Salish Park

An alarmingly high proportion of photographers whose work I admire very much were very very poor: W. Eugene Smith died at 59 with $18 in the bank, Diane Arbus taught a master class (students included Bruce Weber, who is not poor incidentally) to make money so she could buy a Pentax, Garry Winogrand was “perpetually poor… one year, his total income was $60,” as reported here on the occasion of the current exhibition of his work at the Phoenix Art Museum.

You go to enough seminars, lectures, talks on how to break into this and tips for emerging that, you talk to enough photographers, you read enough issues of PDN, you’ll see that some advice tends to get repeated. Some examples:

Make your portfolio well-defined and cohesive.

In the old days, a photographer could go around and take pictures of whatever caught the eye — a landscape, a still life, a street scene, a portrait — make a collection of these pictures, and that was that. That kind of approach generally won’t fly these days. A random collection of pictures just blends into the noise. Now it’s all about concepts and ideas and themes.

Be different.

Nobody likes to think art is a competition — it isn’t, if you’re making art for yourself and not caring about anything beyond that. Getting assignments, getting shown and selling work, however, is competitive. You need to win art competitions, get accepted into juried exhibitions, get noticed. Another macro shot of a flower isn’t going to get you there.

Be consistent.

It’s all about branding. Develop a visual identity and stick to it. This means in your book and in your marketing materials. Stay with the same fonts, the same color palette, the same designs, the same formats. Don’t even start marketing efforts you won’t be able to maintain over time.

Edit the portfolio down to 10 - 30 images, 12 - 20 images, 20 images.

The exact number or range varies depending on who’s giving the advice, but the consensus seems to be to keep it to less than 30 images, more like between 12 and 20, the fewer the better.

Be professional.

Different magazines, different galleries and different art competitions have different ways they like to be approached. It’s a good idea to follow these procedures and not get cute. Photo editors don’t like promos bigger than what will fit in a file folder. Nobody generally enjoys being cold-called or, worse, stalked. Approaching a gallerist with your portfolio when he or she is in the middle of something is stupid. A website that crashes computers is bad.

Proofread.

This is often cited advice. They must be seeing a lot of typos and misspelled names out there.

Stay away from photography if you want to make money.

When I first moved to New York, I sent promos to the photographers I wanted to work for, and a few responded. While talking with one photographer about photography in general and whose work we admired, etc., a certain legendary photographer’s name came up. He said his friend had interviewed with her once back in the day when he and his friend were assistants. This was the gist of what she told him: “Don’t become a photographer. It sucks being poor.”

When I lived in Brooklyn, my roommate worked at Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg. When his company installed a viewing of the photographs lined up for the next auction, he would make mention of it, and I would trek over to Chelsea and check it out. It was a great way to see vintage prints from Diane Arbus, Robert Capa, Garry Winogrand, Stephen Shore, Robert Frank, William Eggleston, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. Once, while browsing around at the gallery, I heard a familiar laugh coming from the next room. I went over there, wondering, “Who do I know that sounds like that?” and it was Cameron Diaz, chatting with some official-looking types.

Judging from the turnout at Jen Bekman’s talk about tips on breaking into the gallery and marketing yourself, Boston is home to a whole lot of aspiring fine art photographers — more than the Photographic Resource Center, which put on the seminar, had thought. That auditorium got pretty packed. There were people sitting on the steps in the aisles and people standing up against the wall in the back. It was like college all over again. (Much of my curriculum in college comprised classes I took just because they were the ones not already filled up.)

Luckily for me, I’d shown up at a decent time (traffic and parking weren’t as bad as I’d anticipated) and was able to snag a seat in the middle. Standing at the lectern, guys scrambling around her in an effort to solve a technical issue, was Jen Bekman herself, gallery owner, the person behind personism.com, patron saint of emerging photographers, a name in fine art photography (which, as Al Gore would say, makes you think of “jumbo shrimp,” but, whatever, I’m a fan).

Some random notes from the lecture:
- Have a website.
- Have business cards (as well as promo pieces).
- Make maquettes: blurb.com is good for that.
- The work needs to be coherent, in subject matter, in theme, in concept.
- Edit your book tightly: each image should be able to stand on its own, keep the portfolio to between 10 - 30 images, a body of work for an exhibition can be as few as eight pieces, edited down from a submission of 15, which was probably edited down from 40.
- Know the landscape, know whom you’re approaching: different galleries show different kinds of work and have different submission policies.
- Observe etiquette, mind your manners, gallerists are people too.
- Artist statements: be articulate, be simple, be direct.
- Proofread.
- Moo cards are a good idea.

In the question and answer period, a remarkable (to me) number of the audience wanted to know about pricing and editioning their work.

From an article by Judy Stoffman in the Toronto Star on Alice Munro:

In Lives of Girls and Women, her autobiographical heroine Del Jordan set out her ambition, to preserve not only what was real about her hometown but to capture what was universally true: “What I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together – radiant, everlasting.”

Munro’s achievement lies in developing a technique and a voice with which to do this, and in something else: She did not think she had to move to Paris or London or Ibiza to make contact with her muse. It never occurred to her to feel marginalized as a Canadian writer; she did not think real life happened elsewhere. The self-confidence she had in her material enabled her to make Huron County as vivid to readers around the world as Balzac’s Paris or Joyce’s Dublin.

Based on what I’ve been reading on the blogs, it seems one of the most insulting things you can ask a photographer is what kind of camera he or she uses, the suggestion being that if you had the same kind of camera you could take pictures like that too. Nobody asks an artist what kind of brush he or she used to make that painting, right? Nobody thinks, boy, if I could just find the right pencil, I could write like Hemingway.

Yet there must be something worth learning from the decisions an artist makes. Much has been made of how Richard Avedon would stand beside the camera when taking portraits, not looking through a viewfinder but instead being face to face with his subjects. That, or there must be some reason why a photographer would decide to lug around an 8×10 view camera when 35mm would pretty much get the job done if pictures are the thing. That’s a lot of work for a picture. Ideally the thing would be not having to have a camera at all. Avedon is said to have once told Truman Capote, “I hate cameras.”

Strangely, someone who didn’t hate cameras was Diane Arbus. In December 1970 she wrote this in a letter to Allan Arbus and Mariclare Costello: …Have gotten obsessed with buying a new camera. Utterly smitten with the new 6×7 pentax. (2 1/4 x 2 3/4). Its just like a big Nikon, which is what Ive always wanted… What it could do is make the pictures more narrative and temporal, less fixed and single and complete and isolated, more dynamics, more things happening. Id like that. The difference knocks me out. Of course it’s not to the good, not yet anyway, and probably it wouldn’t be so apparent to anybody else, I mean nobody else gives a shit, but that’s OK…

Sigma Corporation has announced the launch of the DP1. Pictures show that it has a hotshoe and there’s an external viewfinder available. Also, it looks nicer than the iteration they came out with last September. That one looked kind of cheap. I like what improvements they’ve made to this one. You just can’t get better than a black box if you ask me. The specs suggest this may be the digital version of the Contax T3 that I’ve been wanting. More information at Sigma’s website and dpreview.

Panasonic is coming out with a 25mm F/1.4 for 4/3 system cameras, eg. the Olympus E-410. It’s about three inches long and weighs over a pound, smaller than a big honking zoom but not by much. More info at dpreview.

According to luminous landscape, the G7 comes close to being the digital Contax T3 that I have been looking for but its fatal flaw is not having RAW capability. I would like to be able to shoot RAW not so much for the higher quality (to be honest I can’t tell most of the time) but for the ability for post-processing when I’ve blown it with the exposure.

Olympus has announced a newer version of its E-400 but no lens that makes it good for a carry-everywhere camera.