This article was first posted in March 2004.

There can't be anybody out there evenly vaguely connected with the photography business who doesn't think that times are hard, that times are changing and that we are all facing an uncertain future. How individual photographers cope with times such as these speaks volumes about them.

I have a lot of interaction with other photographers - in person, on the phone, exchanges of e-mail and of course on web forums and the one thing that is apparent is that a lot of photographers are not making the same income that they were once used to. news photographers are having a really hard time right across the world - there is less work, more people out there looking for it and a growing number of publishers looking to spend less on good photography.

So what are the answers? I'm no visionary, so I haven't got the answer ready for you but I hope that these thoughts get you thinking...What we are looking at here is a downturn in the market for photography, in much the same way as we saw in the late 1980's. Depending on who you speak to, the downturn is either more or less severe than we saw then so I don't want to get drawn into a debate about relative severity, but I do want to remind everyone about the natural instincts of the army of "bean counters" who take great delight in capping and cutting fees. These people are opportunists and they have been quick to capitalize on the general economic malaise that followed the terrorist outrages of September the 11th. Of course the economic cycle was reaching the bottom anyway, so the money men (and women) were ready to cut and cut again. Publishers are pretty much back on track, but they have successfully cut expenditure so won't be in a hurry to pay photographers what they should be doing.

The really clever cutters have managed to make the inexorable march towards digital into the bad guy of the piece (...I spy conspiracy theory...) and for a lot of photographers the huge investment that they have been strong-armed into making has not paid off. This is a real shame all round because if everybody involved could be persuaded to "play nice", everyone from the shareholders in major media corporations, to the senior managers, bean counters, picture editors to the individual photographers could be better off. In a few organizations this has happened, but the lack of dialogue between most companies and their suppliers has resulted in the current problems. The accountants don't want to understand how really everything works, they just want to be in control and boast about their "bottom line".

The damage is done, the industry's equilibrium is upset and the majority of photographers are doing a lot of worrying. In the short term there is very little chance that budgets will suddenly be returned to the levels that they were at before September the 11th, let alone the inflation matching increases that would be needed to get expenditure back to where it was twenty years ago. Those are the facts, and we can't change them. We know what the score is, so at least we know where we are starting from.

There is no chance that such a disparate bunch of individuals could organize any form of collective action, even if it were desirable, so we need to work with the system presented to us. Editorial clients increasingly want digital, they want to grab photographer's rights and they want to pay less. All we need to do is to find a way of doing all three and still making more money (and getting to shoot worthwhile and interesting pictures into the bargain)! On the face of it, it's an impossible task. Something has to give, so we have to ditch at least one thing from the wish list all of the time or a combination of things some of the time. Flexible photographers who are prepared to work for a wider range of clients are far more likely to survive whilst a lucky few can keep their integrity intact because they are the stars of the industry.

History tells us that over time budgets creep higher and that new doors open in places where you don't expect them. The strategy has to be to survive in the short term in the hope and/or expectation that the industry will recover/change/develop. Market theory says that enough of us will go to the wall for the rest to enjoy the return of the good times. The fact that I don't trust markets that much anyway, coupled with the ready supply of talented newcomers that this industry will always attract makes me believe that it will always be more of a struggle than it was in days gone by.

I have read many intelligent articles about what is going on and I would urge you to read Mark Loundy and Greg Smith who have both written for this month's Digital Journalist. No "magic bullet" answers then. There are things we can all do to optimize our chances of surviving, but the main one is to stop behaving like ostriches, get our heads out of the sand and keep talking to each other.