A lot of photographers are eager to share what they already know about a place — pints of Guinness in a pub! an antique bookstore! — but fewer photographers ask questions with the visual material that they’re given. It can be a subtle difference, but it’s what keeps us coming back to a certain photographer over time.
via Look Here Blog.
Wired presented not just one of the biggest newsstand gains but one of the most interesting because it benefited heavily from the virtual newsstand of the iPad App Store. Its average single-copy sales of 105,614 in the second half included about 27,000 iPad editions.
In our group, the survivors were the ones who had the least amount of overhead, the largest amount saved for a rainy day and hands down, the ones who created the most amount of new work. They kept advertising because we reminded them over and over that if they advertised during a time when their competitors weren’t advertising then their voices would be louder. A lot louder. It worked and they are all still in business.
Now, times are such that photographers can no longer depend on their agents to do all the marketing and sales. It is required that photographers have their own voice and sell themselves and their work. The days of choosing a source book or two and sending out an occasional mailer are over. Frequency, consistency and variety are crucial in any marketing plan. We tell our photographers all of the time that they need to mirror what we are doing for them and have a marketing presence all of their own if they want to survive. When they participate, the power of their marketing is exponential.
Genius. Via.
News Corp.’s much-anticipated, save-the-newspaper app debuted after several delays. You’ve got to love the serendipity of the February 2 been-here-before release: the newspaper for TV, the newspaper for computers, the newspaper for the web, the newspaper for the mobile phone, now the newspaper for the iPad. Each time we get the old newspaper metaphor on a new device.
via WeMedia.com.
If you were a space alien visiting earth and your first introduction to humanity was the current Moments of Being show at Wallspace, you wouldn’t think our planet is very happy. Out of 38 portraits in the show, not one person is smiling. Instead most of us humans look rather bored.
via B: The Space Test. Thx Ross.
Three deeply regressed whiteys, Joe Bradley, Dan Colen and Rob Pruitt, collected, fawned over by much of the art press and, worst of all, continually exhibited by lazy blue chip dealers, have created a salon of nauseating, tasteless excess.
In a way, you can’t blame them: Damien Hirst gave them permission to unload the contents of a battered psyche into the homes of the stupid wealthy. Bradley, Colen and Pruitt are just doing it on a budget (relative to Hirst, of course). Their indiscriminate aborting of everything that is intelligent in art has the effect of shutting down Marcel Duchamp’s famous dictum that the viewer completes the work. The BCP express shuts down and annihilates the viewer on a high speed rail of stupidity.
via artnet Magazine.
Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skillfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. The same is true of their businesses. One might think that they view their businesses as nothing more than machines to produce profits, since they do closely monitor their accounts to keep tabs on those profits.
But this way of thinking replaces the point of the machine’s activity with a diagnostic test of how well it is performing. Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.
The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.
via kottke.org.
“A business is a repeatable process that makes money. Everything else is a hobby.” — Paul Freet, serial entrepreneur and commercialization expert
Every commercial job that I bid on these days has a video portion. The convergence of stills and video has happened.
via Stephen Alvarez
What drives me to be an artist, to make the work I do and I think that a large part of being an artist is being delusional. You have to be totally delusional and slightly narcissistic. You have to be delusional to think that you’re going to think up stuff and people are going to be interested in it.
— Phil Toledano
Two and a half years ago, Alan Taylor started The Big Picture at the Boston Globe; he basically ran the site in his spare work time as a web developer for the company. Now he’s moving on to The Atlantic, where he will edit a new photo site called In Focus.
Smart move by The Atlantic, which is increasingly looking like one of the media properties that may make a smooth-ish transition from print to online/app media.
via Kottke.org.
A few galleries still call them “giclée,” which is a neologism derived from a French word meaning “nozzle” or “squirt,” and, as we all now know, also French vulgar slang for male ejaculation.
Finally, don’t sweat the portfolio too much. You’re better served to put your time and effort into improving yourself as a designer and artist. Just keep it clean, personal, and put your best work forward and you should be in good shape for your next interview.
via Layers Magazine.
Run like hell from anyone calling themselves a “creative.” Design is a profession and a craft with standards and practices. It’s not a mystical undertaking, and designers are not magical beings.
T Magazine photo guru Scott Hall named DOP of Newsweek/The Daily Beast:
“Scott is a huge get for Newsweek and the Daily Beast,” Barnett said. “His gifted eye for photography will be an invaluable asset to the visual language of both the print and online operations.”
via Daily Intel.
You’re going to hear ten “no’s” for every “yes” so don’t take a lost negotiation personally. Don’t burn bridges. I like to think of it this way: each person in a negotiation is just doing their job. The prospect’s job is to get you to work as inexpensively as possible. Your job is to shake the last nickel out of his or her pocket. Each person is just doing his or her job.
How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce?
We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.
This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?
via The 99 Percent.