Summing up the obvious, professional photography has gone the way of porn: Amateurs, willing to be paid less, dominate. There’s an endless supply of shutterbugs giddy for exposure and not giving damn about getting fair price for the goods.

Commissioned work by professional photographers is officially outmoded with lucky shots from Flickr by everyone with a camera ever. The biz has ceased to be sustainable and struggling photography school grads are bitching about aging housewives making mortgage payment money off of Getty Images in cahoots with Flickr.

Getty Images licensed 1.4 million photos in 2005 and that number’s up to 22 million last year, all due to user-generated content. And though an amateur may not be able to repeat that glory shot on demand, there’s more where that came from (like 4 billion). |NYT|

Here’s a photo amateur I took that The Gothamist got from Flickr for their blog. Why not?