Collab Culture or Creative Exploitation? The Silent Death of Fashion Photography

Fashion photography today is bleeding—and most people are pretending it’s a fair exchange.

In the current “collab” culture, photography has quietly been reduced to free labor. Brands, fashion designers, models, influencers—everyone wants free shoots. They dress it up with a fancy word: collaboration. But let’s be honest—most of these collaborations are one-sided, and the photographer is almost always the one paying the price.

A fashion brand sells its clothes and earns money. A designer builds a label and charges for it. Models use photographs to build portfolios, gain followers, attract paid campaigns, and eventually turn visibility into income. But the photographer? They are expected to work for “exposure,” “credits,” or the promise of future work that rarely comes.

No one stops to calculate the photographer’s investment. Cameras that cost lakhs. Lenses, lights, modifiers, software subscriptions, computers, storage, backups. Add to that travel, location costs, assistants, and countless unpaid hours of editing. And before all this—years of learning, failing, practicing, upgrading skills. Photography is not a button press; it’s a craft refined with time, money, and experience.

The most ironic part? When a model is new, they want photographers for free to build their portfolio. Once they get a few thousand followers on Instagram, they suddenly become “professionals” who don’t work for free anymore. But they still expect photographers to shoot without pay—because “it’s a collab.”

How is this fair?

If visibility is payment, why doesn’t the photographer’s landlord accept exposure instead of rent? Why doesn’t the camera store accept Instagram tags instead of money? Why is the photographer the only one expected to survive on appreciation?

Sadly, many brands and models don’t even consider paying a photographer’s travel or food—forget fees, survival itself is overlooked.

Collaboration should mean equal value exchange—not creative exploitation. If a brand is earning, the photographer deserves a share. If a model is building a career, the photographer is helping build it—and that has value. Respecting photography means respecting the person behind the camera, not just the image in front of it.

Fashion photography cannot survive on freebies and ego. Creativity doesn’t grow where respect is missing. Until we start valuing photographers as professionals—not service providers begging for exposure—we will continue to drain the very talent that makes fashion look aspirational in the first place.

It’s time to stop normalizing free labor. It’s time to pay photographers.