Designing the Photography Value Framework (ver.1)

In the last post, I reviewed reasons why I started photography because understanding myself is essential to back up the value of photography. Let me discuss each piece of this issue one by one from here.

Photography is used by quite a few people. A few photos are sold for extremely expensive prices at the contemporary art market. Some photographers take wedding photos and make their livings, and some win their salaries by taking commercial photography. They can earn money because their photos are valuable to somebody.

But most of the photos around the world are now taken by non-professionals. They take photos mainly by their smartphones. They take selfies, and they take photos of their dishes and everything. Their photos might not look fine, but they take such photos because they are valuable to them.

It was simply confusing to me.

It was simply confusing to me because I couldn't believe that it was possible to find any common value there while quite different types of people take photos in quite different styles. The fact is that they find some values there. People find values in their taken-by-smartphone-photos while people also find values in fine art photography.

I had thought that training for taking visually fine photos was essential to improve the value of photography. But it doesn't seem to be like this. It was confusing. It was contradicting. It was NOT convincing at all.

After a few months of trial and error in my mind, I have reached one idea.

The value of photography can be represented by one factor, that is, how photo is connected to history of the target group. This mechanism can be modeled by 3C Framework, which is often used in marketing industry, as below.

Note that this is the first version of my Photography Value Framework. I'm thinking of adopting this framework to many cases and revise it if needed in other posts later.

Photography Value Framework is very much like marketing, and not like photography technique in usual photo talks. This is why this framework is missing all the visual elements of photography.

I would like to discuss more detail about the framework in my future posts so that I would end up being able to describe the value of the photo below.