I’ve always thought of the photography business like the restaurant business. Anybody can cook, even if it’s just mac and cheese, and anybody can press a button on a camera. You can get dirt-cheap food of dubious edibility (and that’s being generous) at any fast-food drive through, or pay $30,000 for the world’s most expensive meal, and everywhere in between. And it’s the same thing with photography, where you can pay as much or as little as you want, but we generally hope you get what you pay for.
But here’s another parallel I found fascinating: the world of high-fashion. According to the New York Times, (obligatory bug me not link for logins) high-end designers are suffering because, while the quality of their workmanship and materials is unquestioned (mostly), people are simply unwilling or unable to pay hefty price tags for designer apparel. Read this article and tell me you don’t see the current state of the photography industry reflected there.
“There are still customers who want that workmanship,” Ann Stordahl, the general merchandise manager at Neiman’s, said. “There are just fewer of them than there were.”
From the interviews with fashion designers, there simply isn’t any way to cut expenses without cutting the quality of the work, by either using less expensive materials or lower-quality workmanship. It would be great if at the end, the article said what the designers are going to do so they can continue to profit from their creative talents, but it doesn’t. I guess that’s left as an exercise to the reader.
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2 Comments at "Luxury In The Time of Recession"
I think the most important concept in the article is whether this is a “defining moment” for fashion. The same can be said for wedding photography. Is there going to be a dawning/growing awareness that photography is over-rated, unimportant, or irrelevant to the wedding day?
I agree with Paul M, if the word “awareness” is changed to “perception”.
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