In late 2016, I discovered a platform that had launched a few years earlier. It was called Unsplash, and as a passionate (albeit relatively new) photographer, I was drawn to how it described itself: part social network, part free stock image repository.
For creators, the site promised the things Instagram had begun to lose: visibility, community and, most importantly, opportunity.
I joined and uploaded a few photos from my adventures. Soon, I was seeing my work pop up on websites including Yahoo Finance, SmartCompany and BuzzFeed.
An image featured on the website TechRadar.
An image featured on the web version of Mens Health.
For a while, I enjoyed wondering where my work would pop up next. Then I noticed the same sites using my images for financial gain again and again. Suddenly, it felt less like I was contributing to a community and more like I was contributing to the devaluation of commercial photography.
I stopped using the platform in 2019, but left my previously uploaded work accessible.
A photo trip with my brother to Melbourne near Christmas resulted in this photograph. It remains popular on the photo-sharing site with over 39 million views and 300,000+ downloads.
A few of my images, such as Christmas Shopping (above), tend to do the rounds every festive season, appearing on news sites and in magazines. I don’t mind that in itself.
To be honest, I love the idea of Unsplash as I understood it when I joined: a community for photographers that also provided images to small businesses, not-for-profits and community organisations that couldn’t afford professional photography.
These days, it just feels far, far removed from that.
It doesn’t sit right when big businesses (worth millions, if not billions) source free images from sites like Unsplash when they could easily afford to pay creators, but choose not to.
I guess I’m just a grumpy photographer who remembers a time when the world cared a little bit more about community and a little bit less about maximising shareholder profits at the expense of everyone else.
At the time of writing, my Unsplash images have been viewed 152,302,368 times and are edging towards 1 million downloads (currently 958,854).
In 2021, Unsplash was sold to Getty Images for an undisclosed sum.