Have you ever taken an image in a studio and found a black line down one side of it? [..]

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While putting together the catalog that accompanies his current show at Team Gallery, Ryan McGinley asked another photographer, Catherine Opie, if she would interview him. In some ways it was a strange choice. Ms. Opie, 49, is best known for studio portraits that are as static and deliberate as the 32-year-old Mr. McGinley’s photographs are hyperkinetic. And while both artists explore queer identity, they’re separated by gender, geography and nearly a generation.

Catherine Opie, Gladstone Gallery,

“Kate” (2007), of the actress Kate Moennig, is in Catherine Opie’s show “Girlfriends,” at Gladstone.

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Their conversation, as recorded in the catalog, is probing and insightful. And now there’s another, even more revealing dialogue in two Manhattan galleries, between Mr. McGinley’s show at Team and Ms. Opie’s at Gladstone.

At the heart of this exchange are ideas about studio portraiture, and about the photographers who defined this art form in the 20th century: Penn, Avedon and especially Mapplethorpe. Also evident is a renewed interest in community and family.

Both artists also happen to be going through transitional phases. Ms. Opie, working in Los Angeles, had a midcareer survey at the Guggenheim in 2008, and Mr. McGinley, in New York and settling into his 30s, is trying to move beyond the kids-behaving-badly imagery of his 2003 New York solo debut at the Whitney, a first impression that still defines him, at least commercially.

Ms. Opie tends to work cyclically, moving from portraiture to landscape to cityscape and back again. She also seesaws between the personal and the impersonal, following up portraits of fellow lesbians and practitioners of S&M with steely conceptual-documentary shots of freeways and mini-malls. Her series on surfers, ice-fishers and high school football players fall somewhere in the middle: these groups are foreign to her, but they have a similarly extreme relationship to the body.

At Gladstone she’s back within her social milieu, revisiting early-to-mid-’90s portraits of friends and intimates, but with the confidence of maturity. Her subjects represent subcultures, sometimes sub-subcultures, yet they’re connected in subliminal and powerful ways to a mainstream history of portraiture.

Her show “Girlfriends” is split into two sections: recent color photographs and a small gallery of older, black-and-white works. Everything has been installed with tremendous sensitivity, particularly in the larger galleries, where studio portraits on brightly colored backgrounds alternate with more spontaneous shots taken outdoors.

The formal portraits, among them “Pig Pen (Tattoos)” and “J D,” evoke paintings by Hans Holbein, primarily because of their walls of color, but also because the subjects are shown in three-quarters view, with unfocused gazes. The sense of continuity is only partly interrupted by the women’s masculine facial hair, piercings and (in some cases) prominent tattoos.

The color shots are consistent with Ms. Opie’s mid-’90s work, but they’re softer and less theatrical, especially in the portraits taken outside the studio. In 1993 Ms. Opie photographed her friend Idexa wearing a fake mustache, a studded cuff and a knife holster, one hand on her hip. At Gladstone Ms. Opie shows the same woman at ease in the woods, topless and heavily tattooed. Ms. Opie’s women are still tough, but their attitude seems to come more from within.

Most of them are fellow creative types, well known in their fields: the musician K. D. Lang, the writer Eileen Myles, the artist Harry Dodge. It’s clear that they know and respect Ms. Opie. There’s a sense of ease, familiarity and warmth, even in the formal portraits. Some images are coyly seductive (“The L Word” actress Kate Moennig blowing smoke rings); others brazenly come-hither (the model Jenny Shimizu propping up her black combat boots on a pristine white bed).

The black-and-white works in the back gallery, from 1987 to 2008, have a different feel. Showing Ms. Opie and her friends in leather boots and sadomasochistic get-ups, they relate clearly to Mapplethorpe and perhaps also the Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger’s shots of rebellious teenagers.

Some of it is posturing, as in the aggressive gesture of “Angela (crotch grab)” (1992) or the fake beards and mustaches worn by the women in “The Gang” (1990). Even in this part of the show, though, Ms. Opie’s softer side is apparent. Some of the earliest photographs show women lounging quietly in hotel rooms, nude or in bathrobes. Others convey intimacy through close-ups of hands and feet.

For Ms. Opie, black-and-white studio portraiture is an affirmation, or a reaffirmation, of self. For Mr. McGinley, it’s a shift away from everything he is known for: working in color, often outdoors, with distance and the illusion of spontaneity.

Studio photography, for Mr. McGinley, seems to be synonymous with control. Each of the 150 models was selected from thousands of hopefuls, and photographed 1,500 to 2,000 times. During the shoots, Mr. McGinley relied on a mini-trampoline, party music, facial-expression cue cards and a “hype girl” named Brandee to encourage the requisite degree of enthusiasm.

Physically, the lithe young models who appear in the pictures at Team Gallery don’t look all that different from other McGinley subjects. Yet in black and white, and with the isolation of the studio, they’re suddenly awkward and even indecent.

The best images have a rangy, manic quality. In some of these the models are only half in the frame, as if the photographer didn’t click fast enough. In others they’re aggressively frontal, hunching or crotch-thrusting toward the camera as if they’d just popped up on Chatroulette. Least interesting are the closeups of faces; movement, not expression, is Mr. McGinley’s forte.

That sense of movement sometimes evokes Weimar-era gymnastics photographs, in a way that’s vaguely disturbing. More formal poses, meanwhile, often seem to quote erotic images by Man Ray, Irving Penn and Alfred Stieglitz. And the installation, a rigid grid, has deadening, typological implications.

But you have to admire Mr. McGinley for making such a decisive break with the work that has earned him critical accolades, a hipster following and a substantial commercial portfolio. His choice of Ms. Opie for the catalog is part of the shift. In a way he’s disowning earlier role models: “I feel like if I get compared to Nan Goldin and Larry Clark again, I’m going to buy a gun and start shooting people,” he jokes in the catalog interview.

As interviewer, Ms. Opie poses some good questions. Why take the exhibitionism indoors, for instance? “In a place like a studio, where the person is already stripped from all context,” she asks, “what is your interest in the body and in representing it?”

She’s also probably one of the only people whose first reaction to Mr. McGinley’s photography is to historicize it. His shots of teenagers exploring the wilderness are “steeped in a nostalgia for freedom that dates back to the 19th century,” Ms. Opie says. “Like, I look at your work sometimes and I think about F. Holland Day.” Her observations are borne out in several large color photographs at Team, set on cliffs and in caves, that serve as a foil to the black and whites.

Ms. Opie also draws out Mr. McGinley’s interest in family, which she shares. Mr. McGinley is the youngest of eight children, and his siblings are all more than a decade older than he. Everyone in his pictures, he says, “resembles the way that my brothers and sisters looked when I was a child.”

In a way, his relationship to Ms. Opie has the same dynamic. She’s the cautious older sister, and he’s the adventurous little brother. But as their shows imply, those roles can sometimes be reversed.

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Jeffrey D. Allred for The New York Times

D. Sharon Pruitt, taking photos of her daughter Hayley, is one of a growing number of amateur photographers who earn small fees for their work.

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Published: March 29, 2010

But Mr. Eich had been shooting photographs since he was a child, and when he married and had a baby during college, he stuck with photography as a career.

“I had to hit the ground running and try to make enough money to keep a roof over our heads,” he said.

Since graduation in 2008, Mr. Eich, 23, has gotten magazine assignments here and there, but “industrywide, the sentiment now, at least among my peers, is that this is not a sustainable thing,” he said. He has been supplementing magazine work with advertising and art projects, in a pastiche of ways to earn a living. “There was a path, and there isn’t anymore.”

Then there is D. Sharon Pruitt, a 40-year-old mother of six who lives on Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Ms. Pruitt’s husband is in the military, and their frequent moves meant a full-time job was not practical. But after a vacation to Hawaii in 2006, Ms. Pruitt uploaded some photos — taken with a $99 Kodak digital camera — to the site Flickr.

Since then, through her Flickr photos, she has received a contract with the stock-photography company Getty Images that gives her a monthly income when publishers or advertisers license the images. The checks are sometimes enough to take the family out to dinner, sometimes almost enough for a mortgage payment. “At the moment, it’s just great to have extra money,” she said.

Mr. Eich and Ms. Pruitt illustrate the huge shake-up in photography during the last decade. Amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets, have increasing opportunities to make money on photos but are underpricing professional photographers and leaving them with limited career options. Professionals are also being hurt because magazines and newspapers are cutting pages or shutting altogether.

“There are very few professional photographers who, right now, are not hurting,” said Holly Stuart Hughes, editor of the magazine Photo District News.

That has left professional photographers with a bit of an identity crisis. Nine years ago, when Livia Corona was fresh out of art school, she got assignments from magazines like Travel and Leisure and Time. Then, she said, “three forces coincided.”

They were the advertising downturn, the popularity and accessibility of digital photography, and changes in the stock-photo market.

Magazines’ editorial pages tend to rise or fall depending on how many ad pages they have. In 2000, the magazines measured by Publishers Information Bureau, a trade group, had 286,932 ad pages. In 2009, there were 169,218 — a decline of 41 percent. That means less physical space in which to print photographs.

“Pages are at a premium, and there’s more competition to get anything into a magazine now, and the bar is just higher for excellent work,” said Bill Shapiro, the editor of Life.com, who ran the print revival of Life before Time Inc. shut it in 2007. And that is for the publications that survived — 428 magazines closed in 2009 alone, according to the publication database MediaFinder.com, including ones that regularly assigned original photography, like Gourmet, Portfolio and National Geographic Adventure.

And while magazines once sniffed at stock photographs, which are existing images, not original assignments, shrinking editorial budgets made them reconsider.

“When we began, stock photography or licensed images, preshot images being licensed, was perceived as the armpit of the photo industry,” said Jonathan Klein, the chief executive of Getty Images who helped found the agency in 1995. “No self-respecting art director or creative director would use a preshot image, because it wasn’t original, it hadn’t been commissioned by them, it wasn’t their creativity.”

At the same time, the Internet has made it easier for editors to find and license stock photos — they can do it in seconds with a search term and a few clicks, rather than spending seven weeks mailing film transparencies back and forth.

Concurrently, digital photography took off. “It used to be you really needed to know how to use a camera,” said Keith Marlowe, a photographer who has worked for Spin and Rolling Stone. “If you messed up a roll, you couldn’t redo the concert.” Now, though, any photographer can instantly see if a shot is good, or whether the light balances or other technical aspects need to be adjusted.

That meant a flood of pretty decent photographs, and that changed the stock-photography industry. In the last few years, stock agencies have created or acquired so-called microstock divisions. They charge $1 to $100, in most cases, for publishers or others to rerun a photo, often supplied by an amateur. And Getty made a deal with Flickr in 2008, permitting Getty’s photo editors to comb through customers’ images and strike license agreements with the amateur photographers.

“The quality of licensed imagery is virtually indistinguishable now from the quality of images they might commission,” Mr. Klein said. Yet “the price point that the client, or customer, is charged is a fraction of the price point which they would pay for a professional image.”

In 2005, Getty Images licensed 1.4 million preshot commercial photos. Last year, it licensed 22 million — and “all of the growth was through our user-generated business,” Mr. Klein said.

That is because amateurs are largely happy to be paid anything for their photos. “People that don’t have to make a living from photography and do it as a hobby don’t feel the need to charge a reasonable rate,” Mr. Eich said.

With stock-photography payments declining and magazines pulling back on original assignments, some Web sites like Life.com and BurnMagazine.org have popped up as homes for original photography. Life commissions about two projects a month — it sent Mr. Marlowe to Haiti after the earthquake, for instance, and the entertainment photographer Jeff Vespa to cover the European news media tour by the “Avatar” cast.

There seems to be an audience for professional photography on these sites. The average number of photos each visitor viewed for “Michael Jackson: The Memorial” at Life.com was 41, for example, and for “Oscars 2010: The Best Dresses,” it was 38 images.

Still, the pay, compared with print, is “less, for sure,” Mr. Shapiro of Life.com said, since some professional photographers “are really more excited for the exposure than they are to drive a hard bargain.”

But it is hard to live on exposure alone. And some professionals worry that with ways to make a salary in photography disappearing, the impact will be severe.

“The important thing that a photojournalist does is they know how to tell the story — they know they’re not there to skew, interpret or bias,” said Katrin Eismann, chairwoman of the Masters in Digital Photography program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. “A photographer can go to a rally or demonstration, and they can make it look as though 10 people showed up, or 1,000 people showed up, and that’s a big difference. I’m not sure I’m going to trust an amateur to understand how important that visual communication is.”

“Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional? Sure,” Ms. Eismann said. “Can they do it on demand? Can they do it again? Can they do it over and over? Can they do it when a scene isn’t that interesting?”

But amateurs like Ms. Pruitt do not particularly care.

“I never followed any traditional photography rules only because I didn’t know of any — I never went to photography school, never took any classes,” she said. “People don’t know the rules, so they just shoot what they like — and other people like it, too.”

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