"Damn heliographs! Ever since their conception, I've not sold a single painting!!"
"Damn printing presses! Ever since books came out, no one has bought a single illuminated manuscript!"
"Art" - be it photographic, written, inked, penciled, video, played, sung, tapped, folded, spindled or mutilated will always sell. I can't hang a 'video' on my wall, and if I could, I probably still wouldn't. The next generation might, but there would still be Luddites buying stills even so.
Photography for "business" - commercial mags, papers, travel books, etc. is probably shrinking. But I see that as a symptom of the general dumbing down of both the source (enter my rants about Scuba Diving and other commercial mags, which seem to have the same fluff pieces month after month....this year they were so lazy as to have "stories" (which amounted to 3-5 pages at most, blurbs or dive maps) about Dominica within
3 months of one another...as much as I enjoyed the place, that's a bit high of a rate of repetition, and smacks of either paid advertising or as I said before, just laziness), and the attention-deficited, increasingly lazy, spoonfed, and moronic average Western consumer.
It's no different really than music, which became so centrally-controlled by a few large media labels churning out 'formula' new hit bands like prepackaged, drug-laced Soylent Green, while the amateurs complain that any moron with a MIDI-attachment to his computer and a cheap git-tar can strive to be the next big thing, so "breaking through" means being recognized in an increasingly polluted field of background noise. Yet behind it all the evolution of digitized music as mere 'information', the transfer mechanism of the internet, and the demographics of the internet generation which either don't understand or don't "care" about "rights" just share what they like and become their own mediator, out of the control of the media giants in some cases, or just as manipulated by the ones that evolve (viral marketing, plants on Myspace, etc. to 'get out the word'). Bands that know how to market themselves well make a killing even giving away their albums (Nine Inch Nails comes to mind - gave away their last one as a 'gift', prior ones were allowed to be remixed with creative commons licenses, and they're still raking in the dough for their live shows and selling physical copies of the "free" CD via their own website.) The field will continue to evolve, just as it has since the first sepia tints were invented, or the way cinematography has evolved from still sets and fixed angles. Both the creation and the use of media are always changing.
So if you want to follow the monetary trend right now, I see your point. If you want to take pictures, take pictures. Seems to me you fall in the former category, while a lot of other pros here are a little more in the latter category, doing what they want but lucky to make money doing so.
Me, I'm not even good enough to be one of those idiot amateurs who's giving away his work and making it harder for them to sell theirs...mine is still solely for personal (and family and friend) consumption, and will likely never rise far beyond that.
