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.

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now with less salt!
Friday, April 21, 2006

Like most general interest stock photography agencies, FogStock generates the majority of its sales from portraits and other photographs of people and their lifestyles; however, our sales data also show that good, old-fashioned nature photography generates a higher rate of return per sale than other genres of stock photography, and scenics remain an important component of our inventory.

Building on those thoughts, FogStock co-founder Marv Johnson recently participated in the following interview for NaturePhotographers.net.



1. How do you feel about the markets for nature photographers?

The demand is strong for nature photography. Travel publications, web sites, PowerPoint users, retail image sellers and many other image users will eventually license nature imagery to illustrate a destination, serve as a background, or provide general inspiration. There is so much new media being produced and so much photography being used that demand looks to be healthy for years to come. However, in the area of nature photography, supply is abundant, and might be reaching the saturation point.

For example, a keyword search for nature at Getty Images (the leading image provider in the world) returns 94,198 images. A search using landscape returns a paltry 41,333 images. Making it a bit broader and using the keyword outdoors provides 682,529 unique images. So the instant accessibility of good nature photography via stock agencies, image portals and other sources is rampant. Perhaps the biggest complaint from an image buyer is the burden of too much to choose from. Who really has the time and wherewithal to look through so many thousands of images?

Another issue contributing to the saturation of the market is the long lifespan of nature images. What was a good image 20 or even 50 years ago may very well still be good. There are no hairstyles to become obsolete or social trends to follow.

2. What do you look for in a nature photographer?

When I look at the work of a nature shooter, I ask myself is this something that only this photographer could have made? Is a personal vision present? A personal vision doesn’t have to be cutting edge creativity, new uses of technology, or a copy of stylish new trends. It has to be a commitment, though. It could be the simple discipline of shooting only under the very best lighting conditions, or the mastery of full-range black and white printing. It could be something very unique, such as the narrative realism of a successful shooter like Nadav Kander. In his case, the stark loneliness of desert serves not only as something beautiful, but as a context for other messages.

Commitment such as that takes the form of an intention to do something that is specific, and draws a line between capturing and making an image. Most of all it, requires forethought, attention to detail, and follow-through.

3. What qualifications or type of work most interest you in nature photographers, and might lead to representation at your agency?

Beyond the presence of a personal vision, I look to the practical. Does this photographer produce the right combination of quality and quantity? The question of quantity will help me further explore the photographer’s commitment to the process. There are thousands of photographers with a few very good images, but only a few photographers with thousands (or at least hundreds) of good photographs. Quantity will make stock photography worth the photographer’s time.

I also look for diversity. For example, if I see a picture of the Arches National Park in Utah, I also want to know if the whole theme can be expanded to include some outdoor lifestyle, or something graphic. It nearly always helps to have people in the photograph.



The human element in nature helps tell a story in a way that is absolutely essential for stock photography. When the human element is present, a landscape becomes a story, and the story can be translated into hundreds of different pitches and concepts by art directors, graphic designers, and publishers.

Also, photographers should look beyond the beautiful and the inspirational. Nature is a lot of things, including death, violence and destruction. It is even unattractive at times. It is also sometimes quite normal, everyday, banal, and utilitarian. All of these attributes can be explored and used to create an idea, concept, or feeling of interest to a customer.

So if I have to break it down and decide which nature shooter to represent, I look for: good photography skills, attention to light, commitment and dedication to a comprehensive body of work, and a sense of mission or purpose.

4. What would you advise a nature photographer to go shoot?

Start with an idea or something that a shooter really wants to make a picture of. Then use imagination and try to think of everything that can relate to that idea. Explore the human element, the lifestyle that surrounds it, and the details that may be overlooked, but which often communicate strongly. Then go and experiment and be open to the opportunities that will reveal themselves. From the perspective of an editor or art director, a flat tire on a car in Death Valley might make a much more interesting story than a beautiful expanse of the valley floor.

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doll parts
Saturday, April 15, 2006

A fierce debate about the ethics of photographic portraiture recently worked its way through Thomas Hawke's Digital Connection. It began when Hawke and other posters on the blog accused Los Angeles celebrity portraitist Jill Greenberg of child abuse associated with the photographs in End Times, her upcoming gallery show at Paul Kopeikin.

Greenberg's portraits, which depict crying children, represent an inexcusable breach of photographic ethics, in Hawke's interpretation, because Greenberg is enjoying commercial and critical success based on the suffering that the children presumably endured while sitting for the shoot. According to her artist statement, Greenberg provoked the children to tears through such tricks as offering and then witholding a lollipop. Hawke characterized the results of this process as sickening, nauseating, pornographic and sadistic, and many posters on his blog agreed.

Other posters questioned the actual suffering endured by the children, and also challenged the presumed realism of the images. Greenberg and her production team are well known for their skills at photographic illustration and digital manipulation, and much of her celebrity work clearly strives for a kind of epic hyperreality that is quite consistent with what she shows us in the project. Can we really demonstrate via blog discourse that the childrens' distress in End Times is any more "real" than Drew Barrymore's motorcycling skills?

The corporate we that produces these posts for FogStock includes photographers and parents of young children, so we are personally very interested in the questions of ethics and truth raised by these photographs. We don't know whether or not Greenberg conducted the creation of her project in an ethical way, or whether any of the children in her project came to harm as a result of their participation. The answers to those questions might be unknowable, and nothing that is findable via Google is going to provide any epistemological certainty.

But the discourse wrapped around Greenberg's project also has embedded in it an unexamined subtext, one that relates to the presumed realism of photography, and which is instructive to the general practice of commercial imaging, including stock photography.

In commercial photography, fake realism is always better than real realism. There are a number of reasons for the validity of that principle, but the key issue is that commercial photography is largely about controlling risk. For successful imaging businesses, simultaneously creating provocative images and managing risk in all its forms is a process that typically distinguishes the successful from the wannabes. And Jill Greenberg is VERY successful.

Both immersed in the culture of Hollywood filmmaking, and adept at managing the special kinds of risks associated with celebrity portraiture, the corporate Greenberg almost certainly enveloped the End Times shoots in an intricate sequence of pre-production, casting, legal documentation, model compensation, editing and post-production. All of those tools and processes were directed at two ends: achieving a provocative image, and managing risk. Whether one agrees with the ethics of the shoot or not, the risk was managed via an organizational effort that seems almost inconceivable to anyone who hasn't been involved in the production of intricate cultural events.

To a certain extent, critical readings of Greenberg's portraits that make an essential connection between real suffering and representations of suffering are rooted in a photographic sensibility that runs with the Tides, that conceives of the culture of imagemaking in purely personal terms. But, as powerful as they might be, the Tides represent a worldview regarding the political economy of photographic imaging that has not yet been called to deal with institutional risk. Will they someday prove able?

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it won't fucking kill you
Wednesday, April 05, 2006

FogStock recently signed another emerging photographer who we think expresses the evolving creative and commercial direction of the agency. Daniel Peterson bills himself as a photo-savant, but we think his most important accomplishment so far is cult-like following he has built up via his contribution to the tides at the ever-stylish Urbanhonking.com.



Daniel achieves yet another milestone this month, as large-format prints of his work will be on exhibit in a group show at Elizabeth Leach, one of the top fine art galleries in Portland. We'll post more about Daniel's work here soon, but if you are in Portland tomorrow (April 6), be sure to stop by the gallery for the show's First Thursday opening.

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