Jennifer Shaw Interview

by Jonathan Blaustein

Jennifer Shaw is a fine art photographer based in New Orleans. Her project Hurricane Story was published in 2011 by Chin Music Press. She is represented by Guthrie Contemporary in New Orleans, and by Jennifer Schwartz Gallery in Atlanta. Ms. Shaw also teaches photography, and is the director of the photoNOLA festival.

Jonathan Blaustein: Did you ever watch the Jetsons when you were a kid?

Jennifer Shaw: Uh-huh.

JB: When you were watching people talking to each other on screens, did you ever think it would happen in your lifetime?

JS: Not really.

JB: And here we are.

JS: It’s my second Skype conversation ever.

JB: Ever? I’m honored that I pushed you to do something new. I just used a bank drive-thru window for the first time in my life. Sometimes technology is scarier than it ought to be. I always thought I was too dumb to figure it out, but it wasn’t that hard.

Do you use the drive-thru window?

JS: Of course.

JB: Everybody had it figured out but me. You are in New Orleans right now, as we speak.

JS: Right.

JB: But I saw in your bio that you were born in Indiana, and raised in Milwaukee. So you are a child of the great Mid-West.

JS: Correct.

JB: What brought you to NOLA?

JS: I graduated from art school. I don’t know if you went to art school, but there’s not exactly some great corporate job lined up waiting for you. It’s more of a decision of where you want to go to make a life as an artist. I always had this fascination with New Orleans. You know, the mystique. The Crescent City.

I decided after one last long, bitter winter in Rhode Island that I was going to move South. I came down here, and here I am.

JB: How long ago was that?

JS: 1994.

JB: 1994? Old school. I was just in New Orleans for photoNOLA, which all of our regular readers will know. When I do these travel pieces, I don’t have a lot of time to make observations. I keep my eyes open, and talk to people. It works. But the downside is that I’m making judgements based on a really thin slice of reality.

I wrote a piece about the city booming with money and energy and galleries. Putting Katrina in the past. That was a spot observation. I have to admit that I could be really wrong. Just because Mercedes Benz is sponsoring the Superdome…was I rushing to judgement? Or are things doing really well down there, as I surmised?

JS: New Orleans is always a mixed bag. There are parts of New Orleans that are doing really well, but there are still some areas that haven’t fully recovered from Katrina. But culturally, we’re definitely in a beautiful, Post-Katrina boom.

The arts scene is thriving. It’s always been healthy, but especially now. The St. Claude arts district is new. A lot of artist-run co-operative-type things going on. So that’s exciting.

JB: So I wasn’t completely off base?

JS: No, no.

JB: Because that was your opportunity to tell me I was full of shit in my article from a few weeks back.

JS: (laughing) No. I loved your observations.

JB: It’s 2013, so we’re coming up on almost 20 years of you living there. Is this boom unprecedented in your time in the city?

JS: I think so. A lot of the larger institutions have been here for many, many years. The Julia and Magazine St galleries have been here for a long time. But the St. Claude and Downtown scene, where it’s funky and fresh and vibrant, where the artists are starting their own spaces…that’s all pretty new. Post-Katrina.

JB: When I was in town, it was suggested that maybe part of the boom had come from the people who came down to New Orleans to help out after the storm, and then stayed. Thereby bringing in aggressive, fresh energy. Was that something that you noticed? Was it all the government money? What do you think was the cause of the Renaissance?

JS: There definitely has been some “brain gain,” as they say. People who maybe came down to volunteer to help with the re-building, and then just fell in love with the city. There certainly was money flying around afterwards, but I think that’s dried up to some degree. There was a point where there was federal or insurance money, and things felt really hopping. (With lots of construction and renovation everywhere.)

I almost feel like I’m not qualified to answer the larger, institutional-type questions.

JB: No problem. Ladies and gentlemen, while you read this interview with Ms. Jennifer Shaw, you can choose to disregard some of what she says because she does not claim expertise. All right? It’s in the record. You might not be the right person to answer these questions, but you’re on the other end of the video screen, so you don’t have much of a choice right now, do you?

JS: No.

JB: What about the Southern Hospitality? When you first moved South, what was your reaction?

JS: It’s charming, right? Makes you feel right at home.

JB: photoNOLA, as I understand it, is an off-shoot or project of the New Orleans Photo Alliance.

JS: Correct.

JB: And the Alliance is an artist-run, artist-founded, member-supported community organization, with its own gallery in the Lower Garden District. Is that about right?

JS: Yes, non-profit as well.

JB: When did it get started?

JS: The New Orleans Photo Alliance formed in 2006. Another one of those Katrina silver linings. Don Marshall runs the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, and has a long history of working in the arts in New Orleans. After Katrina, he started calling meetings with different groups of artists, encouraging us to form our own collectives and non-profits. To help resuscitate the arts, and the wider cultural rebuilding of the city.

Out of these groups of meetings with the photographers, we eventually decided what to do, what to be, and the name. One of the things I thought we should do was start a photography festival.

JB: Was that emergence concurrent with the creation of the Photo Alliance, or did it take some time?

JS: It was pretty concurrent; it came out of one of the early meetings. We first met in February or March of 2006. There had been a couple of Mardi Gras-themed group photography exhibitions. You know there’s always a big crowd at a group show.

Everybody came out and was just so thankful to see each other again. Hugs all around. Lots of “How did you make out during the storm?” There was this great energy flowing, and I think Don had attended one of those openings. I don’t know if that was one of his catalysts for getting us together, or if it was a part of his mission to organize lots of different types of artists, and getting us forming these self-sufficient organizations.

I’m totally losing track.

JB: It’s OK.

JS: So there were these two shows, and then a formal meeting is called at the Jazz and Heritage foundation. We decided, yeah, this is a good idea. Why not go ahead and do this?
Start an organization. So we had a series of monthly meetings to figure out what we might accomplish as a group. What sort of form it would take, and what the goals might be. What the structure would be.

By December of that year, we had our first officers, and a group show that started membership. We made it so the entry fee gave you membership into the New Orleans Photo Alliance. That was the beginning of it all. Don hooked us up with an exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center. When he got that plotted, I said, “Let’s take this December show at the CAC, and use it as an anchor to get the festival started.”

I knocked on the doors of galleries and other venues, and said, “We’re going to do a festival. Would you have a photo exhibition in conjunction with our show at the CAC? It’s going to be called photoNOLA, a month of photography.”

So that was the beginning. The first year was just exhibitions throughout the month, but nothing what it’s like now, obviously. (Portfolio reviews were added in 2007.)

JB: I didn’t know that the Photo Alliance came out of the immediate aftermath of Katrina. It’s a really interesting idea, the DIY ethos of artists getting together to do if for themselves. Given how much work it takes to do the business and self-promotion aspects of a career, the idea of getting together to lessen the load, and create the rising tide model, makes so much sense.

Were you the head of the photoNOLA festival from it’s inception?

JS: Pretty much so, yeah.

JB: Now, we both know that there are people who do that job, the Director of a non-profit, and that’s their only job. But on top of that, you also teach photography, and you have a full-time art career, and you’re a Mom.

JS: Right.

JB: So you’re trying to juggle everything at once. The 21st Century Hustle. I wanted to hear a bit about the founding of the organization, so thanks. It’s kind of a leading and inappropriate question, but do you think this would not have happened without the storm? Was there a burgeoning sense of collaborative energy because of the Internet anyway? Or do you think this was really a reaction to tragedy?

JS: I think it was totally a reaction to tragedy. I don’t know if something else would have come up in a different form later without the storm. But with Katrina, with everybody being out of the city for two months, and desperately wanting to get home, and desparately missing all of our friends and connections, I think it made us all appreciate people in a way that we never had before. Community ties too, not just in the art world.

There was a whole civic rebirth after the storm, on many different levels. Schools, and community organizations. So Katrina had a lot of silver linings, and the art scene and the Photo Alliance are certainly two of them.

JB: As is your book, “Hurricane Story.”

JS: (laughing.)

JB: So there’s that. My house got destroyed in a Hurricane, and all I got was a hard-cover book. Is that a T-shirt yet?

JS: (laughing still.) No. I should clarify, though, my house did not get destroyed. I’m on the sliver by the river, where there wasn’t any flooding. Just wind damage.

JB: Oh, congratulations.

JS: (laughing again.)

JB: I know, it’s seven years later, and I’m saying, “Congrats that your house didn’t get destroyed.” Let’s not give people the wrong impression.

I picked your book up and reviewed it in the very beginning of my book review column. I didn’t know you, or your name, or your work, or photoNOLA. I grabbed the little object off of my stack, and was kind of shocked. I hadn’t seen anybody personalize the tragedy in such an empathetic, but slightly light-hearted way.
Because you used toys.

JS: Right.

JB: What was the impetus for telling this really difficult story that way, about your evacuation, and having a baby on the day the storm made landfall? What was the genesis?

JS: I had a Holga that I’d modified into a macro-camera, and I hadn’t done a lot with it. I had some King Cake Babies lying around, and I think one day, I saw one lying around, and it reminded me of…I don’t know. Something just sparked, and I decided to pull out that macro camera and try it on those King Cake Babies, and maybe that’s the way I can deal with Katrina.

I’d taken some traditional disaster pictures, but didn’t feel like I owned that. You know? I felt like I was doing it in a documentary sense, for posterity. I didn’t feel entirely comfortable saying that was my art, or trying to sell that kind of work in galleries. I don’t know.

It was just these King Cake Babies, this macro camera, and a roll of black and white film. It just rolled, and made sense. This is it. This is what I need to be doing.

JB: What exactly is a King Cake Baby?

JS: Good question. Sorry. Every year from 12th Night through Mardi Gras, New Orleanians have mounds and mounds of King Cakes. Inside the cake is a little plastic baby, and the tradition is, whoever gets the slice with the King Cake Baby has to buy the next King Cake. It’s a continuing tradition at parties, and in offices, for weeks on end. We all get really fat. Getting the baby is a special thing, so you tend to collect them. They’re small and plastic, and made in China.

JB: Just like everything else.

We left in the dark of night
At 3:47 a boy was born
There were rumors of alligators in the streets
The chaos was hard to fathom
Convoys of rescue trucks passed in the other direction

Mardi Gras was amazing

The Daily Edit
The New York Times Magazine: Joel van Houdt

1.30.13

Design Director: Arem Duplessis
Director of Photography: Kathy Ryan
Art Director: Gail Bichler
Deputy Art Director: Caleb Bennett
Deputy Photo Editor: Joanna Milter
Photo Editors: Stacey Baker, Clinton Cargill, Amy Kellner
Designers: Sara Cwynar, Raul Aquila, Drea Zlanabitni

Photographer: Joel van Houdt

Expert Advice: One-On-One Portfolio Reviews

by Kayleen Kauffman, Wonderful Machine

One-on-one portfolio reviews should be an essential part of any photographer’s marketing plan. It’s a great opportunity to get your work literally under the noses of decision makers at ad agencies, magazines and design firms. We’ve found that creatives are more likely to work with photographers they know, and meetings are a great way to solidify those relationships. It’s your opportunity to present your brand, your work and yourself. However, many photographers find the idea of setting up meetings to be somewhat daunting, so I’ve put together a step-by-step guide to securing and preparing for your own portfolio reviews:

Preparing Your Promotional Materials

  • Make sure your print portfolio is up to date and well edited. Get a second opinion on your edit from a friend or consultant (see Sean’s Expert Advice: How To Edit Photographs).
  • Consider whether an iPad portfolio is appropriate for you. Print portfolios still get more attention from clients at our portfolio events than iPads do. But tablets are essential if you shoot motion and they’re also a nice supplement to show recent projects and to go into greater depth on a particular subject.
  • Have an appropriate leave-behind ready to go. A simple postcard can work. However, you’ll score extra points for something unique like a small booklet or even your own app (like Tony Burns’ Shooting The World). Whenever possible your leave-behind should be memorable, inventive and reflective of your brand.
  • Make sure your website is up to date and working properly. Nobody is going to make an appointment with you without first checking out your site. Make sure it’s solid (see Paul’s Expert Advice: Website Dos and Don’ts.)

Research

  • Whether you’re traveling across the country or just across town, you’ll need to do some research to make sure you’re barking up the right trees. Check out each client’s website to make sure that your photography matches up with their needs, so you don’t waste your time or theirs. Start close to home and then branch out from there. You will only be able to meet with a relatively small number of prospects over the course of your career, so you have to make each appointment count.
  • Put together a list of 40-50 clients that you can tackle. List services are a great place to start finding appropriate clients and building prospect lists.  When we’re setting up meetings for a photographer, we’ll first search for prospects in our internal database. Then we’ll visit Agency Access for additional names. As useful as list services are, nothing is more valuable than personal networking. When you find one client who really responds to your work, ask them if they know any others who might be a good match for you.
  • As you start to cultivate relationships with prospective clients, it will be important to keep good records of your interaction with them. See Craig’s Expert Advice: Understanding Contact Databases.

Requesting & Planning for Meetings

  • After you have your list of prospects complied, start reaching out. We’ve found that contacting people roughly a week before you’d like to meet is a good rule of thumb. Do it too far in advance and you risk having them forget about the meeting or cancel on you. Too little notice may find them already booked up. Start with a casual email that includes:
  1. The prospect’s name.
  2. A little about how your skills and interests might match up with their needs.
  3. A link to your site.
  4. The dates and times you’re available.
  • Don’t attach images to your email. I find that this increases the chance of your email getting stuck in spam filters.
  • Give the impression that you’re going to be in town for other meetings (even if you haven’t set up any others yet). You don’t want anyone to feel pressure that you’re making a special trip for them.
  • Don’t ask for too much time. “A few minutes” is what you should ask for. If get more than that, great. Here’s a basic template:

  • After a day or two, if you don’t get a reply, follow up with a phone call. Yes, this can be scary, but it’s good to be proactive. Don’t create an awkward moment by saying, “I was just calling to follow up on an email I sent you…” They will probably not remember your email among the other 100 they got that day. Simply reiterate that you’re going to be in town next week and you were wondering if they might have a few minutes to take a look at your book. Keep it friendly, short and to the point.
  • Sometimes it’s helpful to write out a script and practice it so you’re comfortable with what you’re going to say. You might have to practice it a few hundred times so you don’t sound like a robot. But creating a really succinct message that you can deliver in a relaxed way, will give you the best chance of success. Creating an alternate script for voice mails is a good idea, too.
  • Be assertive, but don’t be a pest. If you send someone an email and you leave a message and they still don’t respond, you should take that to mean that they don’t want to meet with you at this time. There are plenty of fish in the sea. Don’t get hung up on any one client. Just move on to the next one.
  • Once you start booking meetings, make sure you give yourself enough time for each meeting and time to get to the next one. If you’re going to New York, try to book as many meetings as possible within walking distance so you can maximize your time. If you have to drive from one meeting to the next, account for the time it takes to get your car out of the parking garage and then find parking at the next place. Give yourself enough time for meetings to run long. It’s not unusually for a meeting with one person to turn into a meeting with two or three people.
  • Build an itinerary for yourself including time of meetings, contact’s name, phone number, email address, physical address. Plan ahead how you’ll be getting around. (By the way, TripIt is a great (free) app for keeping track of meetings.)

The Meetings

  • Now that you’ve booked your meetings, it wouldn’t hurt to do a little additional research on those clients. Check out their blog and social media sites in addition to their website. You’ll want to demonstrate that you know their business and you’ll want to have enough to talk about. If you’re meeting with an agency because you think you’d be a great fit for their client, make sure they still have that client.
  • Once you’ve arrived at your meeting, it’s time to turn on the charm! Be relaxed but energetic. Start with a little small talk. Then walk them through your portfolio, explaining your creative process and telling interesting stories about your experiences. Listen. Speak. Listen. Speak.
  • Don’t ask clients to critique your photography or your presentation. That’s not their job and it will make you seem like an amateur. Just guide them through your work, then express an interest in their projects. Show that you’re interested in what they’re doing, but no hard sell.
  • Don’t expect to get an assignment on the spot. The purpose of these meetings is for creatives to get to know you and to hopefully build a comfort level so that they will ask you for a bid when an appropriate project comes up.

Follow up

After your meeting, it doesn’t hurt to send a hand-written thank-you note. If you have any “swag” (t-shirts, mugs, notebooks, etc.) or other promo pieces, that would be a good time to send something! From there, an occasional email or print promo update is appropriate (every few months).

If you need a hand building a client list or setting up meetings, please call us. Or you can visit our consulting page to learn more.

Getting Us Closer To The Truth In Photography

Harry Fisch organizes Travel Photography trips with Nomad Photo Expeditions and recently won the places category in the 2012 National Geographic Photo Contest. 72 hours later he had lost it. The winning image was disqualified because he had removed a plastic bag in post. A blog post about what happened (read it here) has an email from the editor telling him that cropping the bag out or simply leaving it in would have had no impact, but digitally removing it violates the rules. Ouch. Harry is a good sport about it and concludes that had he been on the jury, he would have done the same saying, “rules are rules.”

Many people will argue that photography can never tell the truth. That the lens, image processing, where you stand, and what you chose to include in an image all alter the facts. This misses the point entirely. The point of truth telling in photography is for the photographer to make an image that gets us as close to the truth as they can. That is the goal. Now that the mechanical limitations of photography (film and printing) are gone we are less reliant on the camera to tell the truth, so that obligation falls on the photographer. You must build trust with your viewers and editors so they believe what you are saying.

This is an unusual position to be in, because photographers often relied on the camera and film to do this. Inherent imitations of the medium prevented them from doing too much to alter what happened (although many pushed it as far as it would go). Limitations may be returning to cameras. A new software development by the the human rights organization Witness aims to make it easiter to verify the authenticity of video, photos, or audio created and shared from mobile devices (story on Nieman Journalism Lab). “The app collects metadata that it will bundle and encrypt with your photo or video — including generating an encryption key based on the camera’s pattern of sensor noise, which is unique to each camera.”

The current practice of submitting RAW files for verification (to magazines and contests) may soon be assumed by software that does the verification for us. I expect this will be taken to the next logical step and any work that’s done in post will be recorded and encrypted by the software as well. Eventually news organizations and contests could set a “score” that’s some percentage of allowed manipulation to the pixels of an image that they consider ok. Maybe the software will disable certain tools used in post processing (this is Hal, I’ve disabled the clone tool). Regardless, the goal will be the same. Getting us closer to the truth. And the burden will return to the limitations of the software and not the photographer. That will be a good thing.

Update: the contest was incorrect [corrected], it was not Traveler’s but National Geographic magazine’s, which is officially called the National Geographic Photo Contest. And Harry Fisch was the Places Category Winner not the Grand Prize Winner of the overall contest [corrected].

This Week In Photography Books – Paolo Ventura

by Jonathan Blaustein

Three nights ago, I flung raw chicken out the second story window of my Aunt Lynda’s house. With a salad fork. In East Brunswick, New Jersey.

Two nights ago, I traveled to a parallel dimension, and then back again. I was accompanied by a childhood friend named Brett. We made the journey in a machine; a cross between a sauna, and the hot tub from “Hot Tub Time Machine.” When I returned, I was a woman.

Last night, I repeatedly bashed a former summer-camp counselor about the collarbone with a hammer. Again and again, I beat him. Whump. Whump. Whump. A giraffe trotted by in the background.

You’ve probably guessed these narratives come from my dreams. I rarely remember them, but my son recently asked me to try harder, and now I can’t shake the visuals from my mind. I’m ambivalent about the whole thing, as the retained images are as troubling as they are bizarre.

We’re all comfortable with the fact that each evening, our conscious mind cedes control. The conductor of the night shift is clinically insane. We know this, yet still wake up refreshed, or screaming for coffee. Either way, how many of us spend significant time parsing these madcap adventures? And if we did, what might we learn? (No, I’m not about to quote Freud.)

Within the realm of art, when people think of the dreamworld, they invariably go to Dali. Melting clocks in the desert. Maybe the photo-geeks think of Robert & Shana Parke Harrison, or that young woman who ripped them off and is showing her work around these days. (No, I won’t name the offender.)

Some of the most compelling dream-scape images I’ve seen, though, emerge from “Lo Zuavo Scomparso,” a new, magnificent hard-cover book by Paolo Ventura. (Punctum Press, 2012.) Just last week, I assured you that it’s nothing to me if you buy these books or not. Today, I’ll reverse course, and suggest that this is one for the collection.

The book is experiential on multiple levels. The cover is bright red, with terrific design. Open it up, and you’re treated to a cryptic, repeating graphic inside the cover. Then, we get two poems, in Italian and English, that establish the narrative to come. (Anyone with a brain knows that Italian is the most beautiful language in the world. I encourage you to read the Italian text out loud, for sonorous pleasure.)

As many of you probably know, Mr. Ventura builds intricate sets for his imagery. They resemble paintings, while reflecting the camera’s power to observe. Here, the subject is a Papal Zouave who comes to Rome, and then disappears. (The city itself competes for attention.) The mood is mysterious and elegant, the light not easy to describe.

After the photos conclude, there is an interview with the artist, again in English and Italian, that gives compelling clues to the nature of his process and obsession. Rare for my somewhat-short-attention-span, I found myself reading, then going back to the pictures, then reading again. I returned to some passages three or four times.

Eventually, I decided I needed to know more, and googled Papal Zouave. Normally, I won’t do that, believing that the artist ought to provide all necessary information. Here, I was too entranced to care.

Papal Zouaves were 19th Century soldiers in service to the Pope. In Italy, they fought against the Risorgimento, or unification of the country. (In light of Silvio Berlusconi’s ridiculous escapades, perhaps they were on to something. Bunga, Bunga.)

The book concludes with a set of polaroids that were presumably used as sketches. And then that crazy graphic again, which I could by-then recognize as a Papal Zouave’s profile, repeated over and over. (Just like gelaterias in Rome. How much f-cking ice cream can people eat?) This book will be tough to give back, because it transported me to a different reality. Will it do the same for you?

Bottom line: Masterful, beautiful, dreamy piece of work

To Purchase “Lo Zuavo Scomparso” Visit Photo-Eye

Full Disclosure: Books are provided by Photo-Eye in exchange for links back for purchase.

Books are found in the bookstore and submissions are not accepted.

 

Art Superdealer Larry Gagosian

Fascinating article on Art Superdealer Larry Gagosian that appears in the January 28, 2013 issue of New York Magazine: http://www.vulture.com/2013/01/art-superdealer-larry-gagosian.html

Gagosian has been, for the past two decades, the most powerful gallerist in the world, by a wide margin. In 2011, a survey of dealers in The Wall Street Journal estimated that his annual sales approached $1 billion. That May, roughly half the works for sale by the major auction houses in New York (evening sales only) were by artists on Gagosian’s roster. In addition to his three gallery spaces in New York, he owns two in London, two in Paris, and one each in Beverly Hills, Rome, Geneva, Athens, and Hong Kong. “In many ways, having a show with him is synonymous with having a show at MoMA or the Tate Modern,” says Eric Shiner, the director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

One Has To Learn To Suffer With Grace

One thing that distinguishes me from the pack is that I like unstaged, one-take, expedition shooting. Long and difficult trips are full of little victories and disappointments and they make for great photographic moments. There are a couple big hurdles to being an expedition shooter. One is keeping one’s gear alive in the cold, wet, sandy, camera-killing places. That takes diligence but isn’t rocket surgery. Another is that one has to learn to suffer with grace. That takes practice and some balanced brain chemistry.

via Through The Lens Of Jim Harris | Blog | Teton Gravity Research.

Anonymous Art Buyers Blog: Art Buyers Are People Too

When I started blogging anonymously over 5 years ago the point was to blow off a little steam, check out this blogging thing everyone was talking about and communicate with other Photo Editors about very mundane things that made up our jobs. This turned out to be much more interesting for readers than I ever imagined. That part of my blog life was short lived unfortunately, but I always expected others to pick up the reins, so I was delighted to recently find a group of Art Buyers blogging anonymously under the title Art Buyers Are People Too. I fired off a few questions and here’s what they have to say about themselves:

APE: Why did you start “Art Buyers Are People Too“, do you think people don’t know it or are you just having fun?

ABAPT: It started off as just a little fun. In the beginning we were just posting silly things that people within the industry said to us. But it quickly changed. Honestly, it sometimes feels as though people don’t know what we do exactly; even those we work with on a daily basis within the agency walls and outside as well. Agents, photographers, photo assistants, stylists, and producers have all said to us, “You do that?”. It’s such a multi-faceted position that we wanted to put it all out there in the open. What started off as a fun spoof, turned in to much more. We began to post about our likes, loves and occasional dislikes and lately we’ve been posting more about what we handle. We see the blog as evolving and we’ve made tons of goals for 2013. You’ll see a lot more from us very soon!

APE: Are there more than one of you? Do you all work in the same agency?

ABAPT: We are a group of Art Buyers at the same agency, but very connected within the Art Buying community. We reach out to other Art Buyers on a daily basis.

APE: Do you plan to remain anonymous?

ABAPT: For now, yes.

APE: I’ve seen your hands, promo wall, mail stack, inbox and feet. Do you realize someone will put the pieces together?

ABAPT: Of course! Some people already know who we are, but are respectful of our privacy.

APE: It seems that you are talking to your fellow Art Buyers, what is your message to them?

ABAPT: We are really speaking to the photo/illustration community as a whole. We have so many friends, business partners and acquaintances who we are communicating with as well. We don’t have a “message” per say. We just want to share our experiences and thoughts and hope that it helps demystify what our role is and to show the different responsibilities of being an Art Buyer.

APE: You have very rich tastes in photography. Do you work for very important clients?

ABAPT: Aren’t all clients important? ;) We love all levels of photography and have taken a real interest in emerging photographers in the past two years. We believe that anything can be produced and we look for the right people and teams to accomplish whatever comes across our desks.

APE: Is there a difference between photography you love and photographers you love to work with?

ABAPT: Yes and no. We certainly have photographers whom we admire and would love to work with someday. Of course there are the greats and the living legends and then there are those with the amazing energy and vision. We love rewarding those who have great attitudes. It bums us out to push for and hire someone who gets on set with their own agenda or just looks at ad work with dollar signs in their eyes. We have been incredibly fortunate to work with some of the best out there. We believe in asking anyone if they are interested and love being surprised by a willingness to collaborate and those who simply bring it and kill it. There is nothing like the perfect fit.

APE: What does the future look like for Art Buyers?

ABAPT: We hope it’s full of big, bold projects! We are lucky to work at an agency that involves us heavily in the creative process. They insist on an Art Buyer attending each shoot, which can be grueling during busy season, yet so rewarding to see the final product. Many believe that with print usage dwindling, the Art Buying world will follow. We’re much more positive than that, and It’s our hope to evolve with new media. We’ve been working on video, cgi, animation and so much more and we welcome every project that hits our desks. It’s all about a willingness to change with the industry.

 

Promoting one’s fine art is so different than marketing a service

Learning to promote one’s fine art is both daunting and only occasionally rewarding; it’s required me to get over my shyness, my tendency towards self-effacement, my fear of self-promotion (how unladylike to promote oneself!), and it has forced me to accept rejection…it’s not for the faint of heart! But I discovered that little successes lead to bigger ones – as long as the work is interesting and challenging and the craftsmanship, solid.

via Two Way Lens.

Scott B. Davis Interview

by Jonathan Blaustein

Scott B. Davis is a San Diego-based fine art photographer. He recently had solo exhibitions at Hous Projects in NYC, and at the San Diego Museum of Art. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times and the New Yorker. Scott is also the Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Photographic Arts, and the founder and director of the Medium Festival of Photography, which debuted in 2012.

Jonathan Blaustein: It’s a New Year, and I wanted to inaugurate a mini-series interviewing people who represent the new pathways to success in the 21st Century. I can’t speak to what it used to be like, but it seems many of the folks who are getting their work out in the world are creating multi-pronged careers. Multiple talents, multiple income streams.

Of course, I thought of you. We met back in 1998, in a Photo 3 class with Patrick Nagatani. Is that right?

Scott B. Davis: Yeah.

JB: Our audience knows a lot about me, but they don’t know what I was like back then. Do you have any embarrassing stories about me from back in the day? What did you think of me when we first met?

SD: (laughing.) Let’s see. (long pause.) You were a guy who seemed to think he had it all figured out, and wanted to jump right in the deep end with everybody else. I say that with all due love and respect.

JB: Of course. You’re allowed to make fun of me. That’s the point.

SD: What I also love is one of the early memories, where you then turned it on me. You said, “I couldn’t stand you when we first met. You were this guy who just knew it all.”

JB: You knew a lot for a young guy.

SD: I think the bottom line is we both approached the medium from a very different place, personally speaking, but with a lot of passion and drive to make it a career.

JB: Well, you had a free shot at me, and you didn’t exactly take it. Classy. Let’s move along, though.

You are a working artist, and just had a big solo show in New York at Hous Projects. You’re also the Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, and you just started your own photography festival, called Medium, from scratch. And you’re doing all three of these different jobs at the same time.

SD: Yeah.

JB: Why?

SD: Why?

JB: Yes. Why?

SD: I guess it goes back to that undergraduate experience. I knew I wanted to be heavily involved with this medium from a very young age. As I’ve grown older, and watched the world diversify around us, I realized there’s no singular experience that’s going to fulfill all the hopes and desires I have as an engaged photographer.

Working at a day job gives me these office skills, for lack of a better word, that allow me to understand the nuts and bolts of the industry. As a fine art photographer, that part goes without saying. It’s expressing personal beliefs, wishes, taking wild
attempts at making statements without language. That drives itself.

For the festival, it’s a culmination of those two things. It’s an opportunity for me to say, “How can I create something in my community that reaches other photographers, that gives other photographers a platform and a voice, and that engages me in a new way with photography itself?”

JB: It’s all really heady and high-minded, but isn’t there more to it? Isn’t it, the day job pays the bills, and the festival is where you party, and the art is where you get your crazy out?

SD: (pause) I guess you could put it that way too. The day job pays the bills. And as you know as well as anybody, it’s a dangerous trap. It can be.

But for the festival, it really is about creating a space and a place for other photographers. If it were just about a party, I’d have a party. It’s a business. Really a mega-business, for one or two people to undertake.

JB: I like to put my finger up in the wind and see what people are thinking about. Now that the worst of the Economic Collapse has passed, it’s good to see people come out of retrenchment mode and try to build things. Try to grow their own capabilities, so I thought you might be able to give us a little insight.

We’ve got readers around the planet, and thankfully photo festivals continue to pop up. But there are a lot of communities out there that could benefit from opportunities to see work, and meet new people, learn and grow, kick back a glass of wine.

You shared your motivation a bit, but I’d like to dig a little deeper. Did you always want to do this? Or was it a random idea, and then you decided to put your nose down? How long had you been planning the Medium festival?

SD: About 18 months. But it’s interesting when you materialize something like this, and then you achieve it. You can look back in hindsight and have a little bit of clarity about where it came from.

When I first moved back to California, there was a part of me that wanted to start a center for photography. A do-it-yourself frame shop, and a place where photographers could come together and mount exhibitions. Host lectures, stuff like that. It was 10 or 12 years ago, though. But I didn’t have the personal need or the experience to do it.

But to cycle back to 10 years of working as an industry professional, you start to learn how things operate. What it takes to organize something like this. That, and watching other art fairs and festivals crop up all over the world, it makes you realize there are micro-communities as well as macro-communities that want to have these experiences.

I guess what I’m saying is it’s a lot of world experience that comes together and makes you realize you can take a nascent idea and start to create something unique for this region.

I’ll give you one example. Photo LA, the established photo fair, has really changed a lot in the past several years. One thing I realized it became, by default, was a place for photographers to meet. Photo LA does their own programming. They had Stephen Shore out last year. They bring in big names.

But as that really changed, and less photographers were attending it, because of personal grievances, or not liking the fair, or it not having the same energy, I realized that that community in Southern California could use a place to come together like photo LA.

I’m not trying to create photoLA, through Medium, but when I realized that there’s nothing like this in Coastal Southern California, I thought we could really use something to get the creative juices flowing.

JB: I couldn’t go this year, unfortunately, because the festival was two weeks after the new baby came. I still feel bad about it, but I’ll be there for 2013. Big ups.

Earlier, though, you mentioned 10 years as an industry professional. I know you started out cutting mats in the bowels of the UNM Art Museum in Albuquerque. You were an exacting dude with a good internship.

Then, you started as a preparator at MOPA, and have worked your way up to the Director of Exhibitions.

SD: Right.

JB: Have you had any experiences over the years where you were taken less seriously as an artist because you were working as an arts professional? Or were there situations where anyone tried to hook you up as an artist to get in with the museum? Over the years, have you noticed any changes in the way people perceive a hybridized career?

SD: If anything, I’d say it’s gotten more difficult. I don’t know that people look at me and say, “Wow, he’s this multi-faceted guy.” They usually look at me as wearing one primary hat. It’s challenging, because, particularly as a museum professional, I don’t want to breach that trust, or cross that line.

Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that people want to reduce you to one simple thing.

JB: I can relate. When the writing started to take off, there was a time when I was worried that people would know me more for this than for my art-making. But very quickly, I realized that if people know me at all, then I’m fortunate. I prefer they know me and like what I do, rather than wanting to firebomb my house, though.

But getting back to Medium, now that the festival came off successfully, was there anything you learned that really turned your expectations on their head? Was there any part of the process that caught you off guard?

SD: I don’t know if I can give you a good answer to the question.

JB: No? Should we just move on?

SD: Well, the reason being is that it’s anything that anyone would tell you. Anybody who’s done it, or anybody with common sense will know it’s a lot of work. And then people will turn around and ask you, “How did you do that?”

Getting back to which hat you wear, and how people associate you, it’s interesting to me, when I step back and take it all in, I’m not to worried about how people are going to categorize me. I know that doing every single one of these things is not motivated by profit, or fame or any kind of worldly riches.

JB: Speak for yourself, dude.

SD: Come on, now. It’s motivated by a very deep-seated love for what I do. From my perspective, I see it all as part of a rich life. I go to my day job, I come home and work in the darkroom, or shoot photographs. I organize a festival. To me, there are not always clear boundaries between those.

As far as advice goes for someone who’s thinking of starting something, if you’re really passionate, and you have the inclination and the capacity to do it, I think that’s the most important question to ask yourself. Because everything else has
to come from within.

JB: I ended 2012 with a column that suggested to folks that perhaps this would be a good year to try to stretch yourself, take a risk, try something new. Looking at what you went through, having a solo show, buying and renovating a house, putting on a festival and working full time all during one Summer. Wow.

Now that it’s behind you, what did you learn about yourself? Are you actually a more capable human being for pushing yourself to the limits?

SD: Definitely. I achieved what I set out to do, which is to give added dimension to a community that I passionately feel could use it. That’s something I can’t underscore enough for readers, is this idea. If you really believe in what you want to do, whether it’s to start your career as a photographer, or to start a festival, or create a publishing company. If you believe there’s a need for it, that it makes sense…this is just Business 101. Then it’s totally worth it to stretch yourself.

If you’ve done your job right, you’ve added value to the community. Whether it’s your community by zip code, or by theology. You’re adding value.

JB: Thanks for the honesty. Is there any cellphone footage of you berating an intern during Medium, like Christian Bale? Did you ever lose your shit? You might as well admit it right now…

SD: No. I don’t lose my shit. It’s something I work at more and more as I get older.

JB: I get it. I used to be a hothead, and now I’m not. I’m much happier this way.

But I wanted to shift to the museum for a second. I noticed on the website that you guys have a show up now that was crowd curated by your audience?

SD: Yeah.

JB: You guys gave your audience a chance to vote on pictures from a certain grouping, and then you showed the highest rated pictures in the exhibition?

SD: And the lowest rated.

JB: How did it work?

SD: There are forty photographs on exhibit that the crowd curated. The photos with the most and least votes are highlighted in the exhibition. Because it’s not always about winners.

JB: Forgive me if this is an obvious question, but wasn’t anybody afraid that this might prove the irrelevance of the curator as tastemaker, if the crowd can do as good a job? What’s been people’s reaction to the idea and the show?

SD: The reaction has been really positive, all the way around. The idea was born out of crowd-sourcing in general. The museum is really there to serve the community. Our photographs are held in the public trust, even though it’s a private museum. Why not give the community an opportunity to take an active role in things?

It also allows us to learn things about our collection. It’s one thing for an educated person to make decisions about what’s going next to what, and to develop thematic ideas. But it’s also interesting when you let non-experts look at something and discover new things, and in this case, new images.

It allowed us to ask some hard questions. How strong is our collection? Let’s be real. Let’s be honest, and not hide the duds. And, of course, we don’t believe it’s undermining the role of the curator.

JB: I know it’s off topic, but I think we came up with a new drinking game. Every time people read the word community in this interview, they have to do a shot.

Seriously, though, what happened when the crowd picked? Was it just, oh, they love Henri Cartier-Bresson, and nature and cowboys? Could you learn anything broad from their preferences?

SD: Well, the top three pictures were a photo by Kenro Izu of a sacred Tibetan mountain, a photograph by Bradford Washburn of climbers on an icy peak, and the classic photograph of a nuclear explosion on the Bikini Atoll. Think about that for a minute. People are responding to photographs that elicit emotions. Beautiful pictures of mountains elicit primal emotions, or fantasies about what the world should look like.

The lowest ranked images are basically abstract photographs that, when they’re set out there, on their own, without a voice, don’t make sense to people. Clearly, people didn’t respond to them.

JB: So they prefer the epic, and they eschew the abstract. At least in this experiment. That is not particularly surprising. But it sounds like it gave you guys a chance to get your own metrics in an evidence-obsessed society.

As far as your own work goes, you spend a lot of time rambling around empty deserts, at night, with a big camera. I read an interview a couple of years ago with Robert Adams, and he talked about having someone with him to watch his back, when he was shooting at night in Colorado Springs.

Is that something you’ve had to do, or do you just roll the dice?

SD: I roll the dice, and nothing that exciting has ever happened to me. The worst thing is people in Los Angeles, who find me in the middle of the night, and are whacked in the head, and think I’m making a movie.

Out in the desert, it’s a different story. The worst thing that happens is the border patrol comes by in the morning and says there was a lot of activity last night. You guys had neighbors.

JB: For years you’ve been out there working, in the middle of the night, when the rest of us are asleep. What’s the fascination?

SD: The fascination is discovery. I’m a landscape photographer. But as landscapes in the Western US become more and more well known, more and more seen, I’m interested in letting the camera help me discover worlds that I didn’t know existed otherwise. I’m looking at the world and seeing how it’s transformed, the other 50% of the time. In the darkness. Once the magic hour happens, most people head off to the bar to knock back a drink. Not me.