Keaton! I think I sort of disagree with this! Here’s why:
Anyone pursuing making a living out of photography — or any other kind of art for that matter — typically has the goal of supporting themselves full time with their art, right?
The logic is usually something along these lines: I’ll do it on my own, I’ll learn a lot, I’ll work my ass off, I’ll work my way up the ladder, I’ll be successful! Those people are usually under 25, I’ve noticed. It’s a young way to think, in my insignificant opinion.
But in general (this doesn’t apply to everyone, obviously), that very rarely works out. I have a lot of friends who are photographers, some have even had really impressive gigs. How many support themselves with full time photography? Zero. And if they ever do at all, it’s for short stints between day jobs.
Some people are perfectly happy with that. Great! But many would prefer to make art full time.
So each person pursuing art as a career has a choice to make: Either learn on your own and hopefully work your way up to being successful, or take a calculated risk with education to speed up the learning process.
Most of us know that you often get hired based on your portfolio. So who’s the bigger idiot: Potentially spending years doing mediocre work in order to learn through mistakes and then eventually have a portfolio that’s hopefully presentable or fast track the process and condense it to only a couple of years before you most likely have a decent portfolio?
What you pay for with school isn’t always the education necessarily, it’s how quickly you develop your work versus trying to do it on your own. (Assuming you picked a good school to attend.)
There are obviously exceptions to the above, and I’m a bit biased because I go to a portfolio school. But I made the decision to go to a portfolio as I got closer to 30 and the youthful optimism was beaten out of me by life. So many of my friends, as well as myself, tried for so long to scrape by as “starving artists.” And you reach a point in your life when having to make the decision between paying the electric bill and going to the grocery store stops being romantic, cool, and artsy very quickly.
I did photography exclusively, no other jobs, for 3.5 years. So I have a bit of a bias, I will admit. Within a little over a year after I started I already had Warner Bros. Records as a client and things were going well from there.
Of course, in the past couple months things went downhill, I had to take a job. But, I’m not $90k in debt, I’m $0k in debt, it’s not a big deal. I can do assisting jobs and learn if there’s something I need to learn, yet I don’t have a big debt hanging over my head the entire time.
