Bob Killen Fine Art Photography Blog

Fine Art Photography audiences take possession of your images as it relates to their personal experience. They do not respond to work that has a rootless generality. Your work must be an expressive specific (themes!) because through your images the audience expects to see and feel your theme in new ways, one that may make the world seem more available then it really is.

As you get your work ‘out there’, a special trust develops between the photographer and his audience that relies on the photographer’s ability to transfer feelings. But audience responses to the feelings conveyed will be diverse due to their financial means, desires, time commitment, competing art content, and comprehension. Thus, we have to provide convenient ports of entries so that the audience can join our work at whatever level is possible for them, while providing a series of next steps so that our audience can grow and develop with our work.

I use the term Ports of Entry, but marketers use several other terms, such as Levels of Participation, Points of Market Entry, Price/Use Channels, Buyer on Ramps, and others. The terms are interchangeable and all of them share the following market drivers.

• A Port of Entry is the point where a potential member of your audience becomes receptive to your offering. For example, it’s highly likely that you won’t care about wheel chairs until you need one. Your audience won’t buy your art until they care about art, care about you, and find a reason or more likely, an emotional need to own what you have created.

• Certain markets have clearly defined entry and exit points, like diapers. Other markets, such as Fine Art Photography are more imprecise.

• It’s best to find out when people are interested in your work before you reach out to them in order to avoid wasting resources.

• When an audience member becomes interested in your work, your work will become the standard by which they evaluate competing work, which governs the decision to own/not own your prints.

• It’s important to discover where and when your audience starts looking for information after crossing the interest threshold.

These drivers are common to all sales/marketing programs including developing a fine art photography audience. However, the Ports of Entry vary widely between various products (fine art photography is a creative product) and services. The more imprecise the product, the more discretionary the buyer becomes and thus the need for a wider audience with a number of well-defined Ports of Entry and next step paths for audience growth.

Six Ports of Entry

Based upon my last blog and some of the e-mail received you may believe that I am anti-gallery and see galleries as a waste of time for audience generation. I don’t. I just think that a wider audience is a far better marketing plan for sales and artist recognition. If getting your work ‘out there’ is important to you, gallery, and gallery representation can and should play a part in your marketing program, but I don’t believe it should be an exclusive delivery channel. You need a number of entry portals for a wide audience.

I have summarized six Ports of Entry that you may want to implement in whole or part. Each of these portals could generate a book length discussion that is beyond the scope of a blog article. I suggest that you research other resources about the portals and become familiar with the process and nuances of each. I also encourage you to proceed with the understanding that you may expand and refine your ports as your work and audience grows.

1. Free and No Commitment—This Port of Entry is like going to a high school dance with friends. Its free, you don’t have a date, and there is no commitment from any of the parties. The dancers and wall flowers alike are just getting to know each other and perhaps starting to talk about or view one or two members of the opposite sex with some interest, but the parties are still a long way from personal involvement and commitment.

For the fine art photographer, this Port of Entry in today’s market is your web site. It should be a dynamic, content rich, frequently refreshed, and not a simple showcase of your work. This is your first dance, the place where people get to know you, your work, and why your work is an expressive specific. While you may want to sell your prints online, driving sales of prints should not be the site’s primary goal. The primary goal is to develop an audience and when people leave your site you want them to leave enriched and with a desire to return. Moreover, you want to provide them with a next step opportunity to grow their interest in your work. In future blogs, I will explore web sites and blogs in detail.

2. Free with Commitment— Every savvy marketer in the world uses the free commitment format; sign up here for free recipes, sign up and get news on our next book, get discounts on your next purchase when you join our gold star club, etc. This is a next step point, one launched from your web site, blog and/or in some cases from a social media page, such as Facebook. Your audience members and prospective audience members can follow you or learn more about your work through a free sign up commitment.

As a Fine Art Photographer, you might invite your audience to follow you through a newsletter wherein they receive detailed news about your work, or perhaps you post special .pdf files that contain content that would be of interest to your audience. Besides a newsletter, there are other communication tools available; you can create an art digest, podcasts, and other rich content devices that augment your creative time as opposed to destroying it.

3. Cash Commitment — Your audience will participate with you at various financial levels and this step provides a low cost Port of Entry. For $15-$25 you could provide your audience with content rich pdf’s about subjects related to your work. These could be downloads or well-presented DVD’s that an audience member wants to own for reasons of content or the need to review some instructional material repeatedly.

4. Intermediate Owner Commitment— In the past, fine art photographers have sold images that require wall space for viewing. True, some collectors store work in cold storage and only display images for exhibits or further resale, but most buyers of our work expect to display your work on a wall, but not everyone has the space or discretionary funds to invest in prints suitable for display. You can provide other audience participation products and with today’s technology it is quite possible to produce well-crafted books, folios, or box sets of small prints, electronic folios, and so on. (I recently test marketed images for viewing on wide screen TV with rather positive results.) The point is that you want to grow this commitment level by providing an intermediate cost Port of Entry.

5. Owner Print Commitment— There are print buyers who seek smaller prints that identify with your images as expressive specific. They want to own your work but at a size and price commitment that fits within their parameters. You can sell prints from your web site, through other web sites, through both channels, or have a gallery or outsource printer representative handle your work. Price Points are important at this level as well as any additional value offerings such as providing mats and other value added services. Some images may warrant a low price point but others warrant a higher price point. I’ll cover price points in other blogs, but in most cases, I think you will find that getting your prints out there is a matter of offering your work at an affordable price on a nonexclusive basis.

6. Gallery Print Commitment— If your work is expressive specific, and there has been some significant buzz about your images you may want to consider presenting some of your work through major gallery exhibitions. If you decide to pursue this channel then it is important that you carefully evaluate this path in light of prices that you may have already established for your prints. Work that you intend to release through the gallery channel should not compete with your other outlets. I’ll discuss how to interest galleries in your work with future blogs.

These Six Ports of Entry are not mutually inclusive or exclusive. They represent a logical progression from a wide base of audience followers to a narrower audience who participate with you through print ownership. Nor are these six ports the only method to develop a fine art audience, but they are a proven marketing method that is readily executable for most photographers.

I know many of you are wondering about the time commitment. Yes, each of these Ports of Entry take time and in some cases funds to develop, but once you have a program in place the time commitment becomes one of content input and should account for about 20% of your creative hours. Invest the rest of your creative time in your fine art photography with an emphasis on becoming an expressive specific.

Before we get any deeper into the wisteria of developing an audience for your work, let me remind you (and me) of one simple fundamental.

Fine Art Photography is not about your talent. It is about pushing yourself beyond your given talents and into the core of your character.

Once your work reflects your character, which in turn drives your themes and passions, you will find that attracting and maintaining an audience is rather straightforward. However, getting to your core— not so easy. It is a process of failure and pain, but also a process of great joy as you discover what is significant for you and your audience.

Now back to this stuff about Galleries. From my last blog and case study it should be apparent that a Gallery Exhibition is not an audience development tool, but a retail sales channel where your audience can participate with you and your work. Gallery operators make their living selling art, and until your work has some level of recognition and audience support from other sources, most truly professional galleries will have little interest in your work. They have developed their own audiences of collector/owners who have certain tastes, needs, and make purchases at various price points. Their audience buys for aesthetic and investment value. The gallery owner wants to satisfy and expand his/her audience and choose works for that purpose. If they happen to advance your career, then well and good, but they certainly do not get up in the morning thinking that today is the day to launch a new artist into fame and fortune.

A Case History

To that point, here is a case history that came to me via a blog wherein the author, a recognized fine art photographer, accurately laments the high cost of producing gallery shows and the poor return on investment. In today’s tight market, she bears the cost of frames, the cost of travel to Photlucedia and other gatherings to meet people who may want to exhibit or publish her work, has to deal with limited investor owner interest in her current shows, and slow paying gallery operators when some of her work does sell. She bemoans the Internet and the fact that serious and non-serious collectors alike can buy prints for as little as twenty dollars and that the market for both groups is shrinking. She is right about all of this, but after visiting her web site, it is obvious that she has chosen or perhaps accepted a Narrow Market audience development plan. Beyond viewing her images on line, we have no way to participate with her except by visiting several galleries that stock her work, which limits her audience participation to one Port of Entry.

So, should she or you give up on the gallery channel?

No way, but I would encourage her to open many more ports of entry for greater audience participation in light of these gallery industry statistics.

• The number of galleries that market fine art photography is inversely proportional to the number of fine art photographers who want to exhibit.

• The number of gallery operators that have a viable owner/collector base and know how to run a professional operation is approximately 30 percent of the total number of existing galleries.

• The lifespan of the average photography gallery is one-half life of a restaurant, a business segment with the nation’s highest failure rate.

These are grim statistics, but they do not mean that the gallery channel is not viable and vital. They simply mean that you need to keep this channel in perspective, and understand that it is only one ‘Port of Entry’ for your audience to participate with your work.

Audience Ports of Entry

Until recently, the music industry supported a business model that favored selling oversized CD packages for $20.00 a copy. Today music companies as well as the artists themselves sell songs via the Internet to our IPods and smart phones for 99 cents each or entire albums for eight bucks. Audience participation has skyrocketed; the music industry and performing artists are thriving. The Narrow Market CD is gone, replaced by a Universal Market plan that provides many Port of Entry for audience participation; free radio and on line listening, subscription listening (Pandora etc.), DVD ownership, and live concert participation which generally includes a constellation of collectable items.

In the next blog, we will explore a fine art photography business model that will get your work ‘out there’ to as large an audience as possible via six distinct Audience Ports of Entry.

Until then, I wish you Joy as you shoot to your core.

In television, advertisers salivate over the 18 to 45 year old TV audience.

This is the sweet spot for prime time TV, and within this universe, are subsets or target audiences; 18-25, thirtysomething’s, genxers, males, females, ethnic groups, education levels, or combinations of these. Networks and cable outlets invest millions to develop entertainment content and to keep current shows fresh, relevant, and serving target audiences in order to serve advertisers. If a show fails to attract and hold an audience of sufficient size the axe swings and many folks are out of work.

So how does television production relate to marketing your fine art? Well TV development workflow has many parallels that can apply to your audience development mission.

Kyle Killen and David Slade on location

For example:  last week I was on the set of the NBC pilot, REM (see: http://www.deadline.com/2011/03/five-actors-cast-in-kyle-killens-rem-pilot/). I was impressed as this crew put in a 14-hour day to complete about two minutes of show content. Howard Gordon (”24″) and Kyle Killen (The Beaver, Lonestar) produce Kyle’s script and David Slade (The Twilight Saga: Eclipse) directs the show which stars a quirky LAPD detective (Jason Isaacs) who survives a car accident but his family does not. When he recovers in the hospital, he finds himself living in two universes. In one, his wife is still alive, and in the other, his son is alive, but not the wife and he cannot tell which of these is real. The creative twist is that he also works in two crime solving universes, and as a detective solves two ‘who done its’ with two different partners. The episode ends with the clues from one crime helping to solve the other and vice versa.

Talk about faith in your art! NBC is betting millions that there is an audience for this show. Moreover, they have a strong sense of which target audience will respond to which advertisers and if the show earns a spot on their fall lineup, they will slot it to attract the most eyeballs within the target audience.

True, Fine Art Photography is a very different medium and market then TV. TV has an organized process, seasons, mass audience appeal, and professionals at all levels who keep things cranking. On the other hand, Fine Art Photography distribution is disorganized and murky. Yet there are some useful parallels:

• Create the script (your fine art theme and images).
• Faith that the audience is or will be there.
• Produce the work (make ready for the gallery, web, etc.)
• Presentto the target audience (define your audienceand your distribution channel).
• If the audience follows you, great!
• If this is not your audience, then try again and find another one!
  

  Kyle Killen and Howard Gordon

So. . .what is the right audience for you?

Of the parallels to Television, perhaps the most important is to determine what kind of audience you would like to attract or target. This search and your subsequent decision will have many nuances, but let’s address the main, not so nuanced, issues now.

When I talk to fine art photographers who consistently produce quality, I often ask them about their market expectations. Ninety-nine percent of them tell me they want to hang their images in a gallery and sell their work. I then ask, “How many pieces do you expect to sell? What price will you attach to your work? What gallery has an audience that might follow you?” and to these questions:

I usually discover that the photographer’s actions do not line up with their expectations.

Let’s examine this. Do you want to own a business that sells artwork, or are you an artist who wants an audience for your artwork? A related question: would you rather sell 1 print for $10,000.00 or 100 prints for $10.00 each? The normal answer is to sell 1 print for $10,000 as opposed to 100 prints at $10.00 each.

There is no right or wrong answer to these questions. It is matter of personal preference, but you need to consider these fundamental questions before you choose a distribution channel for your work. After you choose your distribution channel, it is critical that you commit and execute the actions necessary to meet that channel’s needs and expectations in order to develop your audience.

In the next blog, we will begin to examine how some of the distribution channels work, and what type of commitment you will need for success.

Jason Isaacs, Kyle, and Howard discuss Waverly scene

When it comes to sales, I’m a real meat and potatoes guy. Either a product or service sells or it doesn’t and that includes fine art images. I also believe the old adage, “Nothing happens until someone sells something.” To simplify, if you wish to earn income from your fine art endeavors, then you need to sell something to somebody at some price. You need to find a buyer(s) and in the art and entertainment market space, we know buyers as audience. It follows then that if you want to earn income from your fine art work then you need to find an audience of some size willing to purchase your work at some price.

In my professional life, I’ve successfully sold products, services, intangibles, and fine art prints. I’ve learned that “there is a butt for every saddle” and thus, there is an audience for any work that is beautiful, finely executed, thought provoking, meaningful, and available for ownership now. However, the Catch 22 is this: in the beginning, we do not know the size of our audience— it could be one or one hundred thousand— who they are, or where they are. All we know is that an audience exists for our work and that our job is to have faith in our art while we find and then develop our audience.

There is no doubt that audiences are fragmentary, diverse, fickle groups of people, and that art and entertainment products are discretionary. Unlike food and shelter with price points that are subject to supply and demand, artwork requires the creator to connect with an audience at a level that drives involvement. I find that Art is magic and spiritual, and it’s these intangibles that allow the connection between creator and audience at a level that transcends space, time, philosophy, and life experiences. This creative-connective intangible drives artists to create with optimism when none seems warranted by the non-artist observer. Artists, even those who do not believe in seeking an audience but want the audience to seek them, create artwork to connect with people, people who become our audience.

Artists in general and fine art photographers in particular, tend to suffer from something I call, “The Prime Time Syndrome.” We (yes I do this too at times) think that we still live in a world of four TV networks when as we all know there are hundreds of cable outlets for entertainment, news, and visual junk (a butt for every saddle). For the fine art photographer our ‘Prime Time’ millstone is the “Gallery Show”. This “Gallery Show” is still a valid and powerful outlet for our work just as prime shows are for the networks, but as we all know cable now supports Emmy Award Winning, prime time programming; i.e. Mad Men, The Closer, Southland and others. This analogy holds for fine art photography as well. With changes in technology such as the Internet, Digital Capture, and Digital Post, we now have hundreds of opportunities to find and develop an audience that can do as well or better then the Prime Time Gallery Audience.

I’ve proven to myself several times, and I’ve seen other fine art photographers that I’ve been blessed to help along the way, that our work can be appreciated by many different audiences. These audiences may cross a number of lines and follow several of our projects (they watch more than one channel) or they may only follow one area of our work (news junkies). Over time, I’ve grown to accept that I, and you, will not have one audience or one ginormous gallery success where everyone in the world knows and loves our work. The era of Ansel Adams with its universal recognition is gone. In today’s market, the most well known fine art photographers have little recognition outside of a selective audience. True the size of these niche audiences vary, but they are niches just the same.

So as we move forward with our marketing we need to recognize that we will market our work through several marketing channels, not one. In the next blog I’ll discuss how to select the channels that suit your work and your personal goals.

“Is there a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ theory for photography, one that I can use in search for the question whether photography is an art form?”

That question came to me from Daniel Jacques in Amsterdam who is working on a Master Course titled ‘Design & Cultures.’ His thesis tackles the age-old issue, if photography is an art form why does it not enjoy wider acceptance. I thought his question made an appropriate lead in for the blog’s fine art marketing series.

Gesamtkunstwerk is a German word that roughly translates as a total work of art, ideal work of art, synthesis of the arts, or a total artwork that makes use of all or many art forms or strives to do so. The term has achieved acceptance in English as a term in aesthetics. The German opera composer Richard Wagner first used the term in his 1849 essays, Art and Revolution and The Artwork of the Future, where he speaks of his ideal of unifying all works of art via the theatre. These pieces are academic tomes that center on the European social issues of the 1848 revolution, described by some historians as a revolution wave not unlike what we are seeing in the Middle East today.

It is an interesting question, but I can find no unifying expression or theory for photography. Photography has travelled its own road as an art form, which began with the heavy lifting gallery efforts of White and Stieglitz. Today, we have world-renowned collectors such as Eli Broad, whose works include contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman among his vast holdings of paintings and sculpture. Twenty years ago major art museums such as MOMA, The Getty, and others, displayed what we sometimes referred to as the ‘Old Masters,’ but in the last 20 years, contemporary artists (you know, folks that are still alive and working) have commanded successful gallery shows, museum exhibitions, and print sales. Recognition of the medium as an art form has spawned an entire career development infrastructure within academia and as well for those who develop their skills through trials and workshop classes.

Yet Daniel’s question, ‘is photography an art form,’ persists for several reasons; anyone can take a picture—and thus there is no talent required—artists interpret, photographers capture, and so on. I also believe that photography took a different aesthetic in the early 50’s with Robert Frank’s book The Americans (see: www.pacemacgill.com/robertfrank.php). The Americans captured a different America than the wholesome, non-confrontational photo essays offered by Look and Life magazines at the time. Frank’s subjects were factory workers in Detroit, transvestites in New York, black passengers on a segregated trolley in New Orleans. He employed a grainy snapshot style, which was the antithesis of the classically composed images and slick prints from photographers who dreamed of artistic recognition, and thus their work emulated classical fine art pictorialism. Others, such as Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander built upon Frank’s direction of black and white images of ordinary subjects that employed a disarmingly simple snapshot style. In fact, the style is quite sophisticated.

This direction, which to a great degree is one of deconstruction, dominates much of today’s fine art photography. So how does this answer Daniel’s question?

It doesn’t. It simply points out, that photography, which began as a technically strong documentary device, continues to evolve in style and substance. Technical advances drive new interpretations of subjects and allow the fine art photographer to extend his or her emotional range. Photography is a recognized art form, but when we add the preamble, ‘widely acceptable’, we find that it is still difficult for individual photographers to gain personal recognition and market acceptance.

But it is not impossible and we’ll learn how to make it so as we go forward in future blogs.