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Idle hands

Dominick Tyler - Silver Birch

There are probably many things I could be doing right now but I'm struggling to get down to work. I often have days that sit, unopened like a dreaded bill until they pass away. This seems like an awful waste to me and I'm never happy about it but I don't seem to be able to do anything about it. Laziness plays an important part of course but I also flatter myself that in a creative job there will always be times when you need to recharge your ideas and stop trying to think. A day spent in receptive meditation (by which I mean watching movies, reading, light gardening, mid-day showers and such) is all well and good but it can be a slippery slope, especially when there aren't piles of commissions lining up to return you to the land of the working.

At times like these I need the lure of a Self-Generated Project (SGP) to get me out of the house. The beauty of SGPs (I hope it's OK to make up acronyms like this, I did it with Big Advertising Job (BAJ) and someone said they liked it so I thought it might be fun to continue) is that they make you feel busy even when you have no proper work and often they become either valuable additions to your portfolio, or turn into saleable work. One project I started recently has now attracted some actual money even though it started as a SGP (determined to use the acronym now).

Of course there's little difference between this and what freelances always do to research and generate commissions. However, I think that allowing yourself the freedom to work on an idea without thinking about getting it commissioned or published can be very useful, especially when commissions and publications are hard to come by. I guess the choice is either stop taking pictures because no-one is paying you to take them or see the absence of a commission as a opportunity to take the pictures you want to. When (and if) this economic slump passes and budgets for photography start increasing, those photographers who have kept working on their own ideas will have the freshest portfolios and a head-start on the competition.

Off again

Dominick Tyler - Lake Geneva 2008

So, a two month hiatus barely a month into this blog was probably not the best way to draw in a readership but hey, I'm in it for the long haul. I do have an excuse of sorts, my son was born a month ago and before that there was a bit of nesting to do, so sheer indolence is only part of the reason I've not been posting.

As it happens there is now a lot going on in my photography, two new projects (one with some money behind it, one without) and a top-secret Big Advertising Job that I'm still can't quite believe is actually happening later in the year. All this and a baby makes for some sleepless nights.

The BAJ will be posted about more when the embargo lifts but I can say that it's going to be an amazing project to work on and may well stretch me to breaking point, be careful what you wish for and all that.

Cold-calling

Dominick Tyler - Japan 2005

In the course of my recent attempts to get my work 'out there' I've needed to make a lot of phone calls to agencies and publications. Often I'm not sure who I need to talk to so I ask the receptionist, it seems the obvious thing to do. Most of the time I find the right person and take it from there but sometimes it gets complicated, like when agencies change names or personnel, which they seem to do a LOT. One agency I saw three years ago no longer exists but another agency has sprung up with a near identical name, so imagine the confusion when I ring up the new agency believing it to be the old one and ask for the director by name...

Anyway, one receptionist offered me a valuable insight the other day that I'm ashamed to admit I never fully grasped before. "You are basically cold-calling" she said "that's why they [the ad-execs] won't take your call". Queue light-bulb moment <TING> I am a cold-caller! When I'm trying to arrange portfolio viewings I'm not a photographer: I'm a salesman. So perhaps I should learn how to do that better?

Turns out there's lots of advice about cold-calling techniques and how to be successful at cold-calling. Apparently (this according to the second linked article) there are only two techniques you need to know to cold-call successfully (bad news for those who have already invested half an hour reading the first article). These techniques are: "ask the right questions and listen to the replies".

Judging by experience the right question must not be "Would you like to see my portfolio?" because the reply too often seems to be "No".

Booked up

Dominick Tyler - Bookends

I just counted up all the portfolios I've made over the years and it comes out to roughly one for each of the twelve years I've been working. That's not including the odd one-off for a project or a holiday or just for fun. I've written before about the anxiety of showing books but I've always enjoyed the process of making them.

My first portfolios were pre-made books with clear vinyl sleeves, they all smell a bit funny now, a combination of the plastic sleeves and poorly fixed prints. At the time it felt like a big step, choosing images and putting them in the book. Suddenly what had been aimless was given a structure and a point, a beginning, middle and end.

My next books were bound pages of inkjets prints, at first in a folder that could be opened and re-edited and then in a permanent binding. Each of the books cost about £120 to produce, factoring in the cost of paper, inks and the services of a bookbinder, and they took a week of work to layout and print, so I only produced one or two a year.

Several times people viewing these books asked whether they were published editions or home-made and I always took that as a compliment. I suppose my aim was to replicate something of the "object of desire" feel of the photo-books I love, to make the experience of looking at my portfolio just a little bit like looking at a Steidl or Phaidon book.

I no longer have the time to make books like that and I need more copies than before so that some can be sent abroad or dropped off, so I've changed methods again and now I'm using Blurb.com. Blurb is an online printing service that's geared towards low print-runs but good image quality. The books are nicely printed and bound, repro is good, not great, but good. The only major drawback is that you have to use Blurb's own software, "Booksmart", to design the book and while it's very easy to use there are a limited number of page layouts available. It's very cost-effective compared to the fully bespoke books I was making, I've made two fifty page books each for around £25 plus P&P and you can order just one or hundreds depending on your needs. I've also made smaller, cheaper books as commercial portfolios that I can afford to give to prospective clients.

Blurb and services like it (Lulu, QOOP, Smile, Bob Books and more?) must be the result of the falling cost of digital printing, a few years ago producing a book like this would have been prohibitively expensive, or prohibitively disappointing. So now we can all be publishers of our own work, Blurb even offers a marketplace where you can sell your creations if you want.

The photo-book is, and always has been, a seductive, effective and desirable object. For many of us opening the pages of a book by Cartier-Bresson, Arbus, Salgado, Avedon or any other great photographer opened our eyes to other ways of seeing and other ways of telling. Now that we can all enshrine our work in those holy hardcovers will the photo-book loose it's power?

No Access

Dominick Tyler - Tangled

Access can make or break a story and negotiating access is always a nervous process for me. Last week a project that I've been thinking about for a while came to an abrupt halt before it even began because of access or rather lack of it and now I'm wondering where I went wrong. It's not the first time this has happened of course, I've had several stories fold because access either fell through or was impossible to arrange, but the signs were so good for this one it came as a shock when I heard the blunt "No".

My immediate reaction was that I'd failed to communicate my idea clearly and that I'd been misunderstood, so I followed up with a second crack at a first impression, an email that I hope will be interpreted as the persistence of dedication rather than arguing the toss. I don't expect the second email to work really, but I wanted to explain myself better at least, and it made me think about good and bad ways to go about getting access to stories. Each case is different of course but a few things seem to work:

Always phone. By all means email first but emails are too easy to ignore and an actual conversation is the gold standard for negotiation so follow up with a call.

Make it worth their while. There has to be something in it for the subject, or the boss of the institution or whoever is the gatekeeper to access.

Show your credentials. The most effective credentials are previous works that show you don't screw people over, and that you can deliver what you're offering.

Think of it as a collaboration. Which, to some extent, it always is. Long term projects especially need collaborative relationships to develop between photographer and subject and this can be seen as an attraction or a problem for those who allow you access.

With my recent failure I did at least try to follow the above but it still didn't work and the lesson for me is to not take anything for granted, least of all access, and to quickly start work on another project.

Still human, still here.

Abbie Trayler-Smith - Boni

Host Gallery in London is exhibiting a project by Abbie Trayler-Smith called "Still human, still here" that portrays the lives of rejected asylum seekers in the UK. I know Abbie really well, she's been a friend since we worked on a student newspaper together. She honed her considerable photographic skills at the Telegraph where she became one of their busiest photographers, regularly traveling to hot-spots and disaster areas and every time returning with powerful images.

After eight years at the Telegraph she courageously decided to move on and has recently found a new home at Panos Pictures. Like all great photographers, she is her own worst critic so she will hate me pouring on the compliments but having seen this latest project develop, almost from the start, I'm struck again by her ability to make wonderful images, communicating complex stories with simple honesty.

I've asked Abbie to blog about her experiences working on the project and putting the show together so hopefully she will.

The Graduates

Dominick Tyer - Banana Camera

Simon Bainbridge of the British Journal of Photography has kicked up a little storm by asking "Are photography courses useful?". Thousands of new photography graduates join the workforce every year and it's not as if there's that much work for established photographers; so common sense might suggest that the chances of success for the newcomers are slim and getting slimmer. Bainbridge also asks why those running and teaching the courses don't make their students more aware of the odds.

I'm often asked where I studied photography (I didn't) and where I'd recommend studying, so this question is one I've often considered. There have even been times when I've felt my work could do with a more rigorous academic foundation (usually after a long work drought) and I've thought about enrolling for an M.A. or something. Then I was asked to do a guest talk for some students at the London College of Communications and it seemed ridiculous to accept and then to apply to be a student.

I've done a few talks at LCC now and aside from the fact that I've learned a lot about my own work from the experience I'm always surprised by the expectations of the students. While they often seem naive about the business of being a photographer, I don't get the sense that they expect it to be an easy life. I often find myself explaining simple, boring, fundamental procedures like getting proposals out and invoicing effectively and it seems to me that not teaching this stuff is a far greater omission than not teaching that photography is an oversubscribed occupation.

Showing off

Dominick Tyler - Skinny-dip

I had a portfolio appointment yesterday, the first in a long time, and in the end it went really well and I even enjoyed it, but it did bring back memories of previous bad experiences. Some of these experiences are part of the reason I've left it so long to look for new clients. I'm not alone in dreading portfolio viewings, someone recently described it as being like a blind date, and it has the same potential for rejection, but at least with a blind date you have a kind of equal relationship, you're starting from the same place. A portfolio viewing is more like a blind date where you know that you are one of hundreds of hopefuls, and you have to strip naked, and name as many foods that begin with the letter J as you can in a minute. I've had a couple that felt like that, mostly towards the beginning of my career I suppose but even now I feel very erm.. exposed when I show my books.

The dread of showing can easily become a classic photographers procrastination: you don't go and see people with your book because you're conscious that it needs updating. You spend months updating it then you don't go and see people because you're nervous about showing the new work. Any negative feedback convinces you that you should re-do it, which takes months and eventually the new work becomes old work and then you feel like it needs updating...

If you manage to actualy get more than a couple of people to see the work in-between stressing about it you're doing well.

Photo District News ran a feature last summer about Review Santa Fe, a big portfolio review organized by Centre in Santa Fe. It's particularly interesting because it uses the diaries of a photographer, Doug Menuez and a reviewer, Debra Klomp Ching of Klompching Gallery in Brooklyn, so you get a feel of the experience from both sides. It's long-ish, linked in full above, but has some good insights including this advice from Debra:

"A word to the wise, photographers need to be articulate about their work, believe in it and be prepared. The most shocking comments I had from photographers were: ‘I’m so disorganized for all this bollocks! (said in jest)”, “So ... what do you do?”, “I shouldn’t be showing you this” and “I’m not going to say anything about my folio and leave it up to you”. I’m astounded that people can go to such lengths to attend these events and not make the most of their time with me. These reviews are my first impression and the conversation is as important as the work I’m looking at."

So no pressure then...

We Are One

0134, originally uploaded by Cia de Foto.

There was an interesting talk/discussion at The Photographers Gallery last night on the topic of collectives. Documentography, of which I am a member, participated along with ANRA, Unseen, Latitude Photographers and Cia de Foto. There was a lot of interest in the way that Cia de Foto, who are based in Brazil, organize themselves. Whereas it might be fair to say that the other four collectives have come together to promote and enrich the work of the individual members, Cia de Foto is a single unit with no individual authorship taken by the three photographers. For a lot of us the idea of relinquishing or sharing authorship of our work is a hard thing to come to terms with, it's something that we are programmed to struggle against but for Cia de Foto it has produced some beautiful results and listening to Pio Figueiroa describe their "hedonistic" marriage of work and lifestyle evoked a photographic utopia where we all could photograph each other and everything without the limitations of ego. I'm not ready to give up my byline though and it might be partly because of ego but I think that I need the sense of accountability that claiming authorship gives me.

Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon - Nuclear Waste

The Deutsche Borse Photography prize shortlisted artists are being exhibited at The Photographers Gallery in London until April 12th. I went to see it yesterday in-between picking up a repaired Mac and browsing cameras I can't afford. For me the most engaging work was "An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" by Taryn Simon. Her images are beautifully conceived, individually and as a set, and beautifully realised. It's a work with a clear, but not simplistic or one-dimensional vision, it tells us stuff but it has ambiguities to illuminate rather than to obscure. I hope it wins (even though I was born the same year as Taryn and usually that prevents me from enjoying another photographers success).