I wonder why we have come to use “amateur” as a pejorative adjective when applied to photographers. People tend to elide the gap between the trite definition of an amateur — somebody who doesn’t earn a living or much money taking pictures — and the more condescending definition — somebody who is inept at taking pictures. But this confuses two separate and not necessarily related categories — quality and remuneration. I think the freedom from remuneration offers a valuable freedom, a freedom that many people claim is at the heart of making art.
Amateur photographers are most likely to be taking photographs because they love taking photographs, and perhaps looking at them. Maybe part of that experience includes buying the latest gear. Maybe it takes them to unusual places (or to the well-worn places frequented by so many photography workshops). It doesn’t really matter, it seems to me, any more than it matters that people who will never be professional sprinters buy expensive running shoes and shorts to run on the local track, or so many aging men spend thousands on bikes and lycra that doesn’t belong on middle-aged bodies but will never ride in the Tour. The point of being an amateur is merely and simply loving what you do while not getting paid to do it.
It seems to me that amateurs photographers, because they don’t make photographs in exchange for money, have the freedom to make the photographs they want as opposed to the photographs somebody else wants. They might squander that freedom, but…. That doesn’t mean that any amateur photographer’s photographs are good or would sell, but art need not be good or have any market value. Not being a camera for hire liberates amateurs from the constraints that risk limiting the professional photographer.
Maybe, just maybe, the term amateur is an expression of envy as it is anything else because somewhere inside people long for the freedom to create art just for themselves.
Coda: Obviously, the economy of “likes” and “followers” that is the currency of social networks and drives the mind-numbing monotony of popular photos imposes different and perhaps more rigid constraints.