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.

Guess What #5

Yes, I’m behind. The last “Guess What” entry was supposed to be answered almost a month ago…

It was a telephoto shot of a gourd that’s used for bird houses. They’re strung all along a wire, like so:

The shot was at a dairy farm in Montezuma, Georgia.

AND NOW FOR – Guess What #5!

Hint: This Guess What #5 is from a place near Montezuma. All self-respecting Georgians, if you haven’t been to this spot, make the effort. And any visitors to Georgia should go out of their way to see it.

Answer next week, with any luck.

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.

Guess What #4

Last week’s “Guess What” was shot with the optical-digital zoom combined, on the Canon S3 Powershot. This 48X is equivalent to about a 1600mm lens, albeit a dicey proposition on quality when hand-held.

The clitoral-looking photo is a wasp’s nest, tucked into the wooden slats of a covered bridge here in North Georgia.

This week’s photo comes from my Pentax K10D. The hint is that it was shot in Montezuma, Georgia, though I’m not sure that will help much in identifying it…

Since this week’s answer was 5 days late, I will wait until August 31 to publish the answer to Guess What #4.

Guess What #3

Last week’s photo was, as Ann surmised, a mushroom’s gills – shot from below, with the sun coming through it.

My Canon Powershot S3 is well-suited to such a task. It has a tilt-swivel LCD monitor with live view, and the body is small enough to tuck underneath a mushroom. Using the supermacro setting, I can shoot with the lens right up against the subject – as little as 1 mm away! I don’t know of any DSLR that could have accomplished it.

This week’s photo was also taken with the S3, but it shows off a different feature of the camera. Answer posted August 15.

Guess What #2

I think maybe last week’s “Guess What” was too easy. It was indeed the Empire State Building – shot from the top of a 15-story building a few blocks away, with a digital zoom equivalent of about 1000mm. Congrats to George, Chris and Bob for spotting it.

Not giving any hints for this week’s photo. That would spoil it. If you already know from seeing it on my web site, please restrain yourself and let others guess

I will say, though, that this shot was taken with a Canon Powershot S3, NOT with a DSLR – and could not have been shot with any DSLR I know of.

[Simultaneous post on my photos-only blog]

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}

Guess what #1

Trust me – seeing this in color would not help you to identify it.

If you have seen this structure, the color version might actually confuse you.

It is located in the northern half of the United States.

Comment with your guess. In a week (August 1) I’ll publish the answer.

["Guess What #1" is simultaneously published at my photos-only blog.]

The “Decisive Moment” and the Luna Moth

The phrase “The Decisive Moment,” an interpretation of the title of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book “Images à la sauvette,” is frequently quoted in modern photojournalism. For the French painter, photography’s appeal was in its ability to capture the essential, fleeting fragments of life.

“Photography is not like painting,” Cartier-Bresson said in 1957. “… Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative.”

As a young journalist I was steeped in Cartier-Bresson, and compelled by events such as the Kent State shootings and the Iran hostage crisis to understand and interpret America’s role in the world. That led me to travel extensively in developing countries, and to train local journalists in those countries to see and record their own decisive moments.

In middle age I’ve turned to nature photography. The slow unfolding of form – in a leaf, a flower, or a moth – now intrigues me as much as pulsations of action. When I study any scene, I let my eye wander to find the exact point where a brief physical manifestation intersects with the invisible, eternal universe.

For me, this is the “decisive moment” of natural architecture.

Blood Lotus

My photo, “Orange Needles,” appears in the summer issue of the online literary journal Blood Lotus:

I am pleased that it introduces the Creative Nonfiction section of the journal, which is how I’d categorize my photography, if I had to put it in a literature classification.

The first piece in the section is about how the value of objects changes over time – another theme that I keep returning to.

Anyhow, check it out – there’s some good reading in there, and the cover piece is very nice too.