Salish Park

Outside is one of those magazines I don’t think about much until I see it at a newsstand or something. Then I’ll pick it up, read some of the stuff in there, and think, boy, I should read this magazine more often. The Perfect Storm and Into Thin Air appeared as articles in the magazine before they were books; other writers who have contributed to the magazine include E. Annie Proulx and Edward Abbey.

This morning, while waiting at the doctor’s office, I was browsing through a recent issue, the one with one of Martin Schoeller’s big-head photos on the cover. Inside was this:

Sound Advice

The Ten Worst Adventure-Photo Cliches

1. Nalgene swigging
2. Sunsets
3. Boulder hopping
4. Stream crossing
5. Boot soles
6. Coiled-rope throwing
7. Blurry stars
8. Yoga
9. Wading, pack aloft
10. Rainbows

Having not read the magazine enough to know any better, I suppose this is helpful stuff to have come across like this. I’ve ever seen a picture of Nalgene swigging and wouldn’t have known it was a cliche.

The three recipients of the Life Legend Award for Lifetime Achievement in Magazine Photography are as follows:

Richard Avedon: “There is no such thing as objectivity. The minute you pick up a camera, you begin to lie—or to tell your own truth . . . It’s not the camera that makes a good picture but the eye and mind of the photographer.”

Sebastiao Selgado: “It is not the photographer who makes the picture but the person being photographed.”

Helmut Newton: “I have always loved my work. I still love it. Taking pictures is just part of me. I find the intellectualizing of the image absolutely deadly.”

One of the interesting (to me) things Stephen Shore mentioned during his talk at the PRC last week was in an aside he made, while answering a question from an audience member, I think. He said he was a big fan of Garry Winogrand. For two years, he went around with his 8×10 camera and shot street photography like Garry Winogrand.

From Pearls Before Breakfast by Gene Weingarten in The Washington Post Magazine:

If a great musician plays great music but no one hears . . . was he really any good?

It’s an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?

Does it matter? As it is with photography and poetry, outside of a certain circle, no one really gives a crap about classical music.

If I were rich, I’d buy more photography books, but I’m not, so I don’t, even knowing that I will regret it later. I regret not buying that copy of The Americans when I had the chance, or Sleeping by the Mississippi, or Sunbird. I bought William Eggleston’s Guide once, but it was for a birthday present. At least I can still go to the bookstore and look through a copy of that if I want.

Yesterday I didn’t buy a copy of American Surfaces at Stephen Shore’s book signing. That’s a decision I knew, even as I made it, I’d regret in the future, but $57.50 is a lot of money for me these days—more than what I have in my pocket, more than what I can spend on a book, autographed or not.

One day in 2004, I was browsing through the stacks at Spoonbill and Sugartown to see what was new, and one of the books was the reissue of Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places. While flipping through that, I was startled to find myself looking at some pictures that were taken in Regina, Saskatchewan. That’s where I’d grown up, but I hadn’t been back in ten years. Now I was feeling homesick. I don’t know what for—these pictures were from 1974, when I was nowhere around.

Yet, a couple of months after looking at those pictures, while driving across from Brooklyn to Port Moody, I took the northern route and stopped in for a few days in Regina. I drove around the city and looked in on places for old times’ sake. I also drove over to the corner of Broad Street and Victoria Avenue and snapped a photo even though we’d never hung out there back then.

From Vice magazine’s DOs and DON’Ts of Photography:

Another thing they don’t teach you in art school is that getting paid for taking pictures is super-fucking hard. Magazines just don’t pay you. There are a million other dipshits like you out there who are willing to do it for free to get “tear sheets” for their “book.” If you want to get paid you have to do ads or weddings.

The old saw in creative writing, especially short fiction writing, is that there are more writers and aspiring writers than there are people who actually read the stuff (bad news for the increasing numbers of MFAs being pumped out each year). As for poetry, forget about it: I suspect poems are read mostly by other poets who want to see how it’s done. Outside of a certain circle, no one really gives a crap about poetry.

Photography is like poetry and, with the latest shuttering of Life magazine, getting more like it. The headline writers have been having a field day with the news: Life Dies Another Death, Life is Dead, No Life to Live, Death to Life, etc. Cited as reasons for the closure: falling ad sales, declining newspaper readership, dramatic developments in the market, cutbacks at Time Inc. The long and short of it: not enough people were reading the magazine.

Critics are quick to point out the magazine had already long been a relic of what it was back in the day when Alfred Eisenstaedt and W. Eugene Smith were shooting for it. Still, it had been one of the last photo-driven magazines left standing, in whatever incarnation, and its closure is yet another indication that, unless it’s a picture of the latest movie star or something, no one outside of a certain circle really gives a crap about photography.

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.”