hard/easy
Saturday, April 29, 2006
FogStock has signed yet another new photographer that we envision will play an inspirational role in our evolving content strategy. An emerging national-level star of creative wedding photography, look for Portland’s Aisha Harley to boost FogStock’s performance in what is already a very productive category for us.
Readers of the most recent edition of Photo District News should already be familiar with Aisha’s work, which garnered two nominations in the magazine’s annual Top Knots competition for innovative wedding photography, available at your favorite newstand now.
Making successful stock photography of weddings is a difficult and delicate balancing act. Visual representations of contemporary weddings serve as powerful metaphors for a rich set of abstract meanings, including joy, unity, family, gender, eternity, ritual and status. Even negative qualities such as stress or conflict can derive from successful wedding photography, and the potent symbolism of the wedding makes it a premiere topic for many kinds of stock uses.
At the same time, wedding photographers are privileged observers of personal moments. In the context of stock photography, the challenges of capturing those moments visually, while also dealing with the meta-photographic tasks of securing consent, treating wedding patrons with respect, and honoring one’s own ethical center all combine to make the monetization of wedding imagery an especially adventurous process for photographers and agencies alike.
Aisha is clearly up to her end of that challenge. She initially achieved prominence in the local Portland cultural scene in the 1990s with her portraits of participants of a monthly fetish night, and the political skills and sensitivity needed to thrive in that context serve her well as a wedding photographer today.
Aisha’s first submission of images is navigating through our production workflow now, and the task of editing her work really hammers home a point that we are trying to understand and implement in our own thoughts about how stock photography should function in a world of relentless economic and technological change. As people who think about our business in terms of images, our strategy strives to adopt a dialectic of hard and easy.
Like many professional photographers, Aisha has recently begun the transition from film to digital capture, and she has also built up a lot of fresh enthusiasm for the lyrical possibilities of LensBaby photography.We enjoy Aisha’s early LensBaby work, and we think she will do well with it via FogStock, at least for a while. But images like that one are a little too easy in the context of our long-term imaging strategy and we think the rhino in the room will soon catch up with them. As an agency, we continue to believe that our long-term success depends on pushing on the edge of those images that are photographically hard, which have a certain resilience that can stand up against an endless flood.
posted by fogged @ 8:52 PM
