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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”