Commerce & Photography

Or why involving money and your photography is a good idea:

Why commerce?

Commerce means with merchandise, in Latin. Marketplace, merchants. Mercor, trade, deal sell. Merx — perhaps the same root word as mercenary.

Anyways, it seems that we university like going to the market place, to the agora, or to the local farmers market. Typically, marketing is seen as a bad thing, but actually, commerce is what holds human society together.

Photography and merchandise

If you publish your photos online, in someways, you are treating your photos like a commodity, or a merchant item. Money does not sully things. Rather, money often purifies things.

For example, it is actually commerce which prevents wars. The reason why I doubt that China will go to war with America is because so much of Chinese wealth creation is dependent on America. I would guess that 80% of the products created in China might eventually go to America, or listed on Amazon. Perhaps the only world power that we should be concerned about is Russia, because they do not seem dependent on America for anything.

How Facebook stock keeps going up

Facebook, which owns Instagram, or as part of the greater “Meta” networks company, create their wealth through the digital sharecropping of people, who essentially sell their photos and videos on Facebook and Instagram for free. Think about it: the users do all the work, and Facebook takes all the profit, by putting advertisements alongside the photos and videos of the digital serfs on their platform.

No, that does not make Facebook at all evil. Rather, they just become a digital intermediary.

Personally speaking, I do not like intermediaries. They often stilt your freedom, make exchanges more difficult and cumbersome (for example, why is sending a wire transfer such a pain in the ass?), and often means less money in your wallet. Ideally, you would not pay any commission fees, and you would do all the commerce by yourself. This is why peer to peer, sending money via bitcoin is so interesting to me: you cut out the middleman.

Photo freedom

I like the idea that photos are open and free. Free both literally, and metaphorically.

Once you outsource your photos to be published on a social media platform, your photos are no longer free. They are prisoners to that platform. However, if you publish photos to your own website or blog, assuming the platform is open source, that means that your photos are free. They can move around as they like, with no gatekeepers.

The future of photos

A very open and ambitious vision I have for the future of photography involves photos being both on-link, and off-link, on the chain and off the chain. I call it “PhotoLink”. Currently the closest technology that promises this vision is Chainlink.

The more open and free you make your photos, the better.

Open source

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