A photographic imagination

A letter to Aphotoeditor

Rob

Very interesting thread.

I agree that the right marketing materials are needed for the segment you are looking to get work in, as in Rome, well you know the saying …. I think from the reaction here this is experiment you are running is something that “pros” feel for most part valuable and certainly they respect your leadership.

However, I get the feeling in this line “It’s not that difficult to see why I would think you’re an amateur if you put your images on Flickr. That’s what it was created for and that’s who primarily uses it.” that you may be missing something of value. I would argue that by focusing on the “amateurs” and not the audience we will be overlooking a valuable and sustainable marketing opportunity. You own an audience.

This audience of “amateurs” are the same people who consume a photographer’s images in mass magazines. They are the audience. They are the consumers. The photo editors are gate keepers and curators. They are powerful filters but they are not in the case of mass magazines the audience. By perpetuating the stigma, we are keeping photographers from an audience, from the audience.

I think by not encouraging some kind of long term involvement in a photographer’s body of work that a site like Flickr can offer through the mass audience platform it provides, we diminish a fantastic opportunity to connect with the very people who consume the photographs. I am not sure if magazines can make it happen themselves they have a vested interest in their brand - not in establishing a long term connection with broadest possible audience and enhancing the value of the photographer as recognizable.

By dismissing the vernacular aesthetic of Flickr with the audience we dismiss “the audience”. I think photographers coming into the business over the next few years will have this in their DNA. A few top tier photographer’s will have other methods of direct to audience marketing. The more intimate an audience is with a photographer, the more valuable the photographer becomes to the properties that hire them.

I am not an editorial photographer but have learned much form the readers contribution here over the last few months. Thanks for this valuable resource.

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I read John Haber's "Learning to love photography" with some interest as you know I am about to open my first solo show here in NY at Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art. My work has benefited in the the digital space as I have spent the last four years evolving a body of work in public on Fotolog and Flickr.

No MFA, no commercial work, no editorial work just the time and space to work through awkwardness of the movement from technique to craft to style. Making this journey doubly interesting is that in my day job I have been able advocate reader participation and contribution rather than comment and rant because of my experience.

In the article there is a reference to the Hollywood "indies". This got me thinking. What makes sense to me in that the audience gathering power of blogs and social networks has allowed an artist like myself to develop a value far beyond what could have been done even 7 years ago. Not sure that is exactly what John meant but I think that this builds on the notion of an outside the system. I am not sure if I am the first photo artist to move from Flickr to a one man show in Chelsea, I know I won't be the last.

And that is a good thing.

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From Robin Good

"To me the great hope is that now these little 8mm video recorders and stuff have come out, some... just people who normally wouldn't make movies are going to be making them, and - you know - suddenly, one day, some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart - you know - and? make a beautiful film with her little father's camera...corder - and for once the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed. Forever. And it will really become an art form.
That's my opinion."

Francis Ford Coppola

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From Notes from nowhere

Having spent a considerable part of my life in editing, both photography and text, I do believe in the grueling necessity of it. This obviously includes my own photography. The editing may be even more important than taking the images in the first place. I am convinced that no matter how good you may be, if you choose the wrong images, the result will be mediocre at best. Hence, although I have edited roughly two million images of other people over the past ten years, I don’t ever do the final edit of my own work - you just can’t edit your own images with a 100 percent success rate. But you can choose people who are good at it (and avoid those who are not).

I am looking for a an editor to work with, so if you are out there .... call home

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from the NY Times Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad

“We never know where the consumer is going to be at any point in time, so we have to find a way to be everywhere,” said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive at the Kaplan Thaler Group, a New York ad agency. “Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.”

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Maybe play to the system ...

John Szarkowski on playing the gallery system

So that’s the big change. Now you go to schools like Yale and — [the students] would deny it, but they’re lying — their real ambition is to be stars in the gallery system. And I wouldn’t want those young people to know this, but there is actually a substantial market for new people doing something that might look flashy for a moment, because of the fact that there are, you know, a million new billionaires in this country, and they or their wives want to be on the boards of museums. And you can’t collect Jasper Johns anymore. I mean, forget collecting Matisse or Picasso. You can’t collect Rauschenberg or those people — all the good stuff is already in captivity! So you’ve got to find a new guy.

"there's a new kid in town..."

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From Teaching online jounralism

Between You and Me.
A film by Patry Krebisz

A friend recently bought the Canon EOS 20D. I tried its burst mode and was in seventh heaven. In this mode we could record at five frames per second (as opposed to film’s 24). We could shoot for about 12 seconds before the camera’s memory buffer would fill up, so our takes had to be really exact -- no long, hypnotic shots. I did a series of tests beforehand to find the best setup ...

I have been working on some still image based products for the last few months. I have a created a few prototypes and a couple of small films of my own photographic works.

This flip book style is an interesting approach that I hope to incorporate in the next interations.

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The revolution's question is Amateur v. Professional where are the boundaries, what makes it so and does it matter.

In Amateur v. Professional Coxsoft art writes:

Many people find art an agreeable hobby and produce good quality work. And there are many professional artists who make a living selling junk: rusty bicycle parts cobbled together as a "profound statement" on our throwaway society! So what makes the difference between a talented amateur and an untalented professional who has the cheek to sell rubbish? Art School. At the end of it, the "artist" has a diploma.

It seems that the writing is on the wall for most forms of expression and the "arts" are not an exception. However, the world of the "collector" still has a way to go to be transformed by the disintermediation that most other areas of free exchange are evolving to.

Your audience should be in conversation with you not just the gallerist.

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Much has been said how the new digital technologies are rehaping the face of news gathering, presentation and distribution.

In Doom and gloom for photojournalism? Mindy McAdams discusses a slideshow from Yahoo! News -- In the Wake of the Coup -- is wholly composed of photos from Flickr.

Reports of the death of painting, however, were an exaggeration. Painting did not die, but it was certainly transformed. You might think of the work of Jackson Pollack and react with distaste and displeasure (if abstraction offends you, that is); you might also think of Picasso, De Chirico, Magritte, or Cézanne. I'm not attempting an art lesson but rather advancing the idea that change is not bad, and what might seem to be a death in one person's view might be a rebirth in someone else's eyes.

I'm not ready to acknowledge the death of photojournalism -- but I am scanning the horizon for signs of its new forms.

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An interview with Alex Soth
Via Conscientious

The one caveat is that blogging is probably bad for one’s reputation in the art world. The art world is built on exclusivity. Blogs are built on availability. Most art stars don’t even have websites for fear of appearing pedestrian. But photography, for me, is a pedestrian art. It is democratic and accessible. So I participate in the blogosphere knowing full well that it probably hurts my art-world reputation.

This maybe true, but more and more artists may find a "direct to consumer" approach another path which opens doors to opportunity and audience. There is tangible value you have having people involved in your body of work over time even as you are striving for other things - gallery and books.

What do you think?

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Eric Schmidt of Google estimated that on avergae every blog has only one reader....

Thousands of Words About Pictures
from Personism

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s some afoot in the world of blogs about photography (not to be confused with photoblogs). Lately it seems like lots and lots of smart people are writing interesting things on the subject. Some people, like Raul Gutierrez, have been writing interesting blogs for a long time now. Others, like say Brian Ulrich have recently stepped it up a bit, perhaps nudged along by Alec Soth, who only started his blog recently, but has already acquired an almost slavish following. (I too am one of those enthusiastic fans.)

I am pleased by this new development, but also somewhat dismayed. Pleased because the best of these blogs are enlightening about the discipline, but not single-mindedly about photography - they’re broader than than that and touch on life, inspiration and sometimes politics. It’s nice having a window into what makes the people who I enjoy and admire tick. I’m dismayed because, well, how’s a girl supposed to keep up?? I’m not just talking about my ever-growing list of bookmarks, a formidable undertaking in and of itself… I’m also talking about my own musings here. It’s a struggle to stay up to par. All these smart people are messing with the curve, damnit. Anyway, all of that said, here’s what I’m reading and why:

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If we want to measure the arts, we'll need new metrics
The Artful Manager

The challenge is in applying existing metrics (dollars, headcounts, activity, test scores) to such complex and hazy goals (truth, beauty, pleasure, wisdom). To this task I humbly submit the following metrics, already spinning around the world for other purposes.

* hedon
a single unit of pleasure, already used in ethical mathematics (don't ask, I don't know)
* milliHelen
the amount of physical beauty required to launch one ship
* warhol
a unit of fame or hype lasting exactly fifteen minutes. Some useful multiples from the Wikipedia include:
o kilowarhol -- famous for 15,000 minutes, or 10.42 days. A sort of metric "nine day wonder."
o megawarhol -- famous for 15 million minutes, or 28.5 years. The type of person your parents talk about all the time, but of whom you've never heard from anyone else.

If we really hunker down, we could suggest a USRDA for each of the above (U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance). And each cultural production could publicly post the detailed value of its contents: ''Tonight's performance of Romeo and Juliet contains 250 hedons, 950 milliHelens, and 14.9 megawarhols.''

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