WIP.CRACKER

In anticipation of a trip to NYC (tomorrow!), I've redone my portfolio, over the last two weeks.

I say I've redone it, but it was really a group effort. I'm grateful that people are willing and interesting in giving feedback, since it seems it's impossible for a photographer to judge his own work with much accuracy.

Big thanks to Jamie Kripke, Thomas Broening, James Thomas, and Lisa Wiseman. Each of them helped me out in unique, invaluable ways.

I submitted to the Personal Work section of the PIX Digital Imaging Contest.

If you can figure out how to locate my images on the contest site, that is. The link below used to get to my images, but somehow, their site moves pictures around, perhaps randomly. Thanks PDN!



















Stop by and vote for me if you have a chance!

That stuff's on my portfolio site as well of course.

(Warning: dead animals and animal parts herein. I wrote before that this project might offend some people, and I'm convinced.)

I'm mainly done with this Animal Model Kits project. I've been booked a whole lot between when I started it a couple months ago and when I finished it last week.

They're specimens, if you're wondering. I got them from an online supply house, so you could get yourself a set, if you're inclined.

I worked with a stylist, Suzanne Bryan, who was great. I could see I had reached my limit in arranging the parts, so it was time to call in a professional. Suzanne did a great job styling the animal parts, and I liked collaborating some.
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It was nice to have someone else around while I was disassembling these animals. It was pretty creepy, not only cutting them open, but just having them around. But cutting them open is worse.

While prepping them, I returned to ideas I come back to periodically, about death and life and our disconnection to each. Cutting through muscle and bone, though bloodless, made me realize how infrequently I come into contact with such things, when everything is killed, cleaned, prepared cooked, sealed, packaged and delivered to me, all nice and tidy.

I thought this might have a lot to do with entitlement, not entirely, no, but partly. If I had to kill and clean a chicken, I might have a much better sense of its sacrifice, and therefore feel more grateful while I ate it. And really, that applies to food, clothes, everything. We're so disconnected from the origin of our goods it's easy to float off into some Star Trek wonderland where things just...appear.
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The project grew out of a story I read about David Lynch and his Christmas presents one year. If I remember correctly, he obtained animals like chickens and rats, disassembled, labelled, and froze them, then packaged them up, with instructions for reassembly. I thought that was pretty freaky.

Visually, I wanted to try this top-down technique; I'd seen Hunter Freeman and Dwight Eschlimann use it well.
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I'm kinda thinking about Joel Peter-Witkin, but then...naaaaaah. I think his stuff is way more disturbing...

Over the past five years, I've sought the advice of far more established professionals, listened to industry experts, talked with buyers and art directors, and read various magazines, websites, and blogs.

With respect to a path toward advertising photography, the general consensus I took was roughly:

• Make lots of photographs
• Shoot the kind of stuff you want to get paid to shoot
• Develop and hone your style
• Enter contests
• Refine your list of potential buyers
• Market to those buyers with postcards, emails, phone calls, personal visits, and whatever else you can think of
• Go through editorial to get a name
• When you get a job, don't screw it up too badly

This has been my general plan for a couple years, and I'm executing it as well as possible.

So.

Maybe I've been reading too much A Photo Editor, but recently I've been noticing a couple of things:

1. That list of items above, as a framework, has a lot more detail that needs to be filled in.
2. There's some possibility that the above framework might not work for me. Or for me now. Or any more at all.
   

From that point-of-view, I find myself wondering: are the following items opportunities or threats?

I booked some long assisting projects recently and haven't been able to work on my own stuff. When those long projects ended, I found myself frustrated and irritable, and feeling like an imposter photographer.

I thought to myself, "I need to get inspired, get motivated, get to the point where I feel like a photographer, so I can make some pictures."

And you know, I can do all the little things that I find inspiring:

• walking around downtown
• looking at work from photographers that are around my level
• listening to albums from artists I admire
• reading
• looking at stuff

but I'm beginning to see that this stuff usually has no immediate effect.

Then: I don't get to make photographs when I feel like a photographer, I get to feel like a photographer when I make photographs.


Which is what more advanced photographers have been telling me all along: keep making pictures.

Dear Photographer/Designer/Ad Agency,

Do you know how big my monitor is? I think you don't, since, when I access your website, you expand my browser window to full screen, leaving this little tiny content area surrounded by a vast field of grey/black/white.

I wish, if you're going to presume to take over my browser that way, that you'd be more accurate about it. For future reference, you have 1920x1200 pixels to work with. Your content usually occupies about a third of that.

Thanks!

I just hit the button on my first email promotion. As I rolled up to that, my heart was pounding, my palms were sweating, my whole body felt light and there was a buzzing in my head.

Maybe, just maybe it was that third cup of coffee this morning.

More likely, it was terror. I checked the thing 39486120463476 times, but there could still be some atrocious mistake. I sent it to seven of my peers, but it could still somehow have some totally inappropriate career-ending aspect to it that nobody saw. Everybody uses email as a self-promotion tool now and it's totally valid but I have been getting spam for over a decade and I know how annoying it is.

And now, five minutes after the heart-stopping eternity of watching the "processing" message proceed, my body remains light but my heartbeat has returned to normal, and I just had a fit of relieved laughing.

Wait! There's a reply! Already! It must be a portofolio call-in, or some kind of positive feedback, or a scathing flame...oh, no, it's just an out-of-office message.

Sitting on the other side of it now, I realize that, whenever some promotional email is annoying me, that I never give any thought to the sender. I realize now that, in my head, they just click a button and send 3048693748612374632 emails, then go back to watching TV. My experience is nothing like that, so maybe theirs isn't either.

Sympathy for the devil.