livebooks blog

Photographer Chase Jarvis, a long-time proponent of iPhone photography, this week announced the launch of his iPhone application, Best Camera. The simple, elegant photo editing app also allows you to share images to Facebook and Twitter, as well as TheBestCamera.com, the app’s new community photo sharing site. A master of cross promotion, Chase has also simultaneously released a new book of his iPhone photos, The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You.

In a bizarre twist on the celebrity-photographer love-hate paradigm, PDN reports that Agence France Presse staffer Yuri Cortez and freelancer Rolando Aviles are bringing a suite against Tom Brady and his supermodel wife Gisele Bundchen for an incident where their bodyguards demanded the photographers’ memory cards and then shot at them when they refused to comply and fled in their SUV.

We were excited to see the name of Istanbul-based photojournalist Lynsey Addario on the list of the 24 new MacArthur Fellows for 2009 announced this week. Each of recipient of the “genius award” will receive $500,000 in “no strings attached” support over the next five years.

Photographer and film director Richard Patterson released a new stop-motion music video for Iranian rock band Hypernova this week, which was created out of about 16,000 still photographs made with the Canon 1D Mark III and the new Profoto Pro-8 Air. Since releasing, along with a behind-the-scenes making-of video, it’s been viewed almost 40,000 times.

With the rapid change happening in the photography industry, we photographers are becoming part of a much larger, more competitive, more sophisticated global economy. Potential clients now have access to innumerable choices, and any photographer is now just one option in an overwhelming smorgasbord of photographic options. To compete in this economy, photographers need to have a new skill set that includes the ability to define, express, and manage their brand.

Why does everyone want this camera? The Hasselblad brand makes a promise - and keeps it.

A well defined brand strategy can improve your profits, your reputation, and the likelihood you’ll be considered for future jobs. It may even effect whether your business succeeds or fails.

But I’m not here to convince you that you need a brand strategy, nor to tell you what it should be (I’ll discuss those another day). Rather, I want to take a step back and help you understand what a brand is. Unless you understand that, it will be difficult to ever build the most effective brand possible.

If we asked most people what a brand is, their answers would likely be tangible things like logos (the Nike swoosh) or colours (the red of a coke can) or words (BMW’s “The Ultimate Driving Machine”). Likewise, when people set out to build their brand, they usually focus on the same tangible things. “I need a brand” translates to “I need to build a ‘look’ or ‘style.'” While these are important elements or expressions of a brand, they are not the brand itself.

So what is a brand? A brand is a promise. It is whatever people think, feel, trust, and believe you, your business, or your product will give them if they buy from you. It exists inside people’s minds, out of your reach — yet it’s a big part of why they buy from you.

Logos, colours, fonts and words are simply how you try to convey your brand’s promise to people. Thus a “brand” is a promise and “branding” is all the tangible things you use to express that.

Confused? Let me give you an example. If you mention the name “Hasselblad” to photographers and ask them to describe the brand in a single word, you’ll get similar responses: expensive, quality, icon, fashionable, professional, reliable. Many photographers will express a deep desire to own one. That’s the sign of a great brand. But this deep desire to own a Hasselblad, and the positive way photographers describe the brand, does not come from a logo, website, or colour. It comes from a brand promise, which many photographers believe and which Hasselblad has spent decades cultivating.

What has helped make the Hasselblad brand so strong and effective? For starters, Hasselblad has clearly defined the promise it makes to customers. What’s more, it is a promise they make sure they keep. It is based on a truth about who Hasselblad is and what its customers need. More »

Ikpokiri is a poor community in the oil rich Niger Delta. The only school in this small community lay in ruins due to flooding and lack of care. ©Ed Kashi

It’s not enough anymore to create work for one media platform, especially if you intend to raise awareness about issues or are trying to effect change. Now when I create a new project as a photojournalist or with Talking Eyes Media, the non-profit production company I founded with my wife, Julie Winokur, we have our eyes on expanded opportunities for distribution: the web, social media, books, exhibitions, T.V., lectures, workshops, academic applications, and NGO collaborations. There are undoubtedly even more I haven’t thought, of and we’re always looking for new options.

To work in this multi-platform landscape, you must develop skills beyond still photography. You should at least be proficient at gathering and editing audio, and preferably you’d also understand video and be able to handle post production to produce a finished piece.

Since Julie and I founded Talking Eyes seven years ago, we have developed a process that fluidly moves from proposal, field work, and post production to outreach and followup. With the Niger Delta work, we’re learning as we go. As usual, we’re applying for grants, but now they are in areas I’ve never ventured into before, attempting to receive funding support for educational outreach programs.

One small example of this can be seen on my blog where we posted papers written by history students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where my book was required reading. They were asked to pick three images and write about them, and we posted a handful of their papers with the students’ consent.

Unemployed local youths hang out around the Etelebou Flow Station in the Niger Delta. ©Ed Kashi

This is an important aspect of multi-platform storytelling: It can easily be disseminated to a wide variety of audiences. It also provides the means for those audiences to talk back with the photographer/producer about the work. It is exciting to being able to create a groundswell of interest in this way, by building a feedback loop between the documentarian, their subject, and the audience.

I am currently writing grants to fund a broader implementation of this feedback loop idea (really it’s a wiki, but I wanted to avoid that term). My vision is to create a new website, or augment the existing one from liveBooks, so that students in the U.S. and Nigeria (or anywhere for that matter), who are using teaching materials I’ve created around oil and environmental issues, can contribute their own comments, information, pictures, and videos to the site. So a student in Port Harcourt, in the Niger Delta, would study these issues using the texts, stills, and video from my work there (along with expanded teaching materials we plan to include in a teaching DVD) and then do his or her own reporting or just contribute personal materials to the site. In this way, they can correct, augment, and develop my work to broaden, deepen, and personalize it. More »