Todd Selby and The Selby are Red Hot

Todd Selby Photo by Backyard Bill
Todd Selby Photo by Backyard Bill

Todd Selby is the talented young photographer behind TheSelby.com a website dedicated to documenting interesting people, their creative spaces and their stuff usually in New York, London and LA. It seems to have hit a critical mass online recently with a mention in the NY Times (here) and all kinds of design blogs (here, here, here and here).

Todd has really found an underserved market in media and he stands to reap the benefits of not only by becoming known as a photographer who shoots creative interiors but also for serving an audience who’s hungry for this type of photography and any collateral he can come up with to go along with it. It’s quite inspiring to see someone forge a new path and then actually begin to see serious traction. I asked Todd a couple questions about it:

How did The Selby get started?

I have been thinking a lot over the past two years about wanting to work on a photo related art project that I could do on my own and distribute on the internet. When I started taking pictures professionally seven years ago I did my first portfolio solely of photos of my friends in their homes combined with a few still-lives of their possessions. It was a natural shift to just take that work and put in on the internet. From there the concept has evolved and I have started adding new elements such as paintings, videos and hand written photo captions and interviews.

It’s completely blown up online and even made an appearance in the The NY Times. Does that translate into assignments for Todd Selby or just calls from people who think they have a cool place?

Yes, I have been getting a lot more calls from magazines, tons of interest from advertisers as well as home and fashion brands contacting me directly. I also get a lot of emails from people around the world showing me their homes and their artwork.

Any thoughts on getting pigeon holed into the guy who shoots those hip interiors?

No thoughts of that until you just mentioned it. Ha, Ha.

How do you know The Cobra Snake? Do you know The Face Hunter? Any thoughts overall on the popularity of this type of documentary photography?

The Cobra Snake is an amazing photographer as well as a marketing and business genius who’s 5 to 10 years ahead of most photographers. He helped me realize the importance of distributing your work as widely as possible and building up content that is really interesting. I think this is something you already know as well Rob. This is a tumultuous time for photographers, and I believe that the people who are going to really succeed are the ones that think outside the box and really forge their own path directly to the consumers of photography. Cut out the middlemen, do it yourself and get it out there. That is Cobra Snake’s DIY ethic which has directly inspired me to do The Selby project.

Is there ever an end to a project like this?

I dont think it will end, it is too much fun.

Do you have anything else you’re working on?

I am working on doing more of my watercolor paintings and editing photos for an upcoming show and book release which will be at Colette in April 09. Also I am producing some extremely limited edition clothing, jewelry and art collaborations for sale on my online store, http://store.theselby.com. Also look out for shows in Tokyo, Los Angeles and New York for 2009.

Bil Zelman Shoots Pro Bono, But Not For Free

Bil Zelman contacted me recently about some pro bono work he’s been shooting and in particular how rewarding it is for him. Ultimately it ends up benefiting his business too with genuine interest in the work from Art Directors and nice press placement. Here’s what we talked about:

Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you arrived at a successful commercial photography career.

In art school I developed a particular style of hard-flash, in your face, street photography that landed me some museum shows. This was a handful of years ago when 6×6 transparency film and a tripod were standard for the commercial world, but things were just beginning to change. After sending out a few hundred ridiculously inexpensive promo pieces, I gained the trust of a local agency who hired me to shoot a campaign for Virgin Megastores. I took the campaign to the street with no assistants, very little experience and it turned out stellar. The work won a bunch of awards and suddenly the kid with two cameras and four lenses was getting calls. I suppose my confidence and naiveté mixed with my shooting style was something people were ready for.

I’ve always tried to bring something fresh and innovative to the table, and the believability of my shots has been well received and rewarded.

How do you determine what is pro bono and what should be paid, how do you know it’s not something the client should be paying for?

I don’t have any steadfast rules except that they have to be non-profit and preferably a charity. There are plenty of large non-profits which can clearly pay a fee for their photography. Also, many trade and lobbying organizations are nonprofit groups, but not charities so you do need to be careful.

I’ve chosen to work with non-profits which are local, for the most part, whose only budgeted alternative would be to have someone on their staff shoot stuff with a digital point and shoot. And who, after a little research, could clearly benefit from my help. I will also admit that I generally only accept projects where artistic excellence is appreciated and encouraged. Something you’re not going to find everywhere.

Also, when the entity is small and local, it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between the budget of your local “keep kids off the streets program” and someone who can probably afford you like say Greenpeace. Beyond that it’s all about researching them and trusting your gut.

Pro-bono projects I’ve worked on recently would include:

My local Sudanese Center, which clearly operates on a tiny budget. They covered $380 of my expenses and my assistants and I donated time/equipment. When the children and families found out that they were getting their photos taken for free, 80 people showed up dressed in their finest at sunset in a field I had scouted (they were bussed from the center). It was an amazing feeling…and scary, as I had imagined 8-10 would actually make it.

The the International Pediatric Neurological Society. Sound fancy? It’s two doctors I know who donate time and resources in their spare time. They could never have afforded to fly a photographer to Kiev, and Peru, but really needed the help. Because of the two trips, on which they covered about half of the cost, they now have a fantastic presentation with which they can seek out funding and raise awareness to their cause. And I ended up feeling really good about it and landing three pages in Archive.

A local, neighborhood outreach program came up with just enough money for me to shoot 30 rolls of grainy b/w on their project; A well designed, oversize brochure to raise funds and awareness. Beautiful.

Anymore it seems like the big commercial guys are not shooting as much editorial and I would suspect that at times shooting commercial can seem tedious and un-fulfilling. Does this serve as an antidote to that?

Absolutely, I manage to shoot about a five or six good editorial pieces a year and crave more, but San Diego isn’t the best place to be for that kind of work. While I’m blessed with great commercial assignments, those projects are usually confined to product placement first and artistry second.

The charity assignments I’ve done have given me grounds to test new ideas and ways of working, are usually not collaborative (Yes, it can try your patience to have someone else edit, crop and manipulate your work all the time- No matter how well it’s done, or how good the intentions).

I feel so empowered to be able to use my camera as a tool for social change, large or small. Nothing has felt more satisfying, and nothing has garnered a greater response for me than this type of work. From simple thank you letters from complete strangers to Art Buyers skipping over ad campaigns and
celeb work and asking “where where the photo’s of those children taken.” It still amazes me.

It’s also a sad fact that no matter how good that cover shot or ad campaign is, there’s a shelf life before it’s thrown out with all of the other magazines. It kills me. Hopefully people will be able to use the images I create for their causes to raise awareness and even funding for years to come. A longevity we rarely see in other media applications.

You mentioned that photographers are missing out on a opportunity by not taking on these kinds of projects. Can you explain?

The positives to taking on these types of projects are endless. To improve the lives of others, to better your community, to art direct your own piece and have total creative freedom, to travel, to see and experience things you may have never thought possible, to be reminded that not everyone is middle class.

And even the self-serving part; to draw attention to your own work and your own vision and be noticed by others in a fantastically positive light. Images from my last trip to Kiev ended up being printed in both Archive and the PDN Photo Annual. One week of shooting with no production work at all ended up getting noticed just as much if not more than my bigger budget shoots for the year.

And, oh yeah, did I mention that you’ll feel really, really good about it?

Jesse Chehak Interview over @ Ground Glass

“I can say that I am very much an experiential learner. This means that I don’t always see things clearly until I’m at a breaking point and physically in front of what it is I am seeing. ”

Read it all (here).

How to make a contest submission

I was talking with Heidi Volpe (former AD at LA Times Magazine) about some of the things she’s working on in the right now (we have projects we’re working on together so we talk a lot) and I asked if she would write about them from time to time to give people a different perspective on the industry. Here’s her first entry:

For the past four years I’ve been invited to attend speed dating reviews at Art Center of Design in LA which is basically a panel of professionals who look at student work (really fast) and this year I was also invited to look over the work of graduating 7th term photography students (it’s an 8 term program that take 2 years and 8 months to complete if you go nonstop.) This was a two-on-one for the students Dennis Keeley the Photo Chair and I. He ran the show and he gave some insightful feedback, it was amazing to hear him talk about the work. I managed to cough once and awhile *kidding.*

This is an opportunity for the students to get some industry feedback and forces them to articulate their work to a potential client and prepare them for the big bad world out there.

Most recently I was invited by Everard Williams, Associate Photo Chair at Art Center to help curate the work that goes into their student gallery. I spent the day with Everard, and Alexandra Tumbas, my former intern at the Times (also a terrific photographer and photo editor), who’s now the Assistant Photo Editor, at C Magazine. We looked at a lot of strong work for the upcoming show.

The work was strong but there’s an aspect to entering a contest or review that seems to be overlooked and this is the actual submission process so i thought I’d share with you a few tips on how to make a submission.

Typically very specific guidelines are given for any submission. This is a time consuming effort for the reviewers, so the selection process needs to be as efficient as possible.

Rule #1: Read the guidelines

Rule #2: Read the guidelines

I was really surprised how much digital work did not follow the specs, when files were submitted as psd, at 85 megs, they took forever to open. When you are looking about 200+ images you can image how long 45 seconds feels.

While I was working at the Los Angeles Times Magazine we submitted a lot of our work to The Society of Publication Designers and the Society of News Design. SPD is organization that focuses primarily on the visual communication of print and online editorial professionals. SND is the same structure but focused on international Newspapers.

We spent an incredible amount of time getting our entries together. There was a team of people selected to oversee the assembly of the submissions, one person keyed in all the entries into an excel document, freelancers were hired to help and staff stayed as late as 1:00 am and worked weekends to make the deadlines and submit properly. At the end of the contest as a paper we had over 300 entries.

If an entry was not correctly filled out, it did not get considered. End of story. The kick in the pants here is not only did you lose your entry fee, you don’t even get a shot at losing.

Rule #3: Care about your presentation

I was really impressed with students that took the time to pull together a nice edit of matted images. Some submitted a loose box of images all different sizes and it make it a little harder to judge. When they had such a range of work, it made it more difficult to look at as a body because the viewing process was shattered by the varying sizes. It’s easier to compare things uniformly.

Rule #4
Include your best work always, and edit it.

Don’t overwhelm the judges, having a too large of a submission can hurt you more then help you.

Rule #5
Don’t include personal notes or attacks on the judging process. One girl had a hand written note in her submission on a piece of graph paper

FACT: I am graduating this term

FACT: I have submitted for gallery 9 times and never been selected

Um, that would go over really well when you are asking for a grant or a show.

Rule #5
Label your work with your name. I know simple but one CD had no information on it. Memorex CD-R doesn’t cut it.

The Student Gallery opens Dec 12. Art Center has a calendar and all their lectures are open to the public. www.artcenter.edu

UPDATE: Some images from the review (here).

A New Website For Young Photographers

Jake Stangel has a new website for young photographers called “Too Much Chocolate” and it’s already off to a great start because of a smart interview with Trevor Graves. Trevor was part of a group of talented snowboard photographers who revolutionize the snowsports industry in the 90’s. They brought in-your-face, lifestyle and grungy party photography to an industry that had been dominated by pretty landscape pictures with people walking/skiing through them. The surf/skate/snowboard genre of photography is my favorite for the way it seamlessly blends lifestyle and action photography. Trevor now helms Nemo Design over in Portland, OR.

Here are a few choice quotes from Trevor in the interview:

“Personally I hope to be exposed to a young shooters work though a respected third party.”

“We are looking and thousands of creatives a year, I may not have a job today for you but I may in the future so I want to put your website in my bookmarks folder under “something”. David Lachapelle I would put under “Fashion” or “Sexy”, Ansel Adams I would put under “Landscapes”, Annie Leibovitz as a “Celebrity portrait” photographer. Make my life easy, where can I classify your style? Is that category the type of work you would like to be doing ten years form now? I don’t want this to sounds harsh, but I have 10 minutes for you today; ask yourself how do you want me to remember you?”

“We all need to make a living in life and everyone has different standards of living and if you have a high standard of living, then go get a business degree, photography in the long run will not make you happy. ‘Starving artist’ is a cliché for a reason. As a professional photographer if the first year doesn’t break ya, the next five will keep trying.”

Just Slap Something Between The Ads

“The daily newspaper was a centerpiece of the community; it was how community information was distributed.

Eventually the newspaper was sold. It was no longer a point of civic pride for its owners or a cohesive center point of happenings, involvement and community. It was now an investment.

Along with the other media outlets bought and sold through the years a thirty percent profit was a common mandate. As other sources for information became more popular the circulation began to decline and cuts where made.

The more cuts and consolidations made by the owners, the more the circulation dropped. New owners would offer false hope for their investments, but ultimately shareholders demanded the mandated profits. Reinvestment, other than the occasional redesign, was rare.

Local columns, features and news would be scaled back and replaced with homogenized, syndicated columns, features and entertainment. Circulation continued to drop.”

Read more at NewMediaPhotographer.com

Life Delivers Its First Takedown Notice

The first I’ve seen anyway since they released all their images online with google (here).

I was following a link about 70’s Rock Musicians and Their Parent’s Homes (here then here) to see who the photographer was and ended up at Apartment Therapy (here) where it looks like all the advertising on the site got the attention of the Life magazine archive where the images were taken from.

Ethics And Photography Discussion

Interesting conversation over on the NPR radio show On The Media (here) where host Bob Garfield talks with Martin Schoeller, Jill Greenberg, Platon and former DOP of Time Magazine Maryanne Golon about the ethics of portrait photography. It’s interesting because he’s looking for answers about the journalistic responsibility photographers have to subjects and viewers but he’s not asking photojournalists he’s asking celebrity portrait photographers who by and large as you will hear or read don’t really take that into consideration when making pictures. It’s a good discussion to have because publications like Time have long since crossed over into hiring photographers that will give them more punch on the newsstand and less of a balanced look at the subject.

“one category of mass media photography operates with hardly any rules at all”

You can listen here:
[audio:http://plain-glass.flywheelsites.com/wp-content/audio/otm112808e.mp3]

Or download (here).

There’s much more in there but I really enjoyed this exchange:

MARTIN SCHOELLER: I think there has been a long tradition in portrait photography where photographers try to capture a person’s personality, rather than feeling obliged in trying to make them look good. The best example, I think, is Richard Avedon. I mean, you feel like he would take your picture and you would come across as mentally challenged. I don’t think Avedon ever tried to please anyone but himself with his portraits.

BOB GARFIELD: Nor Schoeller himself. His ultratight portraits, which have appeared in such publications as Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, are typically grim mug shots, sort of Chuck Close meets your driver’s license photo. His Jack Nicholson could be a serial rapist, and his Barack Obama resembles Abraham Lincoln, homely wart and all.

The shots are arty and arresting but not exactly flattering, although Schoeller takes issue with that characterization.

MARTIN SCHOELLER: I don’t think my pictures are unflattering, to be honest. The light is very flattering. It’s not a wide-angle lens; they’re not distorted. I just think that people are nowadays not used to seeing people as people anymore, and your perception of the environment is so twisted by all these pictures that you see in magazines and advertisements that if you see a person just for who they are, you are really shocked.

BOB GARFIELD: Are we indeed so conditioned to the unreal world of ads and celebrity photography that we, the audience, can’t handle the truth? Certainly, magazine photography, at least where movie stars aren’t involved, is not hagiography. It is not commissioned to flatter the subject. But whether you’re JFK sitting for Karsh of Ottawa or the family next door posing in sweaters at Olan Mills, no one wants to look mentally challenged or criminal, or demonic, or even unattractive.

So do portraitists and editors have any responsibility to their subjects’ basic vanity? Reporters certainly don’t. If the reporting doesn’t distort facts or context, nobody has a beef. Why should photography be held to a different standard?

PLATON: All I can do is to try and find a human quality and break through all of these plastic walls that are put up in front of me and my sitter, and all the time restrictions and all the pressure that they try to bombard me with to stop me finding perhaps my sense of what the truth is.

—-

One thing that Bob seems to be missing in this whole discussion is that it’s the magazine that determines the ethics of the photography they use. It’s the magazine’s job to fact check not only the stories but also the photography. There are almost always many images to choose from a shoot and the final selection of images to run will ultimately determine the tone of how the subject is portrayed. The editors are making those final decisions. It’s up to the readers to align themselves with magazines that deliver whatever level of ethics in storytelling they are comfortable with.

Hillman Photojournalism Award- Call for Entries

The Sidney Hillman Awards honor journalism that explores issues related to social justice and progressive public policy. The 2009 prizes are given for work produced, published or exhibited in 2008. Winners will be announced in May 2009 and will be published in the New York Times. Winners are awarded a $5,000 prize and a plaque. For more information and past winners, please visit www.hillmanfoundation.org.

Deadline January 31, 2009

**There is no submission fee or form—a cover letter and 3 copies of the nominated material are all that are required.

Your Portfolio As A Video

Erik Wåhlström shot a 1 minute video of himself thumbing through his printed portfolio (on his blog here too). He’s a talented photographer and this is a solid book so it’s a good example for those looking to put one together. I think there’s something else interesting here for photo editors because I think I might enjoy the option of previewing a book this way to decide whether or not to call it in. Regardless it’s kind of a fun way to send your work around and might snare a few people who might not otherwise look.


from Erik Wåhlström Fotograf on Vimeo.

more

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Journalism Will Survive The Death Of Its Institutions

I got that headline from a MediaShift story written by Lisa Williams (here) and it was mentioned in the This Week in Media podcast I was listening to yesterday. It was a special edition of the show devoted entirely to journalism and some excellent point were made so I thought I’d share it with you.

You can listen here:
[audio:http://plain-glass.flywheelsites.com/wp-content/audio/twim_116_aud.mp3]

Or download (here).

Take our business, please! We’re throwing in the towel!

Simon Dumenco of AdAge delivers the keynote this holiday season:

“That big publishers can’t manage to sell enough print ads, in a post-print media economy shadowed by a larger economic meltdown, is not exactly shocking. What is shocking, though, is that they’re essentially saying to scrappier, upstart online competitors: Take our business, please! We’re throwing in the towel! If we can’t play by the old rules of publishing — the profit-soaked, imperial model with endless layers of coddled management ensconced in luxe trophy offices — then we don’t want to play at all!”

“I’m just asking: Are you willing to radically adjust your business model precisely because you still believe in the act of publishing?”

“And when I say ‘radically adjust your business model,’ I don’t mean radically amputating so the patient bleeds to death faster. I don’t mean cutting all the front-line content producers — the editors and writers and art staffers who don’t make million-dollar-plus salaries — in great brutal rolling waves so that soon you’ll be unable to produce any content anymore. I don’t mean changing your business purpose from editorial brand building to, basically, editorial brand hospice care — abusive, inadequate hospice care at that.”

Read it all (here).

Movie Studios Struggle With Digital Screenings

“When you shoot a movie digitally,” Kennedy told Daily Variety later, “you’re dependent on those projectors being calibrated perfectly and everything working perfectly. Even the condition of the screen is important.”

Story in Variety (here).

Trunk Archive – Ultra High End Stock

There’s always been this problem in stock photography that the best images remain with people who care very little about licensing them to you. Often if I wanted to get some great stock pictures I would call photographers directly and ask them to go into their files and pull the contact sheets and send them over. The problem with doing this is that it’s an enormous pain in the ass for them and if there’s a chance the pictures wouldn’t be used or someone might try to use them very small or the story would be killed then I’ve suddenly ruined my chances of pulling stock with that photographer the next time around.

When I heard about Trunk Archive (website here) last February and saw the list of photographers who’s work they represented I thought how great this will be for photo editors and art buyers to source and use high end imagery. I had the opportunity to talk with Matt Moneypenny the President and CEO of Trunk last week and here’s what we talked about.

Matt, tell me about the beginnings of Trunk Archive?

Trunk Archive was started in a kitchen in Copenhagen 3 years ago by 5 high end Danish art collectors. They were saying to each other “wouldn’t it be great if we found a way for fine artists to manage their licensing themselves?” Their idea was to build an archive and website that would allow fine art photographers the ability to post, manage and administer their own archive. It was a passion project for them and of course 3 years ago the economy was in a very different place. They ended up spending about a year and a half building their idea and it cost around 1.7 million to develop it, but they came to realize that the original business model was unsustainable. A friend introduced me to the Danes and they offered to turn the software and the business over to me to run as I saw fit, from NYC. It was too exciting an opportunity to pass up. I had been at the archive at Art + Commerce for several years, and before that I was an agent at ICM in Los Angeles and London.

What are the differences between Trunk Archive and Art + Commerce Archive?

Art + Commerce is tied to their assignment roster with a few notable exceptions. I always felt that this was a much bigger business. At Trunk Archive we can license the archives of any photographer from any agency. In fact we work very collaboratively and comfortably with all of the photographer assignment agencies.

That leads to my next question which is about dealing with high end photographers and subjects and how that leads to complexity in licensing because you have the photographer, publicist, model and agent all involved and it’s always just a big mess. How do you solve that and make it easier for the clients to do deals?

Yes, there are restrictions when working with art at this level, but everyone is also interested in the opportunities afforded by well-managed image licensing. Think of the artists who have most permeated the public consciousness. Warhol is my favorite example. When people begin to collect art, the first work that they often seek to acquire is a Warhol. I would say that’s because of the power of licensing. His work has been actively licensed and thus seen in a huge way. One way to brand build for these photographers is to make sure that their art is seen in Korea, Taiwan, South Africa and so on. It’s increases the perception that these are the important artists with incredible talent – who are at the forefront of the medium. Licensing does that.

There seems to be a real problem with advertisers using this type of imagery because many times you need approval from celebrities or models because the work is not model released. How do you address this?

It’s definitely an extra layer of work but it’s all about the relationships that you have with the people that represent the subjects in the pictures. Due to my years at ICM I know all of the PR and movie studios. I know what an agent’s concerns will be and what will be required to get a particular image approved. On the model side it’s about about having a relationship with the principals at the agencies and understanding that an agent needs to protect the brand and image of the model. We work to gain their trust, as we will generally be negotiating the fee for their model on their behalf. We also work closely with each photographer’s assignment agent as it’s important for us to know what existing contracts each photographer has in place.

So why don’t more A list photographers make their imagery available as stock?

For a long time there was this preciousness surrounding an artists archive. In addition, licensing existing work was a far more labor intensive process. Now you can upload and download high-res files in seconds. A big part of this process is making the artist comfortable with the people that are handling his or her archive. We hand negotiate every single transaction and always ask the artist about every license before agreeing to send any file to any client. We are very protective of our artists.

Why do you think there’s an opportunity here to make money on stock and certainly why in this economy?

I think that most stock agencies do not promote individual artists and their archives, something that we do quite well and with definitive results. No matter how great the work is it’s not going to sell itself – you need to get out there and bang the drum. We are aware of the importance of customer service – we do free research, we give free comps to clients that we know, we’re reachable at all hours of the day. Service has been a big part of our success. We have over 5,000 global clients and i think that it’s the level of service that we provide that keeps the list growing. I have a substantial budget for sales and marketing trips. We just spent 2 weeks in London, Paris, Warsaw, Moscow, Milan and Madrid. I am leaving in two weeks for Scandinavia and early next year we’ll travel to Delhi, Shanghai, Singapore and Sydney. In most markets around the world high-end licensing is still a more hand carried service. In Spain it’s guys on vespas with laser prints zipping around showing the new work to clients. That’s not uncommon in many markets around the world.

Now, is that because these are emerging markets?

No, mostly I think it’s cultural. In France they still want to see the work – they want to touch it they want to hold it. They don’t just want to look at lightboxes on a website.

In this economy is stock a solution to saving money and cutting risk on original shoots?

I certainly hope so because that’s part of what I’m banking on. Our business has been growing healthily this year.

Are you adding photographers to the archive?

Yes, there are a few who have recently come aboard that are not yet online – like Philip Lorca Di Corcia, Raymond Meier, and Dewey Nicks. There are still a few photographers out there who create the type of imagery we believe in. We’re interested in representing them but there is definitely an end point. Right now we have roughly 62 photographers but I don’t really see our roster growing to much more than over 100. There are only so many artists that create work at this level. We don’t want to be Corbis or Getty. We will always be a high end boutique service.

Advertising In New Media

“It used to be really easy for us to advertise anything because consumers had no idea what they were buying. We could basically sell them whatever we wanted. But the Internet has made everything so transparent.”

Story in the NYTimes Magazine (here).

Raymond Meier Website

Another online archive from a top photographer (here). Thanks Dude.

I remember there was a photographer who’s website I used to visit often but one day it disappeared and he told me he pulled it down so people would stop copying his work. I think those days are over now.