peanut butter? chocolate?
Friday, March 10, 2006
As our friends over at Urban Honking/Ultimate Blogger 2 like to frame it, their quest to live a life of Reality TV-style celebrity and blog-style solipsism is a perfectly mismatched blend. But the lessons learned from classic marketing campaigns also run deep for us, at least as we strive to navigate FogStock through interesting and turbulent times in our industry.
A founding principle of our strategy moving forward is this: the stock photography industry as most of its practitioners have typically conceived it is Done. Over. Finished.
There, we’ve said it. Move on, nothing to see here.
Our argument is hardly a novel one: new technologies of production (high-megapixel, low-cost digital cameras), new technologies of distribution (the Internet), and new business models for using and licensing photography (online photography communities) are all contributing to a large and exponentially growing supply of licensable images by technically proficient (and not-so technically proficient) producers.
The question before us, as owners and employees of a small stock agency, is how to survive and thrive in the big squeeze between the elephant in the room and the tides. Especially since we are people who care about photographs, and who strive for a photographic practice that has meaning beyond the functional definition of images as monetizable packets of data and metadata.
So our immediate task is to find a couple of sweet spots in an ocean of images, a little bit of chocolate mixed with a little bit of peanut butter. This page includes a couple of images currently working their way through our production workflow that couldn’t be more different, and yet which exemplify the directions we think will be most productive for our agency, despite the visual oppositions within the pictures themselves.
We’ll have more to say about these images, and others like them, in future posts, but in the meantime, here is a poser: from the perspective of a cultural theorist, what is the most salient observation that might be made when we read these images together?
posted by fogged @ 3:09 PM
