2025 10 01
Night moon. Where’s your focus? Douglas, Michigan. October, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
The Anecdotal Evidence That Keeps Me Up At Night
by Clayton Hauck
The thing is, I’ve been a commercial photographer for over a decade now. Close to 100% of my working time and energies were put towards this profession, weird as it can be. When things were good, they were very good. And when things were bad, well, they were still relatively okay. I was able to make a respectable living doing this work and had close to zero complaints about the deal. It’s still kind of hard to believe I bought a house through making photos.
As I sit in my photo studio today, things are about as different as can be from the pleasant picture I’ve just laid out. Even the studio I now run was opened more as a compliment to my existing commercial photography business. While the reasons are plentiful, I’ll soon get to the specific one I thought of this morning while cleaning up the studio. But first a bit more detail on where my focus is now: yes, I’m still a commercial photographer but my focus is far more split both within the profession and outside of it. I’m now directing and shooting video, and putting a lot more effort towards the art photography world (perhaps teaching is in my future, as well). This has been wildly motivating for me, which is nice, but I’m still super level-headed about the realities of making a decent living through this line of work. Secondly, the studio that I opened without much thought to profitability is now being handled entirely differently. Making this place make money is priority number one, and if I can’t make that happen, it will have to go. Thirdly, I’m now running a photobook shop called realmbooks.co. Much like my newfound artistic photography practice, this side hustle has given me a lot of excitement and motivation, however, I’m equally as level-headed about its chances at producing a living wage for myself. What makes me feel better about this difficult financial reality is that it’s very complimentary to my photography work, and in many ways I feel like I’m back at school learning a ton of new things (without the baggage of student loans).
All this to say: my life is wildly different now than it was even a few years ago. My time is being spread very thin amongst all of these new practices and I have very little downtime to relax and socialize. Fortunately, much of the work is work that is often enjoyable. This helps me justify things.
So why the need to put myself into this situation, you may ask. Here’s the anecdotal story as told from my perspective as a photo studio operator:
Last year we had a client do a shoot in our space. It was all more or less normal aside from my own observation that the photographer was being wildly over-worked for what they were likely being paid. It was a relentless shot list (this is not unusual. Most of my shoots are also this way), but they didn’t have the budget for an appropriate support crew, so I got the sense everyone was miserable. This was the first warning. It’s increasingly hard for Clayton the commercial photographer to compete with the countless productions being run on a far lower budget than I will ever be able to compete with. It is what it is and I don’t take this personally, as I was once the young and scrappy photographer doing things for far less than the established photographers would ever think to do them for.
Fast forward a year and this same client pops back onto my radar asking for studio availability to do a photo shoot last minute. Cool! The space is available and I could very much use the rental income. A few days go by and word comes they decided against the shoot altogether. Fine, it happens. But the reason they decided against it is the thing that has me scrambling to find a half dozen new jobs — they’re just going to run the images they made internally using ai.
Some of us don’t think it’s coming. Some of us are scared shitless. Nobody yet knows how this will all play out, but my previous cautious optimism has cooled quite dramatically. Now, my current base-case thinking is that nearly all jobs linked to the creation of visual images for commercial use (be it stills, video, animation, etc, etc) will either be gone completely — outsourced to ai — or vastly diluted from a price-leverage perspective within just a few short years.
If anyone wants to rent my studio for a birthday party, wedding, baby shower, or hell maybe even an old-fashioned photo shoot you know where to find me!
-Clayton
