The complaints about undercutting real photographers actually kind of amused me. The big political parties spend literally half a billion dollars a year on advertising. If they find a photo good enough to go on the front page of their website, they are perfectly willing to make that photographer's year, and they're not going to skimp on something that important. There's no undercutting going on here - they decided that this guy's photographs were the best options. Maybe it's because the marginal value of a higher-quality photograph is not worth the money for some reason, in which case political photography as a business is doomed. Maybe it's because he's not making technically great photographs but is somehow better at political photographs. Maybe it's because the licensing is a bureaucratic nightmare and the cost to a party of using a professional photograph is 90% the manpower required to deal with it costing any money whatsoever. Whatever it is, I seriously doubt that it isn't the major political parties cheaping out.

>The big political parties spend literally half a billion dollars a year on advertising. If they find a photo good enough to go on the front page of their website, they are perfectly willing to make that photographer's year, and they're not going to skimp on something that important.

I'm actually surprised that a major campaign would just see a CC photo on flickr and decide to use it (assuming that's what happened). Pretty much no ad agency or other non-editorial user would do such a thing. There's too much risk that the photographer could object to the use (in spite of the CC licensing) or didn't actually own the rights to the image in question or had exclusively licensed it to someone. As someone else pointed out, they're not even using the image in a way that technically meets the letter of all the CC license requirements.

Political campaigns are ephemeral organizations and take financial and legal risks at a far higher rate than a typical company.

They get no credit for being good with money, only for winning the election. If they lose, they just disband and there is no one to sue. If they win, they have a good platform to find people willing to forgive or fund debt payments and legal settlements.

Reminds me of the letter Bill Gates wrote about hobbyist programming (almost exactly 40 years ago). "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?"

To answer the question of whether his work is "undercutting professional photographers", look at the Free Software Movement. The movement has been wildly successful; GPL code is pervasive. Yet, the number of programming jobs today is at an all time high, and still growing. No undercutting happening there. Instead, GPL projects (like Linux) enabled the creation of programming jobs that wouldn't have existed otherwise (like jobs at Google, or Facebook, or Netflix, or...).

He's doing what he loves, and there will always be people who do what they love for free. But I don't think what he's doing is taking away the ability to still get paid for the same kind of work.

Yeah the parallel to open-source software is quite interesting. Notably that the license doesn't prohibit resale. Ultimately though, they both face the same challenges: time. The only reason the guy was able to do this was because his parents sponsored his flights and he had the free time. FOSS developers are only able to work on their projects when they have the time or sponsorship. In both cases the usually argument against them is that they are "amateur", but like we can see, amateur is usually good enough for most people as opposed to paying. Like you said, those who need custom work will be willing to pay and the software industry is doing just fine. In fact, one could argue that FOSS actually enables businesses by reducing startup costs—even big companies are known to use certain libraries.