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Thursday, 27 June 2024

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Nice chapter to your memoir. Seeing the world through the loose, creative eyes of an artist while trying to practice a professional craft and business is a difficult balance, I'm sure. Easier to do that as a teacher, but of course teaching has its own difficulties. And trying to pay bills as a full time "art" photographer, another Sally Mann, is a little like trying to be a rock star. Possible, but very unlikely. However, managing to pay your bills through writing about photography for a personal blog is also very unlikely, maybe even more so! You are a rock star of photography bloggers. : )

You are correct, working as a professional photographer is not always satisfying. Art is often in the eye of the checkbook holder.

I can't help picturing the Supreme Court Justice in his custom-tailored sweatpants, gavel in hand, singing Hammertime

I had a friend in the ad biz whose father was also in the ad biz. My friend told me that his father always told him of client work: "It has to be bad enough that they'll like it..."

I went to New York City and got a job as a photo assistant for a Fashion photographer. What he told me was :”I will teach you all about photography but not about the business end.” And that is the reason most working pros have a photo rep because we photographers are mostly poor business men !
Bill

Serious question - do you think people with an average IQ have happier lives than those on the far right of the bell curve?

Caring about outcomes. Being curious. Placing importance on ethics (even when it's hard). Striving for quality over volume... these are things shunned by Capitalism. And those from Marketing who drive consumers feelings of scarcity.

My own theory is that the lower a persons IQ, the happier they'll be with the world and how it's presented to them. Of course, it also means that they'll expect simple solutions to work on complex problems, hence the rise of Populism yet again.

This post reminded me of why I would have been a total failure as a photography professional. I've never been good at marketing myself and that's why I rarely sell a photo. These days if someone sees a photo of mine and wants it, if I know them, I print, matte, and frame it and give it to them. Even in my youth when I exhibited more and sold more, I had a hard time charging for a photo.

You found your niche, writing, and you're good at it. I was lucky enough to find mine (it had nothing to do with photography) and had a successful career. I am now retired and spend most of my free time photographing, and printing. I do it for me!

Perhaps a job as a news photographer would also have been interesting to meet new people every day. Sadly, you'd probably also have to do something else with the demise of so many newspapers.

(I appreciate the small note about the time that the comments were updated. Maybe you could consider adding that info at the top of each post.)

I had a similar experience, when I moved to Italy. I found a job taking pictures for a local news magazine, whilst I learnt Italian. It was a brilliant introduction to the workings of Italian society, and how local politics really works.

I got to meet a lot of interesting people, and access to all sorts of interesting places.

After a while I went back to my real profession as a Structural Engineer. I realised that news photography here was a job with just a poorly paid future, and I did not have the interest or financial means to set up a studio doing wedding photography a sector where a decent income could be made in a small city.

I did carry on with performing arts photography, part time for ten years, and got to meet a lot of my Jazz heroes.


My job as an Engineer has probably taken me to more interesting places, than photography ever did, or ever would, as I did a lot of work on construction sites abroad, in places raging from Spain to Mexico.


I think such varied experiences when you're new to a field is an extremely valuable foundational growth stage...although it usually feels like you're last man on a crack-the-whip. (Good for elder "I remember when..." yarns, too!)


An interesting parallel item posted at Petapixel recently:

https://petapixel.com/2024/06/28/survey-finds-career-in-freelance-photojournalism-is-unsustainable/

I don't really enjoy talking with people very much most of the time, but I am a serious neophile. So, I sometimes (but not always!) envy folks whose jobs constantly expose them to novelty. I've gotten to see some very cool stuff in my job as a scientist (e.g. the atomic clocks at NIST, multiple nuclear reactors), but those experiences are sporadic rather than regular. The thought of regularly getting behind the scenes of the world definitely has its appeal.

Software consulting got me out to the interesting fringes periodically, so I understand what you're talking about there. It was great! (I didn't do enough semi-pro photo work to get that much interesting stuff, though there was a bit.)

I never planned on being a newspaper photographer but that's what I ended up doing for a career that spanned 41 years with three different small newspapers. I started fresh out of high school at 18 years of age working for a weekly newspaper, The Goldstream Gazette on Vancouver Island. I made up a portfolio of my best work and got a job in a small daily newspaper in Brampton Ontario, The Brampton Times. I made a cross-Canada drive when I was 21 years old to get that job, and that's when I found out how big Canada was! I worked at the Brampton paper but was homesick for the wild landscape of British Columbia. One day photographer's job was offered to me at a daily newspaper in Kelowna, B.C. The Kelowna Daily Courier so I took it. I worked at the Courier for 34 years until early 2018 when I was laid off. It was a great job and I loved what I did over my four-decade-long career. I should also add that in addition to my newspaper work, I did my own personal photography work that was important to me as an artist.

Over the years, I had come to think of about four levels of “self” in pursuit of a career. The first getting self awareness in your craft and its execution with others. The other three are self esteem, self respect and self control, which have to be navigated for loss, acceptance and/or avoidance.

Thanks, Kenneth Wajda, for the Maureen Dowd column. She captures what really was a better time in a better place. Except, maybe, for the spittoons.

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