Column: Paging Through PDN, and the Wreckage of an Industry

By Jeremy Hogan

Bloomington, Ind. – July 17, 2025

I found my old issues of Photo District News tucked away in a box recently. For those who don’t know, PDN was a newspaper-slash-magazine that covered the advertising photography world—and the photo industry at large, which used to be massive.

Flipping through them, I was hit with a mix of nostalgia and disbelief. First, the photos. Some of what was held up as top-tier work back then… just isn’t. A lot of it was garbage—2005-era visual gimmicks marketed under the guise of serious photography.

I spent an hour thumbing through the pages and was struck by how many of the companies no longer exist. And neither do the careers of many of the photographers who graced the glossy full-page pages in those issues.

There was a reason people chased that work so hard: the money. Back then, a top advertising photographer could rake in millions per year. Even middle-tier shooters were making $20,000 to $30,000 a day. Travel paid, assistants covered, licensing fees on top. Now, most of that cash flows to Google and Facebook. The money didn’t vanish—it was redirected.

A friend of mine lived that dream. Made real money, then watched it all collapse, especially after the 2008 recession. We spoke a few years ago when he was doing $200 Craigslist photo gigs—if he could get them. Now he’s 60 years old and doing construction.

His work used to grace the pages of magazines such as Vanity Fair, and he worked on ad campaigns for some major companies. Living in NYC was expensive, and he was soon priced out, like so many.

What happened to advertising photography is brutal, but it’s not an isolated story. As I read those old PDNs, I saw the warning signs for newspapers, too. One headline asked, “Can good photography save newspapers?” Well, we know the answer to that now. Full disclosure: I was an award-winning photojournalist at a local paper. I got laid off in 2019.

The disruption of digital photography, the iPhone, the internet, and social media didn’t just take jobs. It stripped entire professions of their ability to do the work. And while the art world dismissed commercial photographers as not making “real” art, photojournalists weren’t spared either. I was once told that photojournalism is just “exploitation.” Maybe they weren’t wrong. I dunno, does it even matter now?

There is barely a market now for serious photojournalism, most of what gets used are stock photos that cost the end user a few dollars, or maybe a few cents, not hundreds or thousands of dollars, and the news cycle is instant, the photos may be valueless before they leave the camera if someone else posts a video first from a cell phone. If you get that “million-dollar image” … or video, the TV stations will hound you wanting it for free, with rights forever, of course.

The old guard—those legendary war photographers who documented history for Life, Look, and later Time—have mostly faded from public view, along with the magazines they worked for. Time is the last one standing. I’m not counting the zombie Newsweek, which died and came back online as something… else. Those magazines once had influence and budgets. Now, all we’ve got is clickbait, conspiracy sludge, and algorithm-fueled disinformation. The internet became a digital billboard, and that billboard now swings elections.

Thumbing through PDN made me feel sad. The National Press Photographers Association’s magazine is also gone. It stopped printing years ago. And now the NPPA itself is barely hanging on—it laid off its entire staff recently, including the editor of the magazine. It’s nearly insolvent.

And while we’re talking about collapse, the Senate just voted to eliminate all funding for PBS and NPR—two of the last remaining publicly accessible news sources. Meanwhile, private equity has spent the last decade gutting newspapers. Hedge funds swooped in and bought them like distressed assets—because that’s all they are now. Most of what’s left is owned by billionaires or Wall Street firms/foreign investors. And let’s be honest, those owners have agendas—and it’s not what the GOP wants you to believe.

They handed trillions in tax cuts to the ultra-rich while sticking it to working people. Again.

I could go on. It’s ironic watching the billionaire-funded political class squirm because a Democratic Socialist won a primary in New York City. But maybe they should see him for what he is: the canary in the coal mine. A response to tech-bro exploitation and gig economy disenfranchisement. A warning signal that millions of Americans—many highly skilled—have been stripped of their livelihoods.

To the billionaires, we’ve all been turned into commodities, and it doesn’t matter how good our work is, that is how I feel. Our only value is how much money they can make from us.

After watching a documentary about how much stuff we throw out, how our society is a throw-away society, I was at the Goodwill, and I remarked to a woman, It’s crazy how much stuff gets thrown out.

You know what she said: it’s not just stuff, it’s people, too.

So, I’m one of the lucky ones still doing this. But I know many better photographers who were pushed out by a broken economy. And it’s not just us. Everyone knows someone who lost a career, a house, a dream. That’s why we see so many people living in the streets of what’s still—on paper—the richest country in human history.

It’s enough to piss a person off. And it should.

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