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.

Interview: Allison V. Smith

I’ve heard Allison V. Smith’s name in the blogosphere here or there, and I finally spent some time on her blog and ordered her zine, and I am officially a huge fan. She’s seriously good. I had some questions for her, and she was kind enough to let me post our conversation here.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

Liz: So, looking over your résumé, it seems like you had your start in journalism, and you’re now working as an editorial photographer and doing your personal projects, too. What’s your background? What’s your story? Where’d you go to school? How did you get where you are today?

Allison: I’ve known I wanted to be a photographer since I was 15. I’m the youngest of five and it wasn’t very easy finding my voice within my large, active family. As soon as I discovered photography, I had my own way to communicate. My 10th-grade photo teacher exposed us to Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Lee Friedlander, Walker Evans. She would give us assignments specifically based on photographers—“Go shoot a Cindy Sherman portrait,” etc. I could not get enough of photography.

Frustrated with college, I took a year off and studied at the Maine Photographic Workshops in the fall and then interned at the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald in the spring. It was a very important year for my photography. It was that year that I knew I wanted to make pictures for a living. Newspaper photography seemed to be the answer. It would feed my need to photograph daily and to be published. I finished college at SMU in Dallas and immediately started working for newspapers. I worked as an intern and full-time at seven newspapers over 15 years. It was an amazing time to be a newspaper photojournalist—experience and knowledge that I will never forget! But I knew I wanted more.

In 2004, I quit to pursue freelance photography and my own personal artwork. Today my freelance work for magazines and newspapers supports me as a fine-art photographer. I’m represented in Dallas at the Barry Whistler Gallery, known for showing contemporary Texas artists. The Dallas Museum of Art and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, both purchased two images from my last show at the Barry Whistler Gallery in 2006.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

L: Do you find that living in Dallas (i.e., anywhere outside New York), it’s harder or easier to get work? Does location even matter?

A: I am a half-breed. I am half-Texan, half-Maine. I hope to live both places someday. For now, Dallas is a wonderful place to live and work. I’m a laid-back Texan, and it definitely suits my personality—not to mention that the artists’ scene in Texas and especially Dallas is very supportive and a great place to be.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

L: Do you shoot medium-format? Digital? Strictly film? Whatever works? Does that kind of stuff interest you, or is the equipment kind of ancillary? (I read an interview with Eggleston where he said he just picked up whichever camera was around when he walked out the door. Seemed really random.)

A: I shoot it all. I have digital for mostly freelance jobs. I shoot Hasselblad and Lomo and Widelux for myself. Occasionally, a client will ask me to shoot with one of my film cameras for an assignment.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

L: I’ve been working a lot lately (in my mind, on my blog) on developing my vision (for lack of a better word), my style, my whatever you want to call it. I think this all relates to knowing what matters to me, figuring out what I want to photograph. It’s all tied together. Part of what I love about your zine is how cohesive it is. It includes a wide variety of photos, but they all hang together really well and seem to be talking the same language. Did that just happen for you, or did you work at it? Either way, how?

A: I think it is for sure something that has developed over time. I work hard at improving all the time. My 96-year-old grandfather taught me that you never stop growing and evolving as a person or an artist. Part of my zine was an effort to loosen up my style, not worry so much about making the composition perfect. It has been a great exercise for me.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

L: Do you feel like you get pigeonholed in a particular genre? I mean, are you known as an editorial photographer, or a fine-art photographer, or both? Do you feel like people are open to blurring boundaries? Maybe I’ve just been watching too much CNN, but I heard James Carville the other day talking about how if a politician doesn’t define himself, someone else will define him, so you need to control the message. I hate the way that sounds (Carville’s voice is ringing in my ears), but I think there’s something to be said for the fact that people do like to categorize and define each other. Is there a way to avoid that as a photographer? Or do you just say, “Fuck it,” and do what you want and screw what people think you are (or aren’t)?

A: I think about this all the time. You know people in the art world don’t quite appreciate newspaper photographers the way I think they should be respected. There are some amazing photographers out there—Damon Winter, Mona Reeder, David Leeson—all of whom I consider some of the best photographers in the country. Yet, you never see their names outside the newspaper worlds. Damon is, hands down, one of the finest portrait photographers there is, and besides seeing his credit in The New York Times, you never see his name. So this makes me mad and it kind of gives me the attitude of, “Fuck it.” I am just going to be who I am. I am going to continue working for clients who are wonderful to work for, who hire me for my vision rather than tell me how to shoot something. I am going to continue to shoot for myself, and I hope for more beautiful exhibits in the future. I am going to continue to make zines and postcards. I am going to continue to shoot for myself as often as I possibly can because, in the end, I love photography. I love photographers and photo books. It’s who I am, what I am.

Copyright © Allison V. Smith

My angst and me

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Joan Didion. She’s the one I go to when nothing else works. I’ve also been thinking a lot about my place in photography, where I fit in (or will fit in), what kind of work I want to be producing and why. The two are connected, in ways that dawned on me this afternoon.

When I do this, when I look at other photographers and try to find someone who’s doing what I want to be doing, I often come up empty-handed. The art world drives me crazy with its valuation of inane artist statements. Stock photography makes my eyes glaze over. Journalism doesn’t do it for me. Editorial has possibilities—but only if I’m hired for my style, my vision, not to execute somebody else’s. But what exactly is my vision? What kind of photographer am I? What kind of photographer do I want to be?

I sent out two prints to each of the people who participated in my print sale—and they’re completely different in style. If you saw the two photographs, you’d never guess they were taken by the same person. That’s not a good thing—it’s a sign (or a symptom) of my current lack of clarity.

Before you send me an e-mail telling me I’m being too hard on myself or I’m overthinking things or I’m focusing on my angst, and I just need to get out and photograph, I should tell you: This is who I am. I overthink things. I focus on my angst. That isn’t going to change, and I’ll be better off if I learn how to put my obsessive-compulsive, control-freak tendencies to work for me in my photography instead of trying to fight them. As S. pointed out today over coffee, “I’ve seen you do this numerous times. You work things over, worry them, until you come to some understanding of what you believe. How many times have you talked for hours like this, and then said, at some point, ‘That’s it! I’ve got it!’ You need to work things out this way—that’s who you are.” (God, it’s good to be known like that, you know?) But it makes sense. There’s the noun form of worry—“mental distress or agitation resulting from concern usually for something impending or anticipated; anxiety”—and I’ve got plenty of that. But the worrying S. was talking about is a verb: “to shake or pull at with the teeth [a terrier worrying a rat].” I gnash at a thing over and over until I get to the heart of it. (That’s much of why I like Didion so.)

Anyway, in my worrying over coffee, talking this out with S., I came up with this:

• I need to not fight who I am (see above). Take Didion and Sontag. Both good writers, but completely different in their approaches. Sontag was all in her head, and Didion comes at things equal parts mind and heart. To read Didion is to have the very real sense that you know her; you can read lots of Sontag and never feel that way. Neither approach is better or worse—but they know who they are (make that past tense for Sontag). So when they approach a topic, they come at it in different ways. That’s what a good photographer has—a sense of who she is, what she cares about—and that’s what helps determine, even if subconsciously, the subject and the approach.

• I want to be in my projects. Not the way Amy Elkins is in hers—not in self-portraits. I don’t want to do projects that are directly about myself. But I want people who look at my work to get some sense of who I am, in the same way that Didion’s essays, though about, say, 1960s America, are also about her. I want to choose projects that I care about that much, projects that I have an emotional connection to, not just projects that are interesting or timely or that satisfy my curiosity. Those things are nice, but the most important thing is the connection, because if that’s there, it’ll show in the work. So whether I’m doing my own personal projects, or I’m doing an assignment, I want to come at it with who I am at the forefront. There are thousands of good photographers out there; the only thing that sets me apart from anyone else is my take, me. The voice, the vision, that’ll come in time. Until then, practice. And if I’m not in it, walk away.

First steps

Last week I took my first steps toward editorial photography, by sending samples of my work to photo editors at five magazines that I would want to work for and, more important, where I could see my work fitting in. I know it’ll take follow-up and persistence to get into these places, but I specifically chose just five—as opposed to sending out a blast of hundreds of promo cards—because I want to build relationships with these editors and their publications, and that takes effort. I sent handwritten notes to each editor, with five or six 5-x-7-inch archival prints of my work—prints I know may have already ended up in the recycling bin, but ones that had some chance, I think, of at least being stuck up on a bulletin board. My next step is to follow up in a month with a few more images. And it’ll go on from there.

In my other life, as a freelance book editor, I’ve done well for myself—getting plenty of work from a core group of clients—by working to foster those relationships. Part of it, of course, is just that you want to work. But a bigger part of it, for me, is that I want to work for people I like and respect, and publications that I admire. As an editor, I’ve had the occasional one-off project—some publisher calls me up and asks if I can work on such-and-such book on a rush schedule and politely haggles with me over my rate—and, though it’s nice to pick up a little extra cash here or there, those aren’t the publishers or projects I remember. The ones I care about are the ones that I’ve worked with for a decade, people who respect my work and whose books I actually like. That’s what I’m looking to do with my photography. It isn’t just about adding a magazine to my client list—it’s about the long haul.

I also sent my book to a rep I met a few months ago. She represents some photographers I really respect, and she’s given me some excellent advice—advice I put to use when I decided which magazines to contact and how to do it. I want this woman to be my rep someday. Why? Because (1) I like the diversity of photographers she represents, (2) she gets the interplay between fine art and editorial/commercial and she encourages that in her stable of photographers, and (3) I had a ton of fun talking with her when we met. Again, it’s all about building relationships, so I e-mailed her to ask if I could share my book with her, she said she’d like to see it, and it’ll be delivered to her today. Do I think anything significant will come out of this one experience? Nope. I think I’ll need to work at this for at least a couple years, continuing to show her my work, continuing to produce work and put it out there (in galleries, in contests, in magazines), continuing to seek and heed her advice. And then, maybe, if she has as much fun dealing with me as I have dealing with her, she’ll rep me.

In the meantime, back to my day job. Today’s assignment: Finish copyediting a travel book on Egypt. I keep hearing The Bangles in my mind.

Women photographers helping women photographers

I’m one of the 1,313 people who submitted two photos to APE’s Flickr group. My background with editorial photography pretty much consists of admiring the photographs in my favorite magazines, but I’d really love to push myself in new directions, including editorial, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. So I narrowed my images to 10 and then I was lost. I knew I wanted to submit one portrait and one landscape or architectural shot, but I couldn’t figure out how to pair them up in a way that would make sense. In my head, they were different projects so how would it work to include one of my portraits with one of my In Store photos?

Jennifer Loeber to the rescue. Jennifer is a photo editor besides being a great photographer, and I ran the 10 photos by her and asked her what she thought. In a few minutes, she came up with three pairings of images that looked like they belonged together. This weekend, I’m pulling together my book. With what Jennifer showed me, I’m in a much better place.

All this is by way of introducing this concept: women photographers helping women photographers. Don’t get me wrong—men are great. Hey, some of my best friends are men. But face it, women are confronted with an art world (not to mention a nonart world) with lower wages, sexist attitudes, etc. And too often, far too often, we’re our own worst enemies by being territorial or possessive, sniping about each other, feeling all competitive and unwilling to share the information and connections we have.

This is completely the opposite of my experience, by the way. I’ve asked numerous women photographers for opinions, advice, suggestions, and every one of them has been generous. I know, though, that I’ve been lucky, and this isn’t always the case.

Cara Phillips posted Friday about the recent New York Times article on gallerinas, and about women and photography in general. (If you haven’t read her post yet, check it out here. It’s a must-read.) She e-mailed some of her fellow female photographers and bloggers and asked for their input, wanting to get a dialog going about all this. I didn’t know what I could do to conquer the Chelsea gallery scene or combat sexism, but I thought maybe we could do something to draw attention to all the women photographers who are generous and helpful and wanting to share their knowledge. I remembered those signs in the windows of some of the houses in my neighborhood when I was a kid, the ones that meant, “This is a safe house,” so that if you were walking home from school and some creep tried to grab you, you could run to the house with the sign in the window and know you’d be okay.

So I came up with the following badges, with input from Amy Elkins (who said my original color of pink did not equal girls and could we please have something else—the black, gray, green, blue, and orange look cool, and you have her to thank for the idea to move beyond pink) and Cara Phillips (who recommended tweaking the wording and made it much, much better). The idea is that, when you see one of these badges on someone’s site, you know that you’re free to e-mail her and you’ll be met with warmth and enthusiasm and a helping hand.

So here’s how it works: If you’re a woman and a photographer and you’re interested in helping other women photographers, right-click any or all of these files and save them to your own computer. Then upload them to your blog or Web site. The only rule: You have to be willing and eager to share your knowledge with other women photographers.

And if you’re thinking, “But I’m not an expert—what do I know?”, wipe that thought out of your mind. You know things, baby. And you’ve got answers.

P.S. If you want to create your own badge instead, go for it! This isn’t an official organization with a copyrighted logo. This is just women connecting with other women—and the more voices, the better!

On portraiture

Five days left in December, and Portrait Month is drawing to a close. Initially, the challenge was simply to ask people if I could take their picture, but that was only a challenge for the first few days. Since then, the test has been to make a good portrait, and if I had to grade myself so far, I’d say a C would be fair. I’ve made some photographs that I’m really proud of (here, here, and here), but the majority are boring.

I see a few reasons for this: Most days, I’ve felt the pressure of the clock and settled for whomever I found. If you believe Alec Soth’s explanation of how he chooses his subjects (likening it to the way you’re attracted to certain people across a crowded bar), just settling for whoever’s around is pretty much a recipe for disaster (or at least a rough night). One solution would be to wait for the right person—and that’s probably the ideal approach. But it isn’t lost on me that editorial photographers rarely choose their subjects, and they have to make it work under time constraints and less-than-ideal circumstances. So no excuses here: Even if I couldn’t find the ideal subject or the ideal situation, I could’ve—and should’ve—made more of an effort to get a better image.

Another issue is that, on more days than I care to admit, as soon as I found my person and made the photograph, I called it a day. It would’ve been one thing to do that when I knew I had the shot I wanted (like the three I mention above), but that’s only happened a few times. Some days, I truly didn’t have any more time—but that was rare. Most days, I could’ve spent more time driving around looking for people. And if I had, I might’ve eventually found the right person.

Finally, so often I felt the pressure to not keep the person too long. Rarely were my subjects just hanging out; they were usually on the move somewhere, and I was aware of the fact that I was keeping them from getting where they were going. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all three of my favorite photographs from the month were of people who were just hanging out. In each of those cases, I felt free to take more time to get the shot, and it paid off.

I still don’t really know what makes a good portrait. I know what I like when I see it, but I don’t know that I can articulate it. And I don’t think that my favorites from this month even come close to registering on the Rachael Dunville yardstick. I like the process, though—that moment when the person is waiting for me to make the exposure, that intense feeling that the person is giving me something in that moment and that I might be able to give him something in return. I can see this experience continuing on past the end of the year, even affecting my choice of projects going forward.

Anderson and I

I dreamed last night that I was walking my dog down the street when I ran into Anderson Cooper, who was covering a Breaking News story on the next block. His phone rang. It was a Major Magazine wanting to do a cover story on him and they needed it now. He said, “Well, your reporter is right here,” and suddenly a reporter with a notebook appeared, “but we don’t have a photographer.” [Insert Underdog cartoon theme song.] I said, “Um, Anderson, I’m a photographer. I can take your picture.”

“Oh, but have you ever done editorial photography before? Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Of course, I do,” I lied. And as if I hadn’t been ballsy enough, I added, “And it’ll be a picture of Anderson Cooper like none you’ve ever seen before!”

“All right then, let’s go!” [Insert CNN Breaking News theme music.]

Anderson and I walked back to my apartment, which had magically been transformed into a super-cool studio where all kinds of students were learning photography. I made one exposure, and the whole thing was apparently brilliant, because A Photo Editor featured me the next day, and I was suddenly the darling of the editorial world.

My next assignment was to shoot Julia Roberts. Anderson was my assistant.

Shawn Records

Shawn Records was in L.A. last night, on an editorial assignment for W magazine, and we were able to meet up. (If Shawn’s ever where you live, be sure to spend a couple hours with him. You won’t be disappointed.) I picked him up at his motel on Hollywood Boulevard and we went to Shotgun Space to see the group show, in which he has a few (beautiful) images. The show looked great, and I was glad he got a chance to see the gallery while he was in town for less than 48 hours.

Went to Starbucks for a quick coffee (hot chocolate for me, of course), and talked shop. Or, more accurately, he talked shop (i.e., answering all my questions about his editorial and commercial work, his process, etc.) and I listened intently. Then he was off to Ralphs to snag a toothbrush and a Hostess cherry pie (a travel ritual for him, he said). He seemed pretty happy with the whole setup—the W gig, the cheap motel, the cherry pie—and I could see why.

Now I really can’t wait to see the photo when it appears in W. I’ll be sure to post about it when it does.

P.S. Thanks, Shawn!

David Alan Harvey on editorial assignments

On the subject of editorial assignments, David Alan Harvey has an excellent post today that gets to the heart of what’s running through a photographer’s mind in anticipation of such projects. (Click here to read it.)

I think a critical part of doing editorial work (or commissioned work of any kind) must be not just asking all those questions he raises—How will I do this? Will I do my best work? Will I satisfy myself?—but thriving on those questions and the unknown answers. I can’t imagine you could really enjoy the work if you didn’t also enjoy all the questioning that happens before you even leave for the airport.

For what it’s worth, I also think those questions are the ones that good photographers ask themselves when they’re doing their own personal projects. Because, in the end, whether the assignment is one you’ve given yourself, or it’s one you’ve been given by someone else, if you accept it, it’s personal.

Expectations

A few days ago, I posted my thoughts and questions about Todd Hido’s work in the July 15 issue of The New York Times Magazine. I said then (and it bears repeating) that I’m firmly on the side of artists-doing-whomever-whatever-whenever. Andrew Hetherington responded to my post and took it in different directions on his own blog, writing from his own extensive experience as an editorial photographer and pointing out the many and varied difficulties in editorial assignments. (His post is definitely worth a read if you haven’t checked it out already, as is John Loomis’s own follow-up.)

Hido’s photo isn’t my favorite of his; the word I used to describe it in my initial post is unremarkable, and I still think that fits. But I don’t have any judgments about who gets hired for (or accepts) which assignments. Curious is a more accurate description of how I feel about it. I’m simply interested in how Hido came to do that assignment, what his experience was working on it, and how he felt about the pictures he got and the one the magazine chose to run.

Today, Jörg Colberg posted saying:

. . . it is interesting to see how once editorial work (done by fine-art photographers) is concerned, there is a new complex of topics. For the photographers there are some new problems to tackle, . . . and it seems to me that everybody else has to deal with expectations. We know what photographer X has been doing for a while, and we simply expect to find something along those lines in his or her editorial work—an expectation that (just like any other expectation) is not very helpful (even though it’s exactly the kind of expectation that certain magazines seem to count on when hiring well-known fine-art photographers for editorial work).

I read this and the line that stuck in my mind was “an expectation that (just like any other expectation) is not very helpful.” Really? I think expectations are inherent, and for good reason. Each of us is filled with expectations—expectations are part of what it is to be alive. We expect all kinds of things from ourselves and from each other, and those expectations are what not only get us into trouble but bring us joy. If we had no expectations, we could never be surprised. Part of an artist’s job is to challenge people’s expectations. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to say that, without expectations, art might not exist.

Besides, to think that a person could possibly approach a photograph, any photograph, without expectations is unrealistic. Break it down: If I tell you that I’m going to show you a photograph, instantly you have an idea about what a photograph is. Your expectations will depend on who you are and what experiences you’ve had with photographs (as well as on who I am and what you know about me), but no matter what, you will have expectations. If I tell you I’m about to show you a Todd Hido photograph, your expectations may or may not change, depending on whether you know Hido’s work (and which of his work you know).

The fact that I had certain expectations of a Hido photograph isn’t a bad thing: It means that I not only have had experiences looking at photographs (experiences that shape my thoughts and feelings when I look at new photographs for the first time), but that I have experience with Todd Hido’s photographs in particular. I approach that photo with all those experiences inside me. And so, in that moment of seeing the photograph for the first time, I may love it or hate it or feel something in between those two extremes. But that initial moment of looking is exciting for exactly that reason.

When I was walking to the newsstand, about to see Alec Soth’s work in W magazine for the first time, I was excited to get my hands on a copy because I had expectations and I knew that those expectations might or might not be met. I might think the photos were crap, or I might be blown away by them, or worst of all, I might not feel anything, and then what? But all those feelings of anticipation that were running through my mind were set into motion specifically because of my expectations.

I expect things of myself, of people known and unknown to me, of my government, of my camera, of my car, of my dog. My expectations are often proven wrong—for better or worse. The world continually surprises me, and I continue to surprise myself.

Expectations may not help, but I wouldn’t want to live without them.

Todd Hido, editorial work

Todd Hido had a photo in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday. A portrait of Milton Katselas, an acting coach in Hollywood who also happens to be a Scientologist.

Copyright © Todd Hido

The photo is unremarkable, really, except for the fact that Hido shot it. In fact, the story ran with two photos, and I wrongly assumed on first read that both images were shot by Hido. (Turns out the second one was shot by Stephanie Diani of Getty Images.)

Copyright © Stephanie Diani/Getty Images, for The New York Times

Note: This version of Diani’s photograph, available on The New York Times Web site, is a cropped version of the photograph that appeared in the print magazine on Sunday.

Even before I realized that only one of the photographs was Hido’s, it made me think about that whole artists-doing-editorial debate. After realizing my mistake, I’m thinking about it even more so.

I’m firmly on the side of artists-doing-whomever-whatever-whenever. That said, I couldn’t help but wonder why The New York Times Magazine wanted Hido for this particular story, and what Hido brought to the portrait that someone else couldn’t have. I love Todd Hido’s work, but this photo seems incongruent in a way that raises lots of questions for me.

With myself

David Schonauer has an interesting interview with French photographer Bettina Rheims over on the American Photo site. I hadn’t known of Ms. Rheims’s work before, but I checked out her gallery’s site, and found some portraits that I really like.

Copyright © Bettina Rheims

Copyright © Bettina Rheims

Copyright © Bettina Rheims

A few months ago, Alec Soth posted about artists doing editorial work, which sparked an interesting debate (should they or shouldn’t they?). Being new to this game, I thought maybe I was just being naïve in wondering why this was even a question: Why not do editorial work, or commercial work, or any work that interests you? I found Ms. Rheims’s comments on this subject pertinent (and helpful to someone trying to figure out where she fits in):

I have always believed that whether the work is my idea or a commission, it is personal work. When I do advertising jobs, I always think, “Will one of these pictures have another destiny? Will it become a lasting, important picture?” In the end, as my old master Helmut Newton used to say, there are only two kinds of pictures: the good ones and the bad ones.

And then this:

I’m proud that I can’t be categorized. I think a lot of artists find something and do everything in that way. They are careful not to change, and to make pictures that can be identified instantly. I would be happy to be recognized, who wouldn’t? I like it when someone comes up to me and says, “I like your work.” But I’m with myself most of the time and I want to be happy with what I am doing.