By Lana Lee

Photo Credit: Leia Jospe

The year was circa 2006: the era of MySpace and the “scene” culture of snake bite piercings, local shows, studded belts, bright hair bows and black eyeliner. The School of Rock was putting on a show in a tiny New Jersey venue stuffed with sweaty bodies, bass strums and drum beats. A single fan circulated the thick air around the dark room as a handful of photographers and masses of fans pushed and gathered around the stage. I was a high school sophomore who managed to force my way to the front, clutching a tiny point-and-shoot. However, most of the show, I was clearly outdone, as I stood next to a 14-year-old girl with braces and a huge digital SLR camera that was constantly clicking and nudging against me. Who does she think she is? I was affronted. Maybe I was envious. But as the night wore on, we reached a silent understanding – we were short girls at a crowded show. We needed to be at the front. It was a small space and we had pictures to take.

At the end of the set, instead of melting away with the crowds, she started throwing small, rectangular cards all over the sticky floor and the stage of the venue. I watched for a few minutes as she pulled them from her bag and tossed them around like confetti. I couldn’t help but ask her what she was doing. She handed me one of the tiny business cards – “Leia Jospé Photography” – and she said, “I want to get my name out there.”

Five years later, that now 19-year-old girl is a student by day studying Design and Technology at Parsons, and a successful freelance photographer by night. And her images can be found on Vogue.com, BrooklynVegan, Blender, NYMAG.com, Stereogum, the Wall Street Journal, Gothamist, MySpace’s front page and all over the not-so-mythical “out there.”

But freelance photography – freelance anything – is a tough industry. With the onset of the digital era, the landscape is constantly changing. As the cameras get better, more amateurs are competing alongside professionals. The industry is a mob scene. While the Internet has provided many outlets to publish photos, there are also more people to take them. In a world where numerous photographers are constantly jostling for a view, this barely-20-year old has already gained respect, recognition and a steady stream of work. “I think if you can support yourself on photography alone, if you can get a consistent work flow, you don’t have to worry so much about the five thousand other people in your area doing the same type of thing you are,” said Jospé. “It’s pushing people who have actual talent to step it up, to really make their photos stand out from everyone else’s.”

So far, there are a few defining moments that stand out to Jospé in terms of her pursuit as a photographer. She recalls avidly following an online forum and reading about a young girl who always discussed winning an award and displaying her work in a gallery. “I remember messaging her and asking her how she takes photos which is such a ridiculous question in retrospect, but I really wanted to know,” said Jospé. “I don’t remember what she said but I remember getting a point & shoot and taking photos with that, not good ones.” When Jospé entered high school, her parents bought her a several hundred-dollar SLR camera. From then on, she took it everywhere and documented everything.

Then began a slow climb for Jospé, taking numerous photos, editing, watermarking her name on them, uploading them to Flickr and adding them to groups online, contacting anyone and everyone, and shooting local shows and concerts that other photographers wouldn’t shoot. It was countless nights of meeting the right people, building relationships and utilizing every outlet to promote her work. “If you’re young, at least when I started shooting, people did not take me seriously,” said Jospé. “I was 15 and had braces. If you were a photographer in the scene for however many years, would you take me seriously? Probably not. Establishing your place in a scene, making sure people know you’re not just ‘some little girl with a camera’ was pretty hard at first.”

Photo Credit: Leia Jospe

After all, anyone can pick up a professional camera and digital cameras make it easy to take professional-style photos. “When I went to shows in early high school, there would be one or two people shooting the show. You go to a show now and the entire first few rows of the audience have a camera in hand,” said Jospé. Worldwide shipments of digital cameras in 2010 reached 121.5 million units, marking a record high, according to the Camera and Imaging Products Association (CIPA), which began compiling records in 1999 when digital cameras were still new on the scene. Since the onset of the technological era, there has been a steady growth in production and shipment of digital cameras. For 2011, the forecast is for a 7.8 percent increase.

The real challenge for aspiring professionals is being visible – and having a vision – in the growing, digital world of photography. A distinct aesthetic can help distinguish the artist from the quagmire of competition. “Most cameras today make it so that you pretty much need no technique to take a photo – the easier, the better,” said Jospé. “With the accessibility of a camera that requires no technique and every other factor like social networking, I could go on about all of the things that have made photography the choice hobby of every single person. The one thing that you can do to differentiate yourself from the millions of other photographers is to have a unique ‘eye.’”

But photography is also more than just a good picture. Angela Jimenez, 36, is a photography instructor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and has been a freelance photographer for the past decade. The democratization of the Internet is both a blessing and a curse, says Jimenez. “There are some great opportunities online right now to do essays and projects, but it is also tricky because you need to get paid as a professional and sometimes the amateur photographers do not abide by the same standards. It’s a little Wild West right now.”

The digital era has paved the way for online organizations like Talenthouse, a global social networking website that provides the creative community with opportunities to gain recognition, as well as collaborate with established artists and brands. The company recently held a contest that asked for a photograph based on the theme of “love.” The prize: the opportunity to travel with and photograph Maroon 5 on their 2011 world tour, attracting thousands of entries.

Photo Credit: Amy Wallen

One of the entries was submitted by Amy Wallen, a 23-year-old freelance photographer based in small town Hueysville, Kentucky. She wanted to break out and head somewhere more fitting for her grander photography dreams. For the Talenthouse contest, Wallen brainstormed various ideas from fields to masks to bloody t-shirts before finally settling on intertwining rusted chains – the idea of being connected to another person forever – around a young couple. After that, it was one endless prayer and a flurry of mass text messages and emails to every person she had ever known to vote for her submission online. Her strategy worked and she was one of the five winning photographers.

She hopes the win will give her a platform to begin her career. “I feel like I was always too scared to make photography my career, because of the unsure and uncharted territories as far as success in the field,” said Wallen. “You can take so many different routes, and it can be hard to find your true calling within the art. But I truly do believe that photography is a sustainable career, both physically as well as emotionally. Gaining fame is just a perk – a pretty cool one.”

Such websites and contests present both good news and bad news: technology can help a photographer get his or her work out there, but on the other hand, anyone has the ability to beat out professionals and long-time photographers with the right camera and the access to social media. The playing field is wide open, but it is also more crowded and competitive.

Despite the odds, Jospé, the tiny girl from Tuxedo Park, New York was all about getting photo passes and making contacts. BrooklynVegan pulled her photos from her Flickr page and eventually contacted her to shoot for the blog regularly; Vogue editors saw Jospé’s photograph of the band Beach Fossils and wanted to use the image for their weekend guide-esque section called “THE short LIST.” And so her contact pool and social network and domino effect of opportunity grew. “In a lot of situations it doesn’t matter how good you are, if you don’t know anyone, it’s going to be hard to get jobs,” said Jospé. “You might have the best photos of some event, but the other guy might know the PR person.”

Photo Credit: Leia Jospe

Beyond recognition, getting paid for photographs is another struggle, especially when so many people are willing to work for free or for some other type of payment. A lot of the time, Jospé trades her photography for compensation other than money – free passes to shows, care packages, meals. Once she did a shoot for lunch and a pair of shoes. According to Jospé, her diverse collection of photographs get sold to everyone from older crowds who are drawn to her more “fine art” type photographs to young, huge fans of certain bands.

But Jospe’s specialty centers on people. Her distinct style is organic, “in-the-moment” shots – filled with youth, raw energy and ringing clarity. “There are a lot of things I think that make me the photographer that I am, but it’s mostly just how my personality gets represented through my photographs,” said Jospé. “I don’t think music is my main subject anymore, I think it is more to do with the culture around the music: the people, the places, etc.” She added with a laugh, “Oh, also if it’s a photo of a drunken looking couple, dirty on the floor of some ‘DIY space,’ making out half naked, I probably took it.”

But whether the pictures involve people having cigarettes and coffee on a summer day or bathing in sweat and screams at a crowded music festival, Jospe’s images make the viewer feel like a participant in the action. They feel familiar. As the late photographer Ansel Adams said, “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.”

Photo Credit: Leia Jospe

So a typical shoot for Jospé – and for many other photographers – is a candid one. For one photo shoot, she worked with bassist Mathieu Santos of famous indie band Ra Ra Riot. With film and digital camera in hand, they wandered around her Brooklyn neighborhood for hours and found brightly colored buildings and walls. “He said he wanted ‘color’ which is hard in the dead of winter when everything still looks dead, but I made it work,” said Jospé. “Every time we saw something we liked, we took a few photos in front of it. I really like a relaxed, laid back shoot – those photos always come out the best. I really talk to the person I’m shooting; that way, the emotions that come through are legitimate.”

After the shoot, Jospé spends hours sorting through and editing them to perfection on a diet of late nights and caffeine. And then the cycle begins again. And again. It’s a familiar scenario, said Jimenez. “I think we will see someone win a big award and think they have made it, but what you don’t see are the years and years that someone spent in obscurity doing this because it was their calling.”

Due to her persistence, fellow photographers and fans can recognize Jospé’s aesthetic. As Jospé says, people who are already familiar with her body of work and type of subject matter would be able to distinguish a “Leia photo” in a pile of non-Leia photos. And now, she works on a regular basis. “I think if you’ve made good connections and are really passionate about it you could sustain a career on photography alone,” said Jospé.

Photo Credit: Leia Jospe

A “good eye,” creativity and technical mastery are essential qualities for a photographer, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. For some aspiring professionals, college degrees and formal training programs in photography can hone artistic and technical finesse, along with courses in business and marketing.

Business skills are more critical than ever for professionals, according to Jimenez, because the traditional newspaper field is changing and dying, and the survivors need to adapt. It is more than being an artist. It is also about having business acumen and marketing savvy. Jimenez contributes to the New York Times, the Newark Star-Ledger and the Getty Images agency for stock work. She also has private clientele from people to non-profit organizations. It took her eight years to consider herself a small business owner, not just a photographer. “I feel like surviving and standing out [in the industry] are two different things,” said Jimenez. “You do need recognition – awards, exhibitions, grants, publications – and you need to know people to keep this ball rolling. It takes a lot of work to create that buzz and people work really hard at that.”

So the definition of a success story varies from photographer to photographer. But at the root is the story any artist has the potential to tell with a camera, a lot of time, a bit of luck, a point of view, and a hunger to share it all. The photo industry is about pursuing a passion – separating the people who do it for art and the people who do it for money, believes Kristen Yoonsoo Kim, the head photographer and writer for the music blog The Morning After Pills. She approaches photography as a “side project to life” instead of a career or claim to fame.

For Shengyuan Hsu, fame and money is not even a part of the equation. It is simply about taking photographs. Hsu – who has published a book of his works, took campaign trail photographs of the Mayor of Tapei and did some freelance work for GQ Taiwan – does not consider photography his job, even though his freelance stints are currently his only source of income. “No matter what my career is or will be, photography is a part of my life now,” said Hsu. “I never really considered it a ‘career.’ If people like my pictures and want to hire me, fine. If not, I can still survive and keep taking pictures and producing work.”

Photo Credit: Shengyuan "Ray" Hsu

Another photographer with a similar approach is 25-year-old New York native, RIT graduate and Brooklyn hipster Andrew Lipovsky. A passion that stemmed from a high school class resulted in his full-time job as a freelance photographer. His clientele runs the gamut from musicians to magazines (Alternative Press, Insider, etc.) to modeling agencies. For Lipovsky, making enough money to live comfortably is a sign of success, but at its core, working in photography is a labor of love.

“It is waking up every day knowing that I have an incredible job, and opportunities ahead of me,” said Lipovsky. “Not everyone loves what they do the way photographers do; and I think that if you love your job, you love what you get to do every day, and it makes you smile for no reason. That’s success.”

And for the past six years, Lipovsky has survived in New York City by selling on his photographs alone. Back home in Rochester, his name was known and had a constant stream of work. Living in the big city, he acknowledges one has to fight for every job. The business is changing and challenging. But like many photographers, Lipovsky believes it to be an industry worth navigating.

Photo Credit: Andrew Lipovsky

“The reliability of constant work has gone down quite a bit for non-established photographers, and even some established ones because of the economy and the rapid decline of print media, but people always want and need photos,” said Lipovsky. “They can’t make a machine that can create ideas, light and shoot the way a human can…or can they?”