Count of Photographers

I was in a discussion recently and we came around to the topic of the proportion of photographers by gender and region. While everyone gave their opinion, we all agreed that we had not seen any metrics on this. 

I thought it would be interesting to look into, so I started to explore. I was interested in relative size of these populations and also how that evolved over time. After looking around, I was not able to find anything that answered our questions. For fun, you can try Google searches for "count of photographers by country graph". I decided to create my own.

I went to collect the information from wikidata.com. This data is not always complete and accurate because it is crowdsourced with limited qualifications. This also compounds the metrics in that the metrics now depend on what the people updating wikidata were interested in. Nevertheless I persisted. 

The two graphs show what the data looks like.

Photographers of Note by Birth Year by Continent (i.e. the continent for country of citizenship)

Photographers of Note by Birth Year by Gender

Here is the query to collect the data from wikidata:

SELECT (COUNT(?item) AS ?count ) ?year ?genderLabel ?continentLabel
WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P106 wd:Q33231.
  ?item wdt:P27 ?citizenship. 
  ?citizenship wdt:P30 ?continent.
  ?item wdt:P569 ?dob.
  ?item wdt:P21 ?gender
  BIND(str(YEAR(?dob)) AS ?year)
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}
GROUP BY ?year ?genderLabel ?continentLabel  

Have fun playing with wikidata!