Yesterday evening I was standing in a packed Photoforum meeting in central London with other photographers listening to two photographers talking about and showing their work. Ray Tang of Rex Features presented some of his stories on sex trafficking and drugs in Eastern Europe, and Carl de Souza showed us what it was like to cover the Olympics for a major agency (AFP) – if I remember correctly he was one of over 70 photographers they had covering the event – as well as the month or so he took off in China after that event.
De Souza had a fast-moving slide show of his work with some very graphic images, particularly from the various cycling events which was one major area he was assigned to. It was a shame that through some technical mis-match his whole presentation was shown with the images at a noticeably incorrect aspect ratio which made his horizontal images almost square and turned verticals into upright pillar-box slits.
One of the more amazing of many facts and figures was that AFP had pictures from the 100m final on the wire in just over a minute after the end of the event – from memory 1 minute 14 seconds. These first pictures came from a remote camera linked by fibre cable to the AFP editing suite where they were selected and dropped into waiting templates with captions etc for immediate transmission.
After the end of the Olympics de Souza got AFP to change his ticket home to give him a month in China and set off on his own to travel around one of the outlying provinces. He had to pay his own expenses, but with hotels at 20p a night and an enormous hospitality from the people he met this wasn’t a great problem, but he had to find his way and make himself understood purely by sign language and pointing at symbols in a guide book, as absolutely no English was spoken.
One question that came up was whether he had sold any of this work from China, and he told us that we were the first people except his family and friends to see it – and were asked if we had any ideas on how it could be market or published.
Most of the discussion over Tang’s work was about his paying for the drugs used by one of his subjects to set up a photographic session. As well as raising moral issues around drugs, some suggested it was an interference with the subject that was unacceptable in a documentary project. But there were also some useful practical questions about how you get to find and work with people on sensitive issues such as prostitution and the victims of sex trafficking. Tang used the Internet to make contacts with local people, mainly students who he employed cheaply on a daily basis to find people and places, make phone calls and go round with him, as well as working with various NGOs involved with the problems.
As with De Souza’s pictures of China, this work by Tang was self-financed and little has been sold. Both work for agencies and get a living from what the agencies want, but also spend a considerable amount of time and money on personal work.
I thought while listening to this about a piece that Simon Norfolk wrote in December for World Press Photo (and it was a big day for them yesterday when the results of the 2008 contest were announced – you can now see all the winning pictures including the winning image black and white image by Anthony Suau, which I think may be less controversial than some other recent winners.)
Norfolk’s piece comes in the on-line magazine from WPP, Enter, and in a section called ‘ask the experts‘ under marketing, which I think is intended to give advice to people coming in to photography. It’s worth reading in full (and isn’t very long) but early on in the piece he writes “I gave up trying to make a living from editorial a few years ago…”
Magazine commissions still get him to places – as they took de Souza to China – and he then stays on and makes work that he can sell as fine art prints. Or used to be able to sell – since much of that market was fuelled by those obscene bonuses that gave bankers more money than they knew what to do with.
Norfolk sees hard times ahead and suggests photographers learn other trades to keep them going: “soon we’ll all be amateur photographers with real-money making jobs on the side..”
Actually this isn’t a new thing. Many of those great names that fill the history books were never able to make a living from photography. And on a much humbler personal note, I took a serious look at the business in the 1970s and decided (despite the encouragement of some whose opinions I respected) that I couldn’t afford to be a full-time photographer – unless I was prepared to do weddings. My situation is different now mainly because I need less money to live – just as well as fees are now plummeting back to those 1970 levels.