A glorious place where people who have little experience delight in calling out those who have decades of it. I ain’t whinin’… in fact, I kinda got a kick out of this, err, discussion.
A photographer who is a self-proclaimed “pro” for going on two years now (part-time, of course, because he has a government job) called me out (fairly rudely) for telling a non-published photographer to get the gig and knock it out of the park even if there was no fee involved.
“The company is a startup”, the question began, “and they are trying to get something going. I want to shoot this gig because I know them and they honestly are running on very narrow budgets.”
“Shoot it”, I told him, “then leverage that shoot into PR, your portfolio, your blog, and your marketing”. He had no current gig, the guys at the startup were not demanding he shoot it for free, (only grateful if he would) and it would be a very good set of images for this as yet unpublished photographer to have in his portfolio.
Now before you think I am advocating working for free… well, I am, sorta — in a way. I think the photographer needed this gig as much as the startup needed the images — maybe even more. I am not on the side of working for free, I am on the side of getting this young man some entry-level stuff so that he can have more credibility and visibility.
Enter our non-pro Pro with his admonishment of wrecking the prices and working on spec and every other lame term he could remember from his arduous time on them good ol’ forums full of others who have no experience.
“… encouraging working for free is like condoning slavery…” — he matter of factly stated.
And obviously, he noted, I have no idea of what the business is all about.
Well, I must say that comparing the brutal horrors of slavery to a half-day shoot of street tacos for a fledgling business sort of really denigrates the impact of horrible fucking slavery on the people’s lives who were impacted by it, but I guess his hyperbole was to make a point. Or something.
“We have to stand up for our right to be paid”, said the non-pro Pro who had never written an invoice in his two years of soul crushing struggle.
Here was my response:
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Change is inevitable.
I’ve been watching change for over 50 years.
From the inside.
Me: Musician — photographer — designer — agency owner — creative director — educator — author.
I’ve had a lot of cool hats to wear. Sometimes it seems like the business changes faster than we can even change hats.
And the changes have come even more quickly for relatively young industries.
The roots of commercial photography only go back to mid 20th century. Before that, photographers were those that made photographs for themselves and were occasionally hired to make images for calendars, an occasional corporate shoot, captains of industry, weddings, babies, and families.
The advent of the modern “Ad Agency” (think Madmen) started in the early fifties, blossomed in the 60’s The idea of a commercial photographer followed close behind. The heady days of Penn, Avedon, Stern, and Turner soon followed the birth of ‘the agency’, and a new form of photography, the ad shooter, was born.
And with it, the ubiquitous, everyone’s gotta have one (or four), portfolio.
Visual proof that you had chops; you could light a room, catch a pour in mid-air, make a model laugh, or handle the trickery of food. And you had to shoot a lot of images to edit them down to your 30 best shots in that big, black, heavy book. The creative bar was very high.
In my early days as a fashion photographer, the best way to get your work in front of as many potential clients as you could was to “test” models. Since the girls had far more opportunities to show their portfolios than the photographers did, there was heavy competition to make sure our images were in their books. Testing rarely paid anything and if it did, it barely covered expenses.
When I changed to commercial, the competition was in how killer your book and promo were. We spent thousands on Brewer Cantelmo books and Dye Transfer prints in order to impress some AD to give us a chance to shoot golf clubs.
And usually, that would pay the freight for the next big Workbook ad.
And the work, for the most part, was boring. Towels for department store ads, garage door openers for brochures and trade ads, hot dogs, and canned hams for meatpacking companies. (But your portfolio had to be absolutely killer in order to get those boring, but very lucrative, gigs.)
The local magazines were the only outlet that we could use to show creativity and they were both stiflingly — pitifully — bad, and they paid not a shit.
But a couple of covers for the local magazine could get you in the door to the agency handling the golf clubs. Editorial has always played that part.
And it does today.
In the ’90s, the cover of Vogue paid $500.
It would cost you $1200 or more to shoot it
The cover of Andy Warhol’s Interview paid $300.
It would cost you $1200 or more to shoot it
Photographers would lose money in order to shoot those covers… because they brought prestige. An Interview cover would bring calls from ADs and editors wanting to shoot with you. For a month or two, anyway. A cover of Vogue meant the AD would be in when you called to show your book.
It was a game, perhaps — but one we all played.
I believe the only way a photographer can be seen is to BE SEEN.
I had a very hard time starting out in Phoenix as a “fashion photographer”… heh, good times… but when I got to New York, my scrappiness paid off. I had already learned the game, and how to PR my work from a free gig to a paid gig. I had to be nimble enough to recognize the opportunity that lay three weeks or three months out rather than the immediate need for, well, food and stuff.
I know 50 ways to cook spam and macaroni. All of them pretty much suck except for the Italian cheese with noodles… mmmmm…
These days we live in a perpetual world of free.
We can pretend that doesn’t exist, but it does.
We can be angry that it exists, but it still does. The world doesn’t care about our feelings.
The question of whether we will have to work for free in order to prove we can do the work has already been answered. We may not like it, but it is what it is. The true challenge is to understand how to USE that work done for “access” instead of seeing it as a simple transaction. We are artists, and art is not a simple transaction.
When I was the partner and Creative Director of my agency, a large one for Arizona, the most important thing you could show us besides the killer portfolio for which you were incredibly proud, were tear sheets.
The budgets are too big, the chance for failure too great, the loss of a client simply not an option. So we had better know that you could shoot under pressure, under deadline, within budget, and produce a product for which someone else had spent money to show as representative of their product.
There were no exceptions. We weren’t running a charity or a ‘workshop for wannabees’, we were running a business and businesses need proof.
Writers get contracts from their works on Medium — for which they receive no pay.
Traditional musicians are starving while Lindsey Sterling and Peter Hollens have built multi-million dollar businesses from free Youtube videos.
Bloggers get book contracts. And speaking gigs.
Unsplash photographers are getting assignments in towns where traditionally oriented photographers are not.
Artists put out tons of content in order to rank higher on Google.
It is certainly not the marketing world I ‘grew up’ in. But it is the one we have before us. And we have to decide to swim with or against the current. I’m a bit of a iconoclast, but I know which way has less friction. And them ol’ waterfalls will get ya. They will.
I have many grouchy old dude friendss who sit around pissing about the way things used to be, and how the good old days were this or that. And I find that boring AF. We are here today. Yesterday’s gone, baby.
All of this being said, I am fully aware some do not see eye to eye with me and I am totally fine with it. I work with hundreds of photographers, and those who have adopted my methods are working and even stayed busy through the Pandemic.
RULES
There are rules that we make for ourselves. Rules for business, rules for life, rules for our art. You are obviously free to establish your own, and you should. Always.
Here are mine:
If it is something that will benefit me in some way, I am good.
If it is something that may benefit someone who needs it, I am good.
(My agency and I always did pro-bono work for charities we believe in.)
If it is access to someone or something I would like access to, I am good.If there is a layout and I don’t think it works, I don’t do the job.
If the gig paid someone else, but they don’t want to pay me, I don’t do the job.
If the job looks and smells and talks like a boring old gig, I don’t take the job.
If the job doesn’t benefit me and my goals, or benefit someone who needs some help, I don’t do the job.
If the job involves Amber Heard OR Johnny Depp, I don’t take the job.
In other words, I will not be taken advantage of, but I will indeed take assignments that can benefit me or my interests.
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We can choose whether to think of art as a purely transactional model or as something larger than that. I choose to think of art as having an ecosphere and experiential existence that is beyond a measurable “bottom line”.
If you want to achieve something big, give it away and the rewards will materialize. The biggest challenge is to see them when they do. And that takes work, effort, and a willingness to challenge the so-called rules.
I am a photographer, designer, and photo editor. You can find me at my self-named website or at Project 52 Pro System where I teach commercial photography online. This is our tenth year of teaching, and it is the most unique online class you will find anywhere.
My newest book, “25 Challenges for Photographers in a Slump”, will be published in August, 2022.
You can find most of my books on Amazon, and I have taught two classes at CREATIVELIVE.
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