livebooks blog

One of Garth's images that appeared in a book about clearcuts, of Yaky Kop Cone on Vancouver Island. ©Garth Lenz

In my last post, I talked about how a photographer can identify and approach NGOs (or, my specialty, an environmental NGO). As I said in that post, even after you form a relationship, getting an assignment to produce images can take a while. For larger NGOs, commissioning a photographer, covering expenses, and paying a day rate is a pretty rare occurrence. For the smaller NGOs, it’s even rarer. If your primary motivation for working with NGOs is to find a new market for your work, then you’re bound to be disappointed. That is not to say that NGOs can’t be a market but, to put it bluntly, if making money is your goal, there are a lot more effective places to put your energy.

A better way to assess if a relationship with an NGO is successful, is to consider whether you share some of the same long term goals and will be able to help each other accomplish those. In my own case, my long-term photographic and conservation interest in old-growth forests, the impacts of environmental degradation on indigenous peoples, and other issues align with a number of NGOs. These NGOs have helped me achieve my long-term goals as much as I have helped them, but the fact of the matter is, I would have found a way to work on these issues regardless of whether any NGO shared these same concerns.

So assuming you have an issue that you are compelled to document and you’ve identified one or several NGOs that share your interests, how can you build a relationship with them? Perhaps a few examples from my early experience will be instructive. With a couple of assignments under my belt and getting a little recognition for my work, I was asked to be a major contributor to a large-format coffee book on clearcut logging. A number of more established photographers, like Galen Rowell and Robert Glenn Ketchum were also involved, and, to the best of my knowledge, we all donated our time to the cause. It was a great experience for me — I had my expenses covered for a prolonged period of time in the field, was able to begin my work in the Canadian boreal region, met other committed photographers and activists, and received more recognition for my work.

After completing work on the clearcut book and witnessing so much devastation as a result of industrial logging, I felt compelled to share my experiences with a larger audience. In particular I was disturbed by plans to clearcut much of coastal Vancouver Island and the biologically rich, largely intact area of Clayoquot Sound. I was also deeply unsettled by the impact that logging and the associated pollution from pulp mills was having on the boreal and the local indigenous population. So, in the winter of 1993, I decided to go to Europe and give a series of presentations to build international awareness of what was going on in Canada.

One of the images Garth presented overseas to garner support for logging protections in Canada's Clayquot Sound. ©Garth Lenz

With the moral support of two NGOs, The Friends of Clayoquot Sound and the Valhalla Wilderness Society, and some logistical support from Greenpeace and others, a colleague and I made plans, raised money, and set off for six weeks to give about 60 presentations in England, Scotland, Germany, and to the European Parliament in Brussels. We passed the hat, slept on activist’s couches, and had a wonderful experience. Although no one paid us, and we did all our own fundraising to cover our basic costs. And at the end of the day, including donations at our events, we were able to pay ourselves a modest honorarium and to donate some money back to the cause. More importantly, I was able to promote issues important to me to prominent NGOs and publications. They in turn came to me for images when these issues grew and took on international significance.

All of these activities can be considered “growing the relationship.” They helped me become a better photographer and better known for my work, while putting me in contact with people and organizations that would later purchase images, fund my work, and occasionally offer me assignments. And because at that time I was also involved in campaign strategy, creating markets campaigns, being a spokesperson, and other non-photographic activities, I learned a lot about how photography can advance conservation campaigns.

With this intimate knowledge of the needs and operations of NGOs, I was in a better position to work with them to create joint projects and self-funded projects that would meet their needs. Given how closely I was working with NGO’s, I was able to fundraise through groups with a charitable status, enabling me to receive money from foundations or individuals, which they, in turn, could write off for tax purposes. For me, working this way — doing much of the initial work of creating a project, fundraising, and working with groups from inception to completion — is far more common simply being handed an assignment, and often a more rewarding way to work with an NGO.

Abay, 28, Awash Fontale, Ethiopia ©Phil Borges, courtesy CARE

Miki Johnson: How did you first come across Phil Borges and his work? Did he make contact with you first?

Valenda Campbell: I’ve been here at CARE since 2001 and part of my role is to find photographers to represent our work. My associate photo editor at the time, Jason Sangster, and I were familiar with Phil’s work, through his Tibetan Portrait and Enduring Spirit projects. This was I guess around Spring of 2004 and we were looking at his work and saying, wow, his style of photography really captures that connection that we want our supporters to make with our project participants. And the way he was able to concisely give the viewer a glimpse into that person’s life and their world was just great. So we said let’s call him up and see if he’d be interested in working some with CARE. So Jason contacted him and we set up a conference call.

We got on the phone and told him what we were about. We let him know that we were really interested in working with him and asked if he would possibly do some work for CARE to help us get our message out. He was interested. I think Phil really connected with the fact that we work primarily with indigenous communities in developing countries and emphasize work with women and girls. He had been photographing indigenous communities for years and he already knew, from all of his travels and his previous projects, how women and girls who are usually marginalized can really influence their families and communities if given the opportunity. So it was just a really good match, and we began talking about what we could put together. What do we want to do? What do we want to accomplish? And that’s how it started.

MJ: And what did that conversation sound like when you guys started to talk about your goals and what you could do together?

VC: We familiarized Phil with everything CARE does, all the variety of programming we do, including microfinance, education, HIV/AIDS, maternal health, emergency relief, the whole gamut. We explained how, at that time, we were beginning to place new emphasis in our communications around CARE’s work with women. Our development work had evolved over the years, and we realized that CARE’s most successful programming was centered around the empowerment of women in the communities where we work. And that really struck a cord with Phil.

He’s a busy man, and he’s not one to just sort of take on a random commission here and there. He was really interested, but if we were going to do something, he wanted it to be a project. If he was going to commit some time to it, he wanted to have really specific outcomes in mind. And he let us know that the message that we had to deliver and the kinds of projects we were talking about was really meshing well with what he was looking to do for his next big project. He talked about everything he’d learned and come to realize through his work with these cultures and that he felt our messaging around women’s empowerment captured that. More »

One of Robert's images from the Tongass Rainforest. ©Robert Glenn Ketchum

Although there is always the fluke opportunity for a picture book to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, like Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Earth From Above, or Ernest Haas’s The Creation, the likelihood of that happening is one percent. The rest of us are pretty lucky if we sell 25,000 books — we’re actually pretty luck if we sell 10. And then if you narrow your market by trying to intellectualize anything, or in particular politicize anything, to take it anywhere other than just a pretty picture book about a popular theme, then you lose even more of the market. Your publisher’s not interested. Your bookstores don’t respond in the same way. Your readership gets smaller. And don’t forget that when you publish a book, it goes to the first tier of distribution, and that’s national, then the price usually doubles. Then it goes from there to the smaller distributors, and then the price increases again. Then from the smaller distributors it goes to the bookstores. If the bookstores take it, it’s maybe two copies, and it ends up spine-out unless the publishing company has paid for some kind of display. So now you’ve got this book you’ve put years of effort into, photographing, editing, publishing. Plus the cost. And it ends up spine-out in some bookstore. If you’re trying to change anything, especially change the world in any way, it’s not likely it’s going to happen at that pace.

I learned a lot about this with The Hudson River and the Highlands, my first book with Aperture. I met Aperture through the Lila Acheson Wallace Fund, which commissioned Stephen Shore, William Clift, and I to photograph the river. My images were pretty confrontational and political, so when I originally presented them to the Wallace Fund, I said, I recognize this is not what you gave me the commission for. You don’t have to use them, I just want to show you that I’m doing them. And they said, these are the ones we think are the most important, because they were working form a conservation perspective.

From there I was introduced to Aperture. It didn’t take me very long at Aperture to realize the frustration of publishing a book and having the limited exposure and sales. We still did well, we sold over 10,000, but only because it was Hudson River and New York. Michael Hoffman, the former president of Aperture said to me, “You take away part of your market by putting these politicized photographs in, but I understand the foundation is supporting it. It’s a kind of corruption of the coffee table book, so I guess it’s interesting that we’re doing it here at Aperture.” And that’s how it was viewed. My further frustration was that the book didn’t reach a wider audience than the Hudson River lovers. It didn’t reach the conservation audience I wanted, and it didn’t really comment on Regan’s take on the Clean Water Act, which was what I kind of implied in my essay.

Another, less idyllic image from the Tongass. ©Robert Glenn Ketchum

So when we came to the table with the Tongass rainforest book, again I was working with Aperture. This time I was determined to be more strident in my political content and to look at book distribution more realistically in terms of what I expected to sell and get from a royalty. First I said, I think this minimal royalty for sales, which is all projected out over years, is a joke. How much are you going to give me, if you added it all up? And usually you’re lucky if it’s between $20,000 and $50,000. I said, how about you give me that in books at cost? I do lectures and workshops for non-profit fund raising and things like that where I will sell my books, and I agreed not to poach their bookstore sales by selling at retail. And then I would just go away, and they’d never have to pay me a royalty or anything, I just get those books free. Well Aperture was happy to do that and I was happy to get free from Aperture’s bureaucracy. In particular it allowed me to hand out books when I felt like it because they only cost a couple bucks.

Having published the Tongass book, I wanted to change the way it was distributed. So I approached foundations in the conservation community. I struck an agreement between one of the foundations and Aperture to buy books at cost (about 800) so that they could be handed out in Congress, not only to members but also their legislative assistants. And Aperture agreed. That was Aperture’s first introduction to the idea. So that happened with the Tongass book, and we got it handed out in Congress and widely distributed through information networks like Natural Resources Defense Council and Earthjustice that needed it as a visual imaging device.

An image from Robert's Overlooked In America book. ©Robert Glenn Ketchum

From the time we published that book in ’86, the presence was accumulative, sort of a ball going downhill, gaining momentum. And in 1990 we passed the largest timber reform bill in history of United States. The book was not the sole element that made that happen. It was all the people working on the project. But it gave them something to carry around in their hands to say, this is what it looks like, and, more importantly, this is what’s being done to it, because the clear-cuts were in the book. And the industrial log yards and people being displaced in the fishing industry were in there. So there was challenging stuff like the images I’d integrated into the Hudson book, but more stridently so, and the essay stopped beating around the bush and came out and called a spade a spade and got a lot of people in trouble. It was a real political advocacy books. It probably had a very limited market in terms of real picture book marketing. Yet it had a huge life, and went to a third addition, 50,000 copies, but mostly by handout, request mailing, website sales, and foundations networking. The group I did all this with is the Macintosh Foundation; they also helped with the distribution in Congress and they helped underwrite the traveling exhibition that showed at the National Museum of Natural History on Earth Day. They operate some boats in Southeast Alaska for recreational use and they appreciate the eco-tourism value of the land as opposed to the log-it-to-death aspect.

That opened the door to my ensuing book with the Akron Art Museum, which resulted from a commission to photograph the newly created Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area. The book, Overlooked in America, went beyond the context of Ohio and examined all federal lands in North America and the way they were being mistreated. Aperture was also the publisher on that production, and their literal words were, “This book is so bitter, we can’t imagine a readership audience.” And they didn’t want to run it. So my funders said to Aperture, if somebody paid for printing costs, would Aperture help distribute any books? And Aperture said, probably just 1,000. So we ran 10,000 and distributed the rest to the environmental networks. And those books were on the front lines of battles about mining, about parks — they even got handed out in Alaska when the battle started over the mine in Bristol Bay. I’d done a completely different set of books there, but they still found Overlooked in America useful to hand out. So these books have another kind of life. They live on the shelves, but they have another life where they serve advocates. But they don’t get out if you don’t take them out into that advocate world.

A so-called "alternative logging operation" in 1991 at Tofino Creek, Clayoquot Sound, Vancouver Island. The image ended up being a poster for Greenpeace's campaign to end clearcutting. ©Garth Lenz

Some photographers who approach ENGOs are already established. Since I started working with ENGOs very early on, now when I approach an ENGO I have not worked with previously, I almost always know someone there and they are already aware of my work. So how did I start working with ENGOs before I was an established photographer? Local groups in my hometown of Victoria were working to protect the Carmanah Valley, one of the last large and intact watersheds of old growth coastal temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island and home to the recently discovered tallest trees in Canada. It was all scheduled to be clear-cut in the very near future. At the time, I was still teaching piano to support myself, but photography and environmental issues were exerting an ever stronger pull. I had recently visited the area and was equally impressed by the devastating clearcuts, majestic forests, and the committed individuals I met there who were building trails to help the public access the area and learn what was at stake.

An image of the Carmanah Valley on Vancouver Island, from Garth's first feature assignment. The area was slated to be clearcut but later protected after a lengthy protest. ©Garth Lenz

I spent a few days in the area hiking and photographing, and upon my return to Victoria, I introduced myself to the local chapter of the Sierra Club and showed them my work. Shortly thereafter, Canada’s weekly news magazine, Maclean’s, decided the issue warranted national attention, they contacted the Sierra Club who referred them to me and I had my first published photo. Not long after that, our national newspaper the Globe and Mail decided to cover the story. The Sierra Club recommended me and I had my fist assignment, shooting aerials, which I’d never done before.

How you approach work with an ENGO or any other NGO will depend on how established you are and what subjects and areas you have in your photographic inventory. For someone in the early stages of their career, I think it is best to start locally. Is there an issue you care about that a local NGO is trying to promote? Do you already have images depicting this issue? If the answer to both these questions is yes, then you have an excellent foundation to begin building a relationship on. How you approach this will depend on how established you are and what subjects and areas you have in your photographic inventory. Of course, there are also other ways to make an initial connection.

1. Offer to give a lunch hour presentation of your work to staff. Or you might ask a local group to host a public presentation on an area you have visited and feel strongly about, perhaps splitting any proceeds from the event with them. Most NGO’s have a good base of supporters and may be able to assist in getting a larger audience than you would on your own.
2. Consider donating a print for one of their fundraisers.
3. See if you can organize a photo workshop through the NGO. Ask the NGO to organize it and perhaps for every paying customer they bring in they can have a free spot for a staff member.

Basically, you want the NGO to get to know you. They need to know that you care about the issues as much as they do. Thinking that you will walk through the door and come away with a paying assignment after your initial meeting is, in most cases, just not realistic. Okay, maybe that happens for some of the photo-gods and with very large NGO’s but for most of us mortals, being sent on a paying assignment by and NGO is something that only comes later.