Does photography still have anything to say outside the market?

A photographer's reflections on a world that has forgotten why it exists

Photography and capitalism were born in the same era. That is not a coincidence.

They share the same fascination with reproducibility, the same faith in technology, the same appetite for circulation. What perhaps no one foresaw was how quickly the first would become the docile instrument of the second.

I have been working for years on long-form photographic series — Todtnauberg, Unheimlichkeit, Resonances, Eschaton. Projects that take a decade to mature, rooted in philosophy, European history, memory. And each time I look at the way the photography world actually functions, I find myself asking the same question:

Who is photography still speaking to today?

The reign of intermediaries

Between a photographer and their potential audience, a dizzying ecosystem has taken shape: galleries, agencies, agents, freelance curators, art advisors, fairs, commissioners, platforms. Every link in the chain takes its tithe, its share of visibility, its commission.

The contemporary gallery no longer simply sells prints. It controls demand, sets prices, attaches each work to a marketable narrative, and places images with collectors it has itself defined as "the right ones". The opening reception is not a social accident: it is the site where symbolic value is manufactured, where the market disguises itself as sociability.

Major galleries are transforming into international mega-structures. Small ones are closing. The result: an oligopoly that concentrates decisions, taste, and legitimacy in an ever-shrinking number of hands.

The manufacturing of the legitimate path

The mechanism begins long before the market — in schools, competitions, residencies.

The field has built a cursus honorum: prestigious art school, research master's, residency here, prize there, shortlist at Arles or Paris Photo, gallery representation, fair. This paved pathway is not a guarantee of quality — it is a guarantee of recognisability.

As a result, festivals function less as spaces of discovery than as ceremonies of confirmation. One arrives with a CV. One leaves with a slightly heavier CV.

And those who work outside — the self-taught photographer, the one based in the provinces, the one who produces slowly and silently — will remain invisible for a long time. Not because their work is inadequate, but because the conditions for its visibility have not been met.

The homogenisation of form

The works circulating in major international fairs increasingly resemble one another. This is not accidental: the market selects what is legible — what can be attached to a clear narrative, described on a wall label, resold.

Complexity, ambiguity, slowness, resistance to quick interpretation — everything that gives serious photographic practice its richness — have become handicaps.

Melancholy, slowness, black-and-white are now sold the way luxury is sold: with the same codes, the same rhetoric of scarcity. Walter Benjamin saw it coming: the aura that technical reproduction was supposed to dissolve, the market artificially reconstructs — because it needs it to function.

So, what can be done?

We need to let go of a stubborn illusion: the idea that "existing outside the system" means not existing at all. That is precisely what the system wants us to believe. The works that truly matter have rarely followed the institutional path that was retrofitted around them, after the fact, to grant them retrospective legitimacy.

Three territories where something alive is still possible:

The photobook as free territory. Not the prestige coffee-table book, but the book as a form of thought — where the author still holds every thread: sequence, rhythm, silence, paper, price. The tools are now accessible: print-on-demand, risograph, small-run offset. Self-publishing is not an admission of weakness — it is a strategy. It creates a direct relationship between author and reader, with no layer of market bureaucracy in between.

Showing work outside the recognised circuits. Between the major gallery and total invisibility lies a fabric of spaces we tend to overlook because they are not part of the prescribed circuit: libraries, cultural centres in small towns, independent bookshops, associations. These places reach audiences who never set foot in a commercial gallery. The untrained eye, the unconditioned gaze, is the one that forces a work to justify itself by something other than its market value.

Long time as resistance. The market runs on permanent acceleration — new series, new posts, new CV line. Working on a single project for ten years, refusing to show unfinished work, accepting that certain images take years to reveal what they contain — all of this is radically incompatible with the logic of the contemporary market. But it may be the condition for producing a body of work that resists its era and, perhaps, outlives it.

Photographing against

This is not about rejecting every institution, every intermediary. The history of photography is also a history of courageous galleries, devoted editors, curators who defended difficult work.

But it is about refusing passivity in the face of a system that has replaced the question "is this a strong work?" with the question "will it sell?" — and has convinced many artists that these are the same question.

Vilém Flusser wrote that photography is fundamentally in the service of the apparatus that produces it. The photographer who does not reflect on this servitude becomes, without knowing it, the functionary of a machine. The alternative is not to step outside the apparatus — we cannot — but to play with it, to turn it against itself, to make it a tool of one's own freedom rather than a mechanism of obedience.

This is not a romantic posture. It is a necessity, if one still believes that photography can be something other than a derivative product of the real.