Russian Professional Photography Booming Thanks To Social Networks

For quite a while I’ve been watching social networking booming in Russia and it has been a spectacular process here in the country with practically everyone now having a profile on at least one of the two major social networks – Odnoklassniki or Vkontakte. One economic effect of this boom has been obvious for quite a while: many office employees spent huge portions of their time chatting on the social networks with friends and flirting with strangers. It is no wonder that many companies started to ban such social networks in their offices. But now it turns out that there is one industry that is actually benefiting from this process – photography.

With popularity of social networks growing at an incredible speed and many people spending a good portion of their time chatting to their friends online instead of going with those very friends out for a real-life conversation, we saw an interesting phenomenon as a new type of users arrived: middle-aged people who were not really tech-savvy and simply wanted to connect to their long-lost friends from the past.

Many of these people only used their home computers (frequently the computer was mainly used by their children actually) for social networking only and in some situations they had no digital photos at all – let alone portraits they could use on their freshly-built social networking profiles. So they rushed to photo studios where in the past they made photos for passports and visas – but now their major requirement was to make them look more beautiful and remove a few years from their faces because they all wanted to look younger. Because of one such woman who could not get the results she hoped for I once spent 30 minutes waiting for photos I needed for a visa because the photographer could never get to print them for me while working with the woman.

It was quite a long time ago and these were only the first examples of what would soon become a total craziness for a good portion of female population of Russian social networks. And now it turns out that this craziness is rapidly turning into a profitable business for people who know how to handle a camera as many women don’t want to be satisfied with regular photos made during parties or walks with their boyfriends – they now want professional photo sessions to look their best on the profiles.

And professional photographers have also learned what viral growth is: they make excellent shots for one girl, she uses one of them as her avatar and uploads some more to her albums – and the photographer has a long and rapidly growing waiting list of her friends aspiring to look equally cool on their profiles.

The photographers in my city claim that their largest and fastest growing audience (in addition to traditional boom of wedding photography in summer months) are unmarried girls aged 15 to 30. And while these girls quote various reasons for paying for a professional photo session, including improving their self-esteem or giving themselves a treat not unlike a visit to SPA, they all have at least one thing in common: they invariably use the photos as user pictures on the social networks they are members of.

But some girls go even further and only clip some parts of their bodies to use them in avatars – like their cleavage or even buttocks. This may look sexy in some situations (especially if a woman actually uses the social network in question to hunt for one-night affairs) but in most cases it looks ridiculous especially when put together with a real name and a job title because this is not what you expect to see representing a CMO of a large corporation.

The price for a 2-hour photo session with 200 photos as a result (with 20 of them processed in Photoshop for better effect) varies close to $100 which is not such a small amount for a Russian girl, especially if she is still a student so this is quite an investment. But the worst part is that many of these girls don’t know a thing about privacy and somehow think that if they upload something to a social network, no one but their friends will see – and risk facing unpleasant surprises in the future if they discover their nu photos on some porn sites. But I guess understanding of privacy will come with time as people get more comfortable with the overall idea of social networking and learn some netiquette – which will eventually cut the profits of the photographers who are currently enjoying the benefits of ‘social networking photography’ boom.

Via (in Russian)