The cart and the horse

Reading Heather Morton’s blog last week, in the 30-square-foot “business center” of the Comfort Inn in Guilford, Connecticut, I came across this, from Sandi Gidluck (associate creative director at Young & Rubicam in Toronto):

fine art = solving personal challenges and issues in a creative way. Expressing personal ideas. And the public sees the final complete piece. Then they critique it.

commercial art = solving business challenges and issues in a creative way. Expressing targeted ideas. And everyone sees the birth, process and final piece, the whole time critiquing it all the way through. And then again when it goes public.

And I realized that, in beginning the pursuit of editorial work, I have been putting the cart before the horse.

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

At this point, let’s be blunt: Why would a magazine hire me, when there are a thousand other already experienced editorial photographers out there and/or up-and-coming photographers who are committed to the concept of shooting editorially? Don’t get me wrong—I fully appreciate the professional editorial photographers, the ones who can take an assignment and turn it into something miraculous, or at least something worthy of tearing out and taping to the wall. But I spend 40+ hours a week executing someone else’s vision in my day job; I don’t want to be doing that in my photography. The photographers I look up to are everyone from (oh, you know I’m going to say it) Alec Soth to Nick Waplington to Jessica Dimmock, along with a whole slew of others.

I loved seeing Alec’s photos in the Telegraph (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4).

via Colin Pantall

And I loved Nick Waplington’s work and Jessica Dimmock’s work in Wired.

But take Alec as a case study: He was shooting portraits of sheep in Minnesota before he started working on Sleeping by the Mississippi. The bulk of his first book project was made in 2002, a decade after he graduated from Sarah Lawrence. That means he spent 10 years working at projects that didn’t go anywhere before the Mississippi project really took off for him. He wasn’t shooting editorially during this time; he was working on his own projects (and at a day job). Now, having achieved remarkable success with his art, he’s doing some editorial and commercial work.

I’m not suggesting that there’s one right path, or that those like Kate Hutchinson (who supports herself with her editorial work and teaching, and does her personal projects, too) aren’t just as admirable. I’m just saying that I want to focus on my personal projects first, before I try to do anything editorially or commercially.