The Setup
Diane Mercer shoots film. Not because she is nostalgic. Not because she thinks digital is cheating. She shoots film because she decided, very deliberately, that slowing down was the only business decision that made sense anymore.
She is 34. She has been shooting in Chicago for about nine years... starting in Logan Square back when the rent was survivable, building her portfolio one underpaid editorial gig at a time. By 2022 she had a steady-enough client list. Corporate headshots. Some restaurant work. A few editorial spreads for local magazines that no longer exist. She was making money the way most photographers make money: volume, hustle, a calendar that never had enough breathing room.
She was not famous. She was not struggling either. She was exactly the kind of photographer the industry has a million of... talented, invisible, replaceable.
Then the market cracked open.
The Problem
Nobody tells you this but the stock photo collapse happened faster than anyone was ready for. By the end of 2023, the platforms that used to pay Diane a few hundred dollars per licensed image had flooded with AI-generated alternatives that clients could buy for two dollars. Sometimes less. Sometimes free.
The truth is the math stopped working almost overnight. A restaurant that used to spend $400 licensing three of her food photos could now generate fifty images from a prompt in about eight minutes. The images were not always better. Sometimes they were obviously fake, hands with six fingers, tiles that repeated in uncanny patterns. But they were cheap. And cheap wins a lot of arguments when margins are thin.
Diane watched her stock licensing income drop by about 60 percent in eighteen months. She tracked it in a spreadsheet she kept on her phone... updated it every week like a wound she needed to check. The corporate headshot work held for a while. But even there, a few clients started asking whether she could just shoot faster, produce more, cut the sitting fee. The pressure was always toward volume. Toward efficiency. Toward making her work cheaper and faster, which made it indistinguishable from every other photographer doing the same thing under the same ceiling lights.
She told me she sat in her apartment in Pilsen one night in early 2024 and thought about quitting. Not dramatically. Just quietly, the way you think about quitting something when you are exhausted and the spreadsheet is open and you cannot remember why you started.
What They Did
She did not quit. But she did something that felt, at the time, like the kind of thing you do right before you quit.
She raised her prices. Significantly. And she started shooting only on film.
Not exclusively Leica... she had been using a Contax 645 for medium format and an old Nikon FM2 for street work, and she kept both. But she stopped offering digital packages entirely. She told her existing clients about the shift in a very short email that basically said: my work is changing, the process is slower, the cost reflects that, here is what the new packages look like.
A few clients left immediately. She expected that. What she did not expect was what came next.
She started posting her process. Not the finished images... the process. Photos of the light meter. The canister of Kodak Portra 400 she loaded in the parking lot of a restaurant shoot in the West Loop. The contact sheets with her grease pencil marks on them. She wrote a short note with each one, usually three or four sentences, explaining what she was thinking when she made the frame. Not technical. Personal. Specific to that moment, that light, that particular Tuesday afternoon in October when the clouds did something unusual over the lake.
She was not building a brand. She was just telling the truth about how she worked.
Over about five months she did this consistently. No strategy deck. No content calendar. She just showed the work, showed the slowness, explained the choices.
What Happened
The first signal that something was shifting came from a referral. A branding client in Wicker Park had seen her posts and reached out not to ask about pricing... to ask about availability. That is a different kind of inquiry. One is a transaction. The other is a commitment.
By the fall of 2024, Diane had a waitlist. Not a long one at first... three clients. Then seven. Then she stopped counting and started quoting six to eight week lead times as standard.
Her average project fee went from roughly $1,800 for a commercial shoot to somewhere between $4,200 and $6,500 depending on scope. She was doing fewer shoots per month. She was making more money per year. She was also, by her own account, making better work than she had made in years because she had the time and the margin to actually care about each frame.
The thing that sealed it for me was when she described a call with a client who asked her, halfway through a booking conversation, whether she could also deliver some quick digital shots the same day for social. She said no. Politely. Clearly. No. The client booked her anyway and paid the full rate.
That is scarcity working. Not manufactured scarcity. Not artificial urgency. Real scarcity, because there are only so many Diane Mercers and they do not work faster just because you need them to.
She also stopped submitting to stock platforms entirely. Her archive of film scans she sells directly, through her own site, at prices she sets. She licenses them for specific uses with specific terms. She sold three prints to a hotel project in the South Loop in early 2025 for more than she made in an entire month of stock licensing two years prior.
What I Learned
I have thought about Diane's story probably a hundred times since she first told me about it over coffee at a place on 18th street. And I keep landing on the same four things.
First: competing on volume against AI is a war you cannot win. The machines generate more, faster, cheaper. The moment you accept that and stop trying to out-produce them, you are free to do something they genuinely cannot do... make work that carries a point of view, a fingerprint, a specific human behind every frame. That is not nostalgia. That is positioning.
Second: process is the product now. Diane's posts about contact sheets and light meters were not marketing in any traditional sense. They were proof. Proof that a human made these choices. Proof that something slow and considered happened before the final image existed. Buyers who care about that will pay for it. And in a market flooded with instant AI generation, the number of buyers who care about it is growing, not shrinking.
Third: price is a signal. When Diane raised her prices, she was not just changing a number. She was changing who would call her. Low prices attract clients who are optimizing for cost. Higher prices attract clients who are optimizing for outcome. Those are different relationships. The second kind is better in almost every way.
Fourth, and this is the one that keeps me up at night: the research is starting to back this up. There is a line of thinking now, documented in economic studies of art markets, that when AI-generated images flood a category and drive down the average price, they simultaneously create a new premium tier for work that is verifiably human-made. The floor drops. The ceiling rises. The artists who survive are not the ones who kept up with the machines. They are the ones who stepped away from the race entirely and built something the machines could not replicate.
Diane did not know she was running an economics experiment. She just knew the spreadsheet was not working and she had to try something different.
The truth is she was terrified the whole time. She told me that too. Three beers in, on a Tuesday, at Skylark. She was genuinely scared that slowing down meant falling behind.
Turns out slowing down was the whole answer.