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Marketing Photography

Pete Hellmann

Blog #67 of 137

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July 20th, 2010 - 12:26 PM

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Marketing Photography

When I was a young college student I thumbed through the works of Cartier-Bresson, Adams, and the like and assumed that once one became “good enough” at photography, the recognition and the money would follow. I guess it’s the same motivation that causes high-schoolers to go “practice” for their eventual rock stardom in their parent’s garage banging on drums. It is the belief that financial success is directly tied to artistic success.

As with most photographers, I quickly found that this belief only served to propel me toward an eventual downfall for two reasons. First, most of us do not realize until later we should not be the ones determining when we are “good enough”, and I was no exception. Most of the time, in our minds during the formative years we imagine ourselves as stronger artists than we are in reality. Given enough time and experience, however, we can come to recognize and honestly critique our true ability. It is then that we can affect the appropriate change. Some do not make it this realization.

Second, and more importantly, the world just doesn’t work that way. As a parent, I realize why my parents gave me the various sage advice day after day as I matured a grew. “Pack an extra set of clothes”, “always have $5 and be 5 minutes early”, and of course, the most popular, “the world isn’t fair”. That’s right, for some people financial success is joined inexplicable to artistic success. For those, the composition is strong and the lines lead the path that they must take. Then there’s the rest of us.

When speaking of most commodities and goods, traditional marketing literature tell us that there are two basic production paths, quantity (i.e. McDonald’s - Billions of hamburgers served), and quality (i.e. Lotus - Seen a handful in my life). The world of photography was traditionally no different. There have been and continue to be stock photographers dedicated solely to the pursuit of quantity. There is a set procedure, a list of subjects, a description of settings, and then the capture and processing. Mechanical, efficient, and historically cheaper. Then there were the singular experience quality photographers, waiting years for the correct celestial events, the perfect weather conditions, and spending countless hours setting up and finding the strongest composition, all to elicit the desired mood or story - historically more expensive.

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Mohammad Safavi naini

13 Years Ago

Tehran, te

please let me know , can you make money with original fineart photography or not ?