The art of commerce, 4: When global is local

When I first came to North Georgia, I asked a local gift shop owner what sort of photographs I should bring her – what sells?

She said, “Oh – the covered bridge! People always love the covered bridge.”

I dutifully trooped off and photographed the bridge for several afternoons. I got bored with it almost immediately.

As I was poking around under the bridge, looking for an unusual angle, my eye was drawn to a crisp leaf suspended in mid-air….  in a very fine spider’s web. The late afternoon light caught it just right.

Once I slowed down and began looking at those small details, the bridge became a fascinating and beautiful place. Eventually I did a small photo essay book about it (using Lulu.com).

Not surprisingly, I have sold more prints of the “straight” photos of the covered bridge than I have sold of the photo essay book. But I managed to make the assignment into something that was both artistically and commercially satisfying.

One of my favorite shots from the covered bridge series was a macro of well-hammered and web-encased bolt. I printed it on 16 by 20 canvas and exhibited it at the local Fitness Center, where the staff told me it became a real conversation piece.

People weren’t sure what it was, even though it was such a common object. They guessed it was a hat, a cake, or a building…. and then were amazed to read the tag with the title: “Bolt, Covered Bridge.”

I sold two prints of it. But that was enough to make me feel validated.

I do a lot of abstracts based on extreme close-ups (see my “Guess What” series on this blog), and my artistic purpose is twofold:

-to find and highlight the structures, textures and other design elements found in “natural architecture”, whether a leaf, bark, or moth wing;

-to help people see differently – by showing them very familiar places and objects in a way that they do not recognize.

Recognition, though, helps sell art. Abstracts are disorienting, on purpose; but disorientation doesn’t usually prompt someone to whip out their checkbook.

So, you need to “ground” your audience if you want to sell your work. Sometimes just explaining what or where the photograph actually “is” (in the straight-world sense) will be enough that people can connect to it.

Even though the point of my abstracts is universality, many people need to feel it’s something they know and understand before they will like or buy it.

Where I live (in North Georgia), art is considered somewhat alien – one of those odd things that hangs in Atlanta museums. But when locals venture into my gallery space, they are thrilled to see the flowers, covered bridges, and rock formations that are familiar to them, formally presented as art.

It’s art they can feel proud of, a sense of personal ownership of the subject matter. It helps them to bridge the gap that is sometimes created by the mere term “art”.

[View the complete set at now-defunct group photoblog]

May all the dreamers go forth

Congratulations to all the finalists in the “Name Your Dream Assignment” photographer’s competition. There will only be one cash winner, but I hope others keep going on their dream ideas. Many of these ideas do not require a $50K cash prize to accomplish.

I was heartened and inspired by the ideas, the comments, and the professionalism that came forth from this. My idea (“Shooting Without Guns,” Afghanistan) ended up at 58th, which was far better than I expected to do having entered only on March 27.

It was a real testament to networking. Having to campaign for the votes put me back in touch with many colleagues that I had not heard from or written to in a long time. I’ve been away from overseas work, and this dream contest made me realize how much I want to go back.

The comments were very moving. I made many new contacts, too. And best of all, I got three job offers to go back to Afghanistan because of this contest.

I hope that all of those who are sincere about their dreams will now work diligently to find the way to pursue them. There is ALWAYS a way.

You can read about my idea and see all the comments by following the link here

The top 100 are here

Update: Afghanistan project now rank 63rd – VOTE BY MIDNIGHT

I am really honored that so many people – colleagues, friends, and total strangers – around the world have taken the time to vote for this project…

To vote, go to

http://nameyourdreamassignment.com/the-ideas/BarakaPhotos/shooting-without-guns/

This is the full project description

Summary:

Children in rural Afghanistan know what guns are – but most haven’t held a camera. I want to work with them to photograph life in the village and give the world a new view of Afghanistan. I chose a village where I’ve worked and know people.

Detailed description:

From an airplane, Afghanistan’s rugged mountains look uninhabitable. And from the viewpoint of news media from across the globe, images of violence and poverty dominate.

But tucked in the folds of Afghan mountains are thousands of villages, where people work, eat, play, and pray. Where children are coming to school as never before.

Although war has dominated Afghan life for three decades, the children today have a chance to live a stable life. Communication is a fundamental tool in bringing about peace and justice.

Story-telling is a traditional way of passing on information, and images are an immediate and powerful way to tell stories. “Shooting Without Guns” takes aim at conflict by putting photography tools in the hands of children. The project would help ordinary Afghans tell their own story through their own visual perspective.

In learning to use cameras, children will learn technology and connect to the larger world. Their images can allow us to see what our families have in common with their families – and through the blog, Afghan children can gain a personal connection with children in other places.

Although I would be taking photographs as part of the project, my photos would chiefly be instructional materials as I teach the children to take their own photographs. Together, all our photos would become documentation of the project, and I would act as a trainer, editor and mentor.

The children have a perspective on their homes, fields and streets that an outsider can never have. I choose to work with children so that they can grow up with an alternative meaning for the word “shoot” – so that they can all become shooters who add to life rather than take it away. Because most learning is shared within the household, the children can teach their older siblings and their parents as well.

A large portion of the project money would go to buying inexpensive digital cameras, computers, and a portable receiver for internet connection, and (since the village does not have regular electricity) a solar-power battery system to run them. I would train children and their teachers to use and maintain this equipment, so that the project would carry on after I leave.

The project is based in Mohammad Agha village in Logar province, southeast of Kabul, a strategic area both politically and militarily. I am confident that I can accomplish this project because of my experience in living and working in Afghanistan, and my personal contacts in this particular village.

As a journalist since 1980 and overseas trainer since 1996, I have worked with Afghans and people in 17 other countries so that they can tell their own stories. I have designed, managed and carried out extended projects for non-profit organizations.

My husband and I lived in Afghanistan from November 2002 to November 2004, and worked on several national projects to train Afghan journalists. We helped build the first independent national news agency, Pajhwok Afghan News (which in 2008 won the International Press Freedom Award), and I started an organization of Afghan journalism trainers. After leaving Afghanistan, we continued to work with Pajhwok and the trainers as they became fully Afghan organizations. We still advise and support them.

I also raise money for a girls’ school in Logar. The original school was attacked in 2003, and I covered the story with a group of journalists in training. I was very moved by the strong determination of people in the village, especially the little girls. So my family assisted them as they built a new school, and since I returned to the US in 2007 I’ve had fundraising sales and given talks about Afghanistan to help them.

“Shooting Without Guns” would, I hope, be a pilot project that could be replicated in other parts of Afghanistan and other countries as well. I would design and implement it with the idea of creating a model that others could use, complete with teaching materials and examples from this village.

Afghan Project needs help!

I am trying to fund a project to teach photography to children in an Afghan village. You can read about it by following the link here

and then, please VOTE for this project! I need to be in the top 20 vote-getters by next Friday, April 3…

more soon…

The art of commerce, part 3

More than a year ago, my friend Sara suggested that I teach photography workshops.  “After all, you’ve trained journalists all over the world,” she said.

I grimaced.

I love training adults in new skills. I’d rather teach people how to photograph their kids than have them pay me to do it.

But as I told Sara – I’m a professional trainer. Unlike some so-called instructors, I can’t just show up and start talking. I spend 4 or 5 hours in preparation for every hour of instruction. So here’s the math:

In North Georgia, the typical workshop fee is $40 for a morning workshop. Typical enrollment is 10 people. Gross: $400.

The hosting organization takes 25 to 30 percent of the total. So, I’d take home $280 to $300. That is IF 10 people enroll and show up.

Best case, I spend eight hours preparing for a two-hour workshop. Inevitably there is travel time and I also spend time marketing directly to my client list, adding at least another two hours. That means I am earning $25 an hour.

But that is my GROSS pay. Then there’s overhead…. I pay income tax, social security, insurances, office costs, supplies, expenses, advertising – and I pay for time off. Any minute I’m not working is a minute I’ve lost income, which means I usually work six days a week.

As a sole proprietor with no employees, I do EVERYTHING. I hold a dozen staff “titles” because I do it all myself: secretary, accountant, tech support, marketing, legal documents, purchasing, printing, state sales tax, archiving, vehicle maintenance, research and continuing education, and HR.

[Yes, HR: I have to spend time to shop for and maintain all my benefits - health insurance, pension, disability, business insurance... And I donate a significant portion of my time to charitable events.]

Still – I love to teach. I have been satisfying that urge by doing short seminars and private lessons, but that only seemed to create demand …. for workshops.

So, I gave in and started teaching workshops. It immediately became my biggest steady source of income.

To make the math feasible for workshops, I have gone to this formula:

+I do workshops that require less preparation time, and that can be repeated in many locations or in larger markets.

+If asked to do a workshop for a group, I charge a set fee of $175/hour for up to 12 people. This way I have a guaranteed income no matter how many people sign up.

+I market more heavily on individual and small-group lessons. With only one to three people attending, I can simply adapt the pace and material on the spot. That greatly reduces the prep time.

If you are an artist or photographer who’s considering this, please do your participants a favor: LEARN how to train adults first. Just because you are a good photographer, or painter, or writer, does not mean that you know how to transfer these skills to a group of adult learners. Lecturing is not training.

But that’s another blog entry….

Making love in Photoshop

People hate themselves. They spit on their own images. They want wrinkles removed, scars covered over, teeth whitened, fat lost, dark circles lightened. All the things that life has done to them, and they want me to fix it.

I do understand. A portrait, even an informal one, is an Occasion. It has much to do with how we view ourselves – even though photographs are also lies.

At any rate, I have spent hours on amending portraits of people – some are dear friends, some are one-day clients.

But this weird thing happens.

In order to do most retouching, you magnify the photo so that every pixel is distinguishable. Stroke, brush, daub, and smoothe.

Inevitably, I have the sensation that I am actually touching that person’s skin or eyes. I am careful, yes. But I feel so much, too. Compassion of the most intimate kind.

It is very much like making love. That kind of close, slow, soothing touch. As though I could really take away all the life-hours that brought on those wrinkles and scars and fat.

It’s not so different from Reiki – the hands-on healing technique that I practice. When I do Reiki on someone who has pain, I literally feel their pain.

It isn’t that I am IN pain. I simply touch it, the way that one touches cold water and gets the sensation without turning to ice.

Digital photography and all its accompanying software is often described as cold and distancing. It can be. But this strange business of retouching has become warmer than anything I ever did with film.

The art of commerce, part 2

A friend asked recently in despair,

When you can buy these posters so cheaply – how do we price photos???   Click here: Natural Landscapes (Photography) Posters at AllPosters.com

I’ve struggled with that for a long time.

But, the biggest factor is that people are never just buying art as a “product” – they are buying a feeling, or a story, that means something to them.

Many people will buy a piece of art because of their personal feeling about the scene, the artist, or even the place where they’re shopping for it. Or because it tells a story that they can relate to.

It is very hard to convey feelings and stories with photos on a monitor.

One of the women at the office where I have my gallery space told me that she wasn’t too sure she liked my work when she’d just looked at my web site. But she LOVED it in person – especially in canvas, but also when matted, framed, and on a beautiful wall.

There’s also the “expertise” factor, which is a major thing that small retailers have going for them in the face of the Big Box retailers. If someone don’t know what they want, the web site just feels overwhelming, and they will appreciate the personal attention and guidance that they get at a gallery.

Don’t despair, fellow artists – we have much to offer that will never be available online.

We must take the time to share our personal stories, about why and how we do art, with people who believe they cannot be artists.

The price is right.

The art of commerce, part 1

I make postcards.

It’s a pain in the butt, making all those 4 by 6 prints and stamping the back, but they sell for a dollar each at the local gift shop. It doesn’t pay my mortgage, but I know for certain that whatever effort I put into making postcards will be rewarded.

I also sell small, inexpensive prints with pre-cut mats in clear plastic wrappings. And I did a batch of mousepads with my photos, which sold steadily. Recently I set up a greeting cards web site.

I know that some artists would say this makes me a sell-out, or a “commercial” artist, or that I’m cheapening my work by mass-producing it.

Well, fellow artists, someday I hope that I will be as well-known as Ansel Adams and sell for $5,000 each the 30 by 40 canvas prints that really show my photographs to their best advantage.

Or maybe I’ll win the lottery.

Or I’ll decide to become dependent on my husband for financial support in addition to his emotional support.

But, until that day, I shall sell postcards and matted prints and mousepads and anything else that has a decent return on my investment in time and energy.

Here’s the breakdown: I make low-priced reproductions of photos that I know will sell – the landscapes, birds and flowers that are recognizable to my audience – and I know that this “cheap art” will reach many hundreds of consumers.  The profit margin works out to around $12 to $30 an hour.

I also make expensive, limited edition prints of photos that, according to contest and exhibit judges, meet the standards of fine art, and these are a puzzle to many and seen by few. Collectors do buy them, but the volume right now is so small that the profit margin works out to maybe 50 cents an hour.

Sometimes there’s crossover and one of my allegedly fine-art photographs appeals to a broad audience – then I can sell it in many forms. And sometimes people who keep coming back to look at my “accessible” work start to understand what I am doing in the abstracts or darker pieces.

Best of all worlds, I figure.

Let me also say this in defense of the cheaper forms of art:

The postcards, mousepads and small prints are a great marketing tool. Every one of them carries my name and my web site URL. People in my community and visitors here know my name and my photographs, and they visit my web site and recognize my style. They keep the postcards or they send them to friends far away, which expands my name recognition at no cost to me.

Second, sometimes postcards that get taped to the refrigerator, mousepads that rest under our hands, and small prints that are thumb-tacked onto the wall have just as much impact as a big expensive canvas. They are part of our everyday life and we love them too, because they are infused with meaning.

It isn’t the medium of the art – it’s the message.

Not all of the people who buy my postcards and mousepads are fine-art collectors, but all of them appreciate a beautiful image of North Georgia. Owning even an inexpensive reproduction is a way for them to remember the peace and enjoyment they feel when contemplating nature. Why is evocation of these  feelings “not artistic”?

[For more on this subject, see the column at Empty Easel by Denise Ivey Telep.]

Final question: If I don’t do “commercial” work, then I need to do something else to pay the bills. Given my work experience, that would be consulting on overseas media development projects, editing a newspaper, writing grant proposals, or running workshops.

Would that be somehow more respectable for me as an artist – to stay engaged with my former career, even when it drains my creative energy?

Or would it be better for me to be a waitress, so that I could keep my brain free for Art, uncontaminated by serving a larger audience?

For now, I choose postcards.

What Katherine Saw

My niece Katherine wrote me the other day, out of the blue. I have not seen her in six or eight years, I think. She is my niece by virtue of the fact that she calls me “Auntie” and that her mother, Penny, is like a sister to me; we played racquetball together when she was pregnant with Katherine.

Katherine is now 14, um, 12 years old, and she had an assignment to write about a painting that inspired her. She went to my web site and contacted me from there, saying that the photos were “breathtaking” and made her happy to look at them.

That was wonderful to hear, of course, but I was curious about which photo she’d chosen to write about. A placid landscape? A blossoming flower?

But when she sent me her essay, I was astonished to see that she’d chosen to write about an abstract – one that some people find disturbing or spooky, and others dismiss as meaningless computer-generated garbage.  It was a piece selected for an exhibit last year called “Body and Soul.”

“Essence of Shell: Eyes” is one in a series that I worked on shortly after leaving Afghanistan. My husband and I were recuperating at the beach, and I spent hours photographing the intimate interiors of seashells, then playing with their form and color to pull out the themes I saw in them.

I was wounded, exhausted, and unsure of whether the two years of difficult work had really accomplished what we’d set out to do. I had left Kabul reluctantly, longing to stay with my colleagues and keep up the good fight. These things were in my soul when I made this piece, but I did not consciously set out to tell that story.

Katherine, though, divined the story behind the image without ever having heard it from me. Here is her version.

Of course he had read all those stories of fantasies and wild, conjured dreams from the darkness of the mind, those musings and wonderings and rantings of the philosophical among us.

Of course he had known cheerfully, tramping through foliage and getting soaked and getting bitten by bugs and eating moldy ration bars and running from monsters-but you know, when you were on a Quest like this, it was the end that mattered.

Not the journey.

Right?

…

Right…?

His heart almost seemed to shatter as he remembered tearfully those days when all he had to fear was getting eaten by a Soul Breaker. That was simple.

This was not.

The dark edges of his brain whispered conspiratorially, time will go quickly and don’t you worry, because soon you will be buried without a name or a cross to guard your rotting flesh, like those warriors you see on the side of the road.

Swirls of frenzy stirred him up; was that his fate? He had come to the end of the journey, he was about to win against the monsters…every thought linked to another, and eventually he had come to conclusion that soon, very soon he would leave on another Quest.

But to where?

And without his beloved companions, who now were dearer than life to him now? It seemed incomprehensible, those souls who were so close.

It hurt.

And he was not going to deny it.

Those halcyon times seemed so far away. Romping and laughing and complaining…would that all come to an end? He saw now, that he had been foolish. The pink swirls of joy had all too soon slipped into black curls of venom and bleakness.

It wasn’t the ending that counted, was it?

It was the journey.

Of contests, books and legitimacy

Got a letter today that at first made me very happy: My photograph “Rain, From Below” was chosen as a finalist from among 3,000 entries in the 28th Annual Spring Photography Contest of Photographer’s Forum magazine, co-sponsored by Canon.

Rain, From Below - Bali 2007

Then I realized that there must be at least 104 finalists (and I assume, double that number) because next month they will announce the 100 Honorable Mentions and the first through fourth place winners. But still, even if there are 300 finalists, I’m in the top 10 percent. And hey, it was an international competition.

As a finalist, I’ll see my name and photo in their hardcover Best of Photography Annual 2008. That’s nice too – but, I have to pay $55 for a copy of it.

Hmmm…. I could buy some of that really nice Epson fine arts paper for $55. Or a tank of gas to go shooting in southern Georgia. Couldn’t they have given the finalists a free book, or maybe a discount?

But, well, what do you want for a $4-per-photo entry fee?

This letter starts me down the usual no-win debate inside my head about contests in general. I’ve always hated them, never thought they were worth much. I saw great photos and feature stories that didn’t win contests and mediocre photos and stories that did.

I remember all the contests I sat through as a young journalist with my photographer friends. We’d go down to Columbus for the Ohio News Photographer Association judging sessions, which were open, and watch the judges rip through those photos. There were hundreds of photos, and so each image got perhaps a 2-second viewing before being rejected or taken to the next level of judging. It was a good lesson in just how to compose and light a photo that has impact.

In fact I learned a lot about photography from those contests, but moreso from hanging out with some very fine photojournalists. (Ed, Gus, Marcy, Denny, Fred, ….. you know who you are)

One year in particular I remember because a young woman won the portfolio competition for Photographer of the Year. She was still in college, I think, but she’d done an internship in California and came back with some photos that were pretty exotic by Ohio standards – bullfights and such.

The subject matter was dramatic, but her technical skills left much to be desired. Meanwhile, several of the photographers who had never traveled outside of our poor and dying rustbelt corner of the state had very fine portfolios.

That year it was the glamor of California that swayed the judges, and we felt the “real” photographers had been robbed.

To this day, the photographers I respect the most are those who find a great photo no matter how mundane the assignment. Any asshole can take an interesting photo at an exotic location. It takes a really good shooter to pull a great photo from an ordinary situation.

Here are some examples:

2007 Winners ONPA

Ed Suba Jr.’s sports photos

[Watch this space for more examples as soon as I can coax them out of my friends}