livebooks blog

• The long-awaited new LIFE.com has finally launched this week. A collaboration between LIFE and Getty Images, the new website features millions of images from the LIFE and Getty archives and more than 3,000 images are added to the site every day. You can download, share or print any of the images for free for personal, “non-commercial” use. We can’t deny this is an amazing (well-designed) resource, but like Vincent Laforet, we wonder how this will affect editorial licensing in the long run.

• This April is the inaugural Month of Photography Los Angeles, produced by the people behind the Lucie Awards in New York. The festival consists of exhibitions and lectures around the city, including a Douglas Kirkland exhibition at the new Annenberg Space for Photography and one by glamor duo Markus Klinko and Indrani at the Pacific Design Center.

• These days pretty much anything seems “greenable” so it’s not surprising that Aurora Photos is launching a “Green Collection” that “focuses on creative photography illustrating contemporary environmental themes and issues.” We like the journalistic approach of its “Nature and Environment Feature Stories,” which has slide shows that cover environmental issues from all over the world.

• The New York Times broke the sad news on Monday of Helen Levitt’s death. The photographer, famous for her poetic imagery of New York City streets, passed away in her sleep at her Manhattan home at the age of 95.

An image from the Edmonson's Indian wedding site. ©Edmonson Wedding

When we started working together, my father’s business was primarily commercial photography: magazines, books, CD covers, annual reports. So one week I got sent to the West Coast for an assignment, and he got sent to the East Coast for an assignment. And I said to my father, I came back here so that we could shoot together, but I don’t feel like we’re doing that. This is the commercial world, and that’s the way it’s going be; but we have our Saturdays, and wedding photography has changed. Have you ever considered doing weddings? I showed him that wedding photography today is little bit more lifestyle, more photojournalistic. I also showed him how the coffee table wedding books now are more of a magazine layout, which he could relate to.

So we kind of put our sign up in the world to do weddings. The first year, we did everything wrong. We did 120 weddings at $1,000 each, which was way too much. But you learn from your mistakes. So we changed our prices and we ended up doing more weddings the next year. We almost burned ourselves out because we were just all about volume — that’s what we thought success was.

So we learned from our mistakes again and changed our business model. One of the big ways we did that was with our websites. I have background working with websites, so when I very first started, I started off doing it all by myself, ’cause I thought nobody can do it as good as I could. But then I ended up realizing that the only way to grow your business is if you free yourself up to do what you’re best at, which is getting  business, running your business, being a photographer. So we started out with four sites. Those first four were a site tailored to our American weddings, a site tailored to our Indian clients for Indian weddings, a website for David Edmonson, and a website for Luke Edmonson. One of the reasons we had our two individual sites was because some of the organizations that we are part of, for instance WPJA, have specific parameters for the type of images that you show, and if you can identify who the photographer is. For us it was much simpler just to say, let’s take our consistent look and feel from our wedding sites, and we’ll make separate sites dedicated to each target audience.

The second reason we wanted separate sites was that, when we looked at our client, we saw that our most profitable clients are either our high-end Indian clients and our high-end American clients. We’re not making much profit on the in-between, middle-ground clients. But if we were only going after one group or the other, then we would be limiting ourselves. So we said, let’s go ahead and invest in completely separate websites.

Then number one, we could choose a domain name that meant something special to our Indian clients. That’s why our domain for that site is EdmonsonShaadi. “Shaadi” means matrimony in the Hindi language. And the messaging, the tone of what we wanted to say to clients was different, simply because culturally Indians are Hindus, Muslims, and Christians and have 10 thousand different languages and dialects. So rather than presenting ourselves in English, we wanted to be able to talk to say thanks to them in their own languages -– the different greetings that they would expect from other people who understand their culture. We were blessed to shoot a wedding in New Delhi, India, and we had the ability to see things first-hand. For us, when we’re looking at how to divide up the website, it was really important to be able to show our Indian clients things that relate specifically to their expectations. And then, vice-versa, for our American clients we could do the same.

©Edmonson Photography

Another thing that was important to us was that our separate sites link to one another, to allow people to navigate to the different types of photography we do. So for our wedding sites, at the bottom you’ll see that it says “Wedding,” “Indian,” “David,” and “Luke.” That is simply because we want our Indian clients who maybe know somebody who is non-Indian, to realize that we do work other than just Indian weddings, and hopefully recommend a new client. And likewise for our American clients, who could see we do Indian weddings and might tell a friend.

The same thing goes for our commercial and portraits and other related businesses. One of the things my father taught me long ago was that it’s very hard to be profitable the first time you do business. Profitability comes from a lifetime relationship working with someone. So we start out showing clients that we put an emphasis of the type of photography that we’re doing for them, but then we expand to their other needs.

For instance, someone might start out as a wedding client; then, of course, they’re going to have portrait needs. Maybe that starts with babies, maternity photos, and eventually those become senior portraits, family portraits, and so forth. Perhaps the dad has a business, so it’s awesome if he can see that we do commercial work as well. There are an infinite number of ways to grow your business by just putting it out there. One of the things that we found was that whenever we were initially introduced to a client, they wanted to be able to see that we focused on them. If it’s a commercial client, they didn’t want to see any portraits. They didn’t want to see any wedding photos. They wanted to see commercial photos. Likewise a bride who is looking for wedding photos, that’s all she wants to see. It’s only later in the relationship, when they started to explore some of our other offerings, and once they’ve already gotten connected to you and liked you, all of a sudden they start thinking of you and other ways that they can use you in their life.

The image that started it all. Alan's first photo that got picked up by BAGnewsNotes and started his ongoing discussion with commenters on the blog. ©Alan Chin

One of the most important features of the blog format is this ability to have a comment thread, this feedback with the readers. As a photographer I’d never had that before. When you publish something, you know people write letters to the editor and maybe weeks or months later you might get a few letters. But that’s very rare and remote. Now it can be instantaneous. We forget very easily what the average person who’s not a journalist, when they pick up a paper or they go online, how they approach the imagery. This is what Michael’s site is all about to begin with, but it’s especially important with the original photojournalism work we’re doing.

It’s been educational for me that this is what “normal” people think about when they look at pictures, which is not the way we as professionals look at pictures. We’re really jaded. And we have a huge opportunity educate our audience; they can be really surprised. If I put up a little diary entry, for example, of how I work in Iraq, or being on the campaign trail, readers are amazed. For photojournalists, we think, of course, you have to get a fixer, you have to get a flak jacket, we don’t think twice. But the average person, they’re not thinking about that at all. They only see the results of our labor, they never really understand how we go about doing it. And when you give even the most basic of explanations, then that whole conversation starts. We have found specifically on this blog a tension and dynamic between photo people and political junkies, because it is a political blog. It’s telling how people who are really politically savvy can be very naive photographically, and vice-versa.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t read the comments on my images. Photographers are like children in that sense. We crave praise and hate criticism. And we’re insecure about ourselves. I mean, if some total stranger says, wonderful picture, you feel good, even though you have no idea who this person is and why they say that. And also if some other stranger says it’s terrible, you feel bad, even though they might be blind for all you know. So I read all the comments on BAGnewsNotes, and I will on RESOLVE too!

But most of the comments on BAGnewsNotes are more of a political nature, using the photographs to inform the debate. At least I don’t have to worry too much about my “photographic” pride, especially at something like the DNC, which we’ve all seen so many times. How do you take pictures at a convention that aren’t boring? I think I spent most of my time just trying to make good pictures. I read the comments, but that doesn’t change what you do the next day because you know you just have to go out there and try to make interesting pictures.

Images of homeless teens by Jay Fram (left) and Martin Schoeller for Do1Thing.org. ©Jay Fram/Do1Thing and ©Martin Schoeller/Do1Thing

Miki Johnson: How did Do1Thing start?

Najlah Hicks: Back in May, 2008, after 25 years out of school, I went back for my master’s degree in multimedia. Do1Thing is actually my master’s thesis at Parson’s. I was planning to create a long-term documentary on what happens to kids who never get adopted.

Pim and I had co-founded the Heart Gallery of New Jersey, where professional photographers take pictures of children in foster care, in hopes that people will be drawn to the pictures and seek out these children and adopt them. We shot about 350 kids in 2005, and in 2007 and 2008 we shot another 100 of what the state calls the “hardest to adopt.” They have lived in foster care the longest, they have multiple siblings, or they are older kids. We were wildly successful. Over 150 of those kids have now been adopted. Today a third of all inquiries for foster care adoption in New Jersey come through the Heart Gallery of New Jersey website.

Then, our last project that we shot, we were seeing that a lot of the kids were older, 15, 16, or 17, who were about to age out of foster care. And there are 25,000 kids nationwide aging out every year, and about 40% end up homeless. That’s where Do1Thing started. That initial idea to document homelessness turned into: We can’t just document it, we have to do something. How about if we do just one thing? And that’s how Do1Thing was born. We launched Do1Thing on February 14, 2009, but it wasn’t just a one-time thing. We are currently working to get official non-profit status, create a traveling gallery, continue to raise awareness, and find funding. So while the fury of our launch is over, that was just the beginning.

Our larger goal is to put together this multimedia, multidisciplinary group that will tackle the big nagging issues that are affecting teens and children. They’ll go in there and come back in a very short time with a comprehensive focus — that’s exactly what we did with this first project. We targeted teen homelessness and within eight weeks we put up a massive amount of quality content documenting teen homelessness around the country. We feel like, there are all these social dilemmas that people just don’t know about, until someone brings them to the forefront.

Another good thing about Do1Thing is that we recognize that we can’t solve the problem alone. We’re not smart enough. We don’t know enough about it. We don’t make the legislation. But what we can do is raise awareness. I hope we change the face of what a lot of people think homelessness is. It’s not fifty-year-old drunks on the side of the street. Today more people are homeless than any other time in history, even the Great Depression. And 1.3 million of them are children.

The results of this first project varied by location. A lot of it depends on how much the local non-profits were working to get the word out. Some worked feverishly — they understand the value of being able to use Do1Thing as a vehicle to spotlight the issues they’re working on. Others are leery because they don’t know us. But the first project was a great success. Our website is now averaging six to eight thousand hits a day. A lot of national homeless associations are linking to us, and asking us to link to them.

MJ: What are you and the Do1Thing volunteers doing on a daily basis now?

NH: We’re editing –- we recieved over 125 gigs of JPGs in 48 hours, which is tens of thousands of images. We have six or seven editors who are editing every day, and we’re adding new content to the site every day. We want to get the word out there, so we’re considering festivals and traveling galleries. Anything that works. We also want to print images for each one of the non-profits that we partner with so that they can have this work on their lobby walls.

Of course identifying sources for funding is a constant process. We would love to be able, five years down the road, to fund independent projects for photographers. Five photographers to work on AIDS; five photographers to work on cancer; five to work on water-borne diseases. To produce great work that will create significant social change, that’s our long-term goal.

Non-profits need this kind of powerful visual content, if they’re going to succeed. For organizations like the Covenant House, 80 percent of their funding comes from direct mail marketing and 80 percent of their donors are over 65 years old. Before Do1Thing, the Covenant House knew very little about social media. They didn’t Twitter. They had a small Facebook crowd. In the 48 hours after the Do1Thing launch, the Covenant House’s YouTube channel was the most-watched non-profit YouTube channel in the world. But they didn’t know about any of that before working with us. They had no concept of blogging, Twittering, Digg, del.icio.us, and all the social networking sites. I think non-profits need to start utilizing those tools and exploring their potential for fundraising.

Do1Thing is not yet a non-profit. We’re applying for non-profit status, and we’re partnering with non-profits, like the Heart Gallery. Right now we’re a project of the Heart Gallery. But it will become its own non-profit, hopefully in the coming months. And then we imagine Do1Thing becoming a kind of consulting agency for non-profits. Again, we’ll shine a light on a cause we believe in. Then we partner with non-profits and take over the multimedia from them. Like with Covenant House, in a very short period of time we can put together a comprehensive multimedia presentation on any social dilemma.