IC w0 Amateur or professional panel discussion

HildeMaassen
Jan 31, 2020
4 min read

Updated: Aug 16, 2020

I went to a panel discussion about the differences between amateurs and professionals in the national museum for photography that collects the work of both the amateur and the professional. All the things that were told were not really new or surprising to me and didn’t change my vision on the subject. I came back disappointed and a bit angry.

The adverteer text that got me to the talk:

THE AMATEUR VS THE PROFESSIONAL, WHERE IS THE BORDER?

Why wouldn't an influencer with beautiful photos on Instagram and thousands of followers be a professional photographer? Is there still a border between the amateur photographer and the professional? Where is this then? And what are the criteria? Education, clients or talent? Where in the past the distinction between amateur and professional was very clear, it now seems more difficult to determine. The rates of the professional photographers are under pressure and the media eagerly use material offered by amateurs. At the same time, the professional voice is getting louder. According to them, a distinction can certainly be made and it is necessary to make this clear to the public. During the talk The amateur versus the professional, director Birgit Donker talks to Rotterdam photographer and videographer Marwan Magroun and member of the Fotobond board, Tom Meerman, about the boundary between amateur and professional photography. Marwan Magroun is neither an amateur nor a professional; He sees himself as an artist. This year he is putting together our exhibition The collection highlighted by .... He does this from his personal vision of Rotterdam and Dutch photography. Tom Meerman is a board member of the Fotobond, Dutch Center for Leisure Photography. The Fotobond was founded in 1922 by the photo clubs where the art of photography has been practiced since the very beginning of photography. The Fotobond is committed through the hundreds of associations and departments in the country for meeting and development between and from amateur photographers. This discussion is part of the activity program of the exhibition Strong stories from the rich collection of the Nederlands Fotomuseum. In this exhibition, several photo series by amateur photographers can be seen, such as Hein Wertheimer, Frits Lamberts and Cobie Douma.

(https://www.nederlandsfotomuseum.nl/tentoonstelling/amateurs-versus-professionals-2/)

Birgit Donker, started with the question; do we have to define the difference between an amateur and a professional. She answered her own question in the first sentence stating that the professional is someone who makes a living out of photography. And that stopped that part from the start. The answer was, in my opinion, never answered.

What I find quite strange was that Marwan Magroun was called an amateur at the moments that he did his own projects and a professional at the moment that he got paid. He started some project for fun and than a company saw it and decided to pay for it in the form of a weekly publication in their magazine and that way the same work became professional. Wasn't it professional from the start?

That raises the question whether my images for the MA are amateur or professional. Although I hardly make money with photography since I stopped my company I still see myself as a professional. Not because I make money with it but because I can work from a concept, pre visualize images, can do problem solving and end with the wanted image. The way I work and the way I can control the process if wanted makes me a professional, that is how I feel it. By the way according to the panel I am a professional because I teach photography? Again strange because I know a lot of people who teach photography who aren't professionals in my opinion; they just know a bit about the technics or about images and were the one who enjoyed it the most in the team or the one who knew the most. I doesn't involve quality.

Photography as a way to escape is a very popular. And was defined amateur. The photographs are often shared through the social media. And a lot of people are a member of a photo club (7000 registered in the Netherlands). People have a job and in their free time they make images while others go for a walk, play music or sport; that is the definition of the amateur was stated and it didn’t say a thing about the quality, the amount of control, the vision or the storytelling. Amateurs could also make money but they were less available (because of the day jobs) and couldn’t add value for the client.

In the Netherlands artist were seen as amateurs in the ‘60’s.

The amateur can be happy. They use their free time it is fun and exciting. The professional feels pressure and has to meet with expectations. Very straightforward assumptions were made in my opinion.

How did I get angry?

Who decides what work of amateurs is bought by the museum was the questions form someone in the public. The answer was that the sponsors of the museum and some amateurs were asked for their opinion as well as some professionals. But on the next question if amateurs were also asked for their opinion on what to exhibit in the museum was the answer by Birgit Donker: “no off course not; that is a real profession.” That made me angry because that way photography was downgraded to not being a profession. Or that was how it felt.