Crusade for Your Art: Best Practices for Fine Art Photographers
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About this ebook
Crusade For Your Art: Best Practices for Fine Art Photographers gives you the tools to take your fine art photography career by the reins and thoughtfully and purposefully develop a plan to get you where you want to go. Learn how to tighten your work, develop your brand, identify goals and a plan for your photography, and strategi
Jennifer Schwartz
Jennifer Yoffy Schwartz is a publisher, photographer, and arts advocate based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the founder/publisher of Yoffy Press, which publishes photobooks you need to own. She is also the creator/director of Crusade for Art, a non-profit organization focused on cultivating demand for art, specifically fine art photography. Jennifer owned a fine art photography gallery in Atlanta (Jennifer Schwartz Gallery) for five years, showcasing the work of emerging photographers. She also created the online project, The Ten, and was the co-creator of Flash Powder Projects. In the spring of 2013, she traveled around the country in a 1977 VW bus, engaging audiences with photography. Her book, Crusade For Your Art: Best Practices for Fine Art Photographers was published in March 2014. The follow-up publication, Crusade For Your Audience: Finding and Cultivating Art Collectors, was released in 2017.
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Crusade for Your Art - Jennifer Schwartz
PRAISE FOR
Crusade for Your Art
"In Crusade For Your Art, Jennifer Schwartz has written one of the most comprehensive guides to date for both the professional and emerging fine art photographer to navigate the current world of Photography. With contributions from leading photography museum, gallery and photo directors, the expert advice given is instrumental in creating what every photographer needs to know to navigate the current art market. I absolutely love this guide. It covers all bases! I whole-heartedly recommend this masterful guide to the photographic community."
– Elizabeth Avedon, Independent Curator, New York,
NY www.elizabethavedon.com,
www.elizabethavedon.blogspot.com
"Crusade for Your Art is a valuable roadmap for those who wish to navigate the fine art field and elevate their professional practices."
– Laura Pressley, Executive Director at CENTER,
Santa Fe, NM www.visitcenter.org
"Jennifer Schwartz is a guardian angel for photographers. Crusade for Your Art is a passionate call to arms for image-makers around the world to get your work out there and in front of people like me. This is how you do it. Don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise."
– Michael Foley, Gallerist and Educator, New York,
NY www.foleygallery.com,
www.thesummershowproject.com
"Crusade For Your Art: Best Practices For Fine Art Photographers is a must-read for anyone who works in the fine art photography realm. Photographers at all stages of their careers and practice will be well-served to read this guide cover-to-cover, and photography collectors and enthusiasts can also learn a lot within these pages that will help them better understand an artist’s business. Jennifer Schwartz answers hundreds of the most common questions and hundreds more that people are probably scared to ask. Who would think to write out a step-by-step guide on how an artist can best use Twitter? Jennifer Schwartz did. The contributing authors offer advice based upon years of experience and countless hours of observation. Jennifer Schwartz takes the mystery out of the fine art photography world by outlining the business and taking the photographer through the entire process of creating and sharing photographs. As the author says, it’s a lot of work, but this book removes one of the biggest tasks of all — identifying what needs to be done."
– Bevin Bering Dubrowski, Executive Director of Houston Center for Photography and Editor of Spot magazine, Houston, TX
www.hcponline.org
Jennifer demystifies the steps towards a long and invested career as a photographer. An overdue and necessary resource for us all.
– Brian Ulrich, Photographer and Educator, Richmond, VA
www.notifbutwhen.com
The 21st-century photography world is at once complex and accessible – an aspiring artist needs an eye, the will, and a good map to explore the terrain. This welcome and highly readable book combines Jennifer Schwartz’s amazing breadth of knowledge about guiding photographers on their journey with trenchant insights from photo-world pros on both sides of the reviewing table. Between them all, the landscape of photography seems friendlier, clearer, and maybe even rewarding.
Jen of Art leads an inspiring crusade!
– George Slade, Writer, Curator, and Consultant, Traverse City, MI
www.rephotographica-slade.blogspot.com
Young photographers need this information. While academic programs at colleges and universities are developing new art talents with incredible work, most are not offering enough in professional practices and preparation to support fine art careers. This book offers a great resource for the practical, hands-on information that artists need to navigate the marketplace. With both traditional and innovative approaches on promoting and exhibiting work, as well as developing relationships with galleries, curators and collectors, it is an easy read, full of invaluable advice and direction for entering the art world today.
– Michael Marshall, Chair of the Photography Department at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA
www.mmars.myweb.uga.edu
Crusade For Your Art
BEST PRACTICES
FOR FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHERS
Jennifer Schwartz
Crusade Press
Atlanta, Georgia
Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Schwartz.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator,
at the address below.
Crusade Press
PO Box 8688
Atlanta, GA 30306
www.crusadeforart.org
Ordering Information:
Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the Special Sales Department
at the address above.
Crusade For Your Art/ Jennifer Schwartz. —1st ed.
ISBN 978-0-9912779-3-3
For the photographers – you are an inspiration.
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
—MARK TWAIN
Introduction
The art world has been turned on its head, and no one knows what to do about it. Long-time gallerists tell stories of mythic proportions about the days when they could not keep art on the walls. With more and more people buying art online and in alternative venues, many traditional galleries cannot stay in business.
Career photographers talk about the days when career photographers existed. Days when they could support themselves on their art and they recognized the value of their work. Days when photographers would not dare give it away for the glory of a photo credit.
Up-and-coming photographers lament the digital era where everyone with an SLR (or better yet, an iPhone) calls himself a photographer and layers and filters can turn the dullest images into something . . . special
.
Nostalgia is easier than change. Routine is more comfortable than innovation. The past is like looking through a soft-focus filter, while the present has a hard-edge.
And yet. The truth is, we have the tools to take this upside-down art world and own it. The Internet has leveled the playing field for everyone, and may the best photographers and galleries win. We can take things into our own hands, and we can create our careers. Gone are the days of sending slides to galleries and waiting for the call that would signal the start of something. Photographers with talent, creativity, and ambition can start their own fire.
So rise up. Take your career by the reins. Be thoughtful, purposeful, and develop a plan to get you where you want to go. Form a plan, tighten your work, create your brand, and launch your project.
Make your mark on the world.
PART I
Making the Work
First you have to make the work.
This guide addresses bodies of work
or projects
. A body of work or photographic project is typically twenty strong images with a cohesive concept, feeling, and look. To get to a portfolio of twenty strong images, a photographer usually makes significantly more over a long period of time. Rarely does a photographer go on a two-week trip and return with a depth and breadth of imagery to constitute a full, complete body of work.
Bodies of Work
While twenty images is appropriate for a project portfolio, there are situations where you would want fewer images (for display on your website, to submit to certain portfolio competitions) and instances where more images are appropriate (a book edit, for example). Having a much larger selection of good, strong images offers the opportunity for creating different edits of the work to suit different purposes (meeting with a curator whose tastes you feel would prefer a certain type of selection or submitting to a competition with a theme that favors a different edit of the work).
Creating a photographic project involves an idea, a plan, and the elasticity to allow your concept to evolve. What started out as a project about one thing can turn into something different over time, most likely something with more depth and emotional pull. There is no need to rush. Let the images simmer and percolate. You and your project will be all the better for it.
Stages of Fine Art Photographers
As photographers move through the process of making work, there is a natural evolution from experimenting to creating with intent. Fine art photographers can be thought of as falling into one of three stages or levels. The levels are not a hierarchy – it all depends on the goals of the individual photographer.
The first stage is centered around experimentation, technical competence, and stylistic development. The second stage moves to working within projects and telling a story through a body of work. And the third stage takes the experience of the first two and applies it to work that is truly connected to the individual photographer. Most photographers straddle