Today the boundaries between professional and amateur photography are increasingly blurred. The ubiquity of amateur images raises concerns about the field's ‘de-professionalisation’ [e.g. Good and Lowe 2017; Josephi and O’Donnell 2023; Mäenpää 2023b; Nilsson 2021). This article explores perspectives on professionalism and non-professionalism from educators and students enrolled in full-time photojournalism and documentary photography programmes in Russia and Sweden. Through individual interviews and focus groups, this study shows that photography educators and their students are responding to the challenges of ‘de-professionalisation’ by seeking to better navigate the digital attention economy. They suggest to re-evaluate professionalism in photography through feelings, meaning-making and a ‘(r)evolution’ of photographic practice.