livebooks blog

Terence Koh ©Dietmar Busse

When I started getting hired as a photographer, I really was not very well prepared. I was far from clear about what I wanted. I had not created a vision nor had I developed a clear photographic language. In some instances, everything would fall into place: the right subject, the right stylist, the right creative direction. There were moments of real magic.

Often, however, it was much less perfect. When I did not like what I saw in front of me, I did not know what to do with it, and often other people would take charge because I was not able to. For example, the stylist would impose his or her ideas on me, or the hairdresser, or even the model. Needless to say, I was not very happy with that, and it often showed in the results. All this was a lot of stress and I wasn’t getting rich, so there came a point after a few years when I got really fed up. One day I was trying to make a beautiful photograph of flowers for my mom and send it to her on her birthday. I bought a bouquet of flowers, put it in a vase on a table in my studio, and began photographing it. Because it was for my mom, it had to be super special and gorgeous. Nothing I could come up with met my standards at the time, and I got so frustrated that I just took the entire bouquet and ripped it apart.

What a drama! However, as I sat there ready to put the whole thing into the trash, I started playing with the bits and pieces. On the floor I reassembled the petals and stems and just sort of played around. Then I took the camera and photographed my creations. This looked new and fresh to me, and it reminded me of the drawings I used to make for my mom when I was little.

Out of this incident grew an entire body of work. I would lock myself in my studio at the end of the day and make up flowers that don’t exist. I recreated scenes from my childhood and glued hundreds of flower petals and leaves on my body, then photographed myself. I loved just creating things without anybody around — nobody making any demands or having expectations.

At that time, when my agent sent me to meetings with clients, I showed my commercial portfolio and I either got the job or not. But at the end of the meeting I would show my little flower creations and often people would ask me if I would sell them, so I did. Encouraged by this, and somewhat frustrated by my fashion and commercial work, I decided to take a break. I moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and glued flower petals on myself and on all the walls of my railroad apartment. I think I learned a lot about myself during that time. I had to.

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.

• Cable channel Bravo confirmed that a new reality show featuring celebrity and fashion photography duo Markus Klinko and Indrani is slated for a debut in January 2010. The glamorous pair were the creators behind iconic images including the album covers of David Bowie’s Heathen and Beyonce’s Dangerously In Love. American Photo’s State of the Art blog has more details. Another interesting development about photography invading mainstream TV is the anticipated launch of the Photography Network this September. An excerpt from their marketing pitch hopes Photography Network will be to photography “what HGTV is to home and garden and the Food Network is to food.” For a sneak peak, check out their demo reel.
• Following complaints from photographers and an NPPA letter to Amtrak in January, Amtrak issued a new set of guidelines last week that incorporate NPPA’s recommendations. The new policies state that Amtrak police should not “delete, destroy, or alter photographs and video, along with the directive that they shall not request others to delete, destroy, or alter photos or video either.” After a lot of mixed messages and mistreatment from Amtrak, this is finally some good news for photographers.
• After months of anticipation, the Getty Flickr stock collection is finally here. While most would agree it is impressive in terms of quality and quantity for something on Flickr, it comes with a hefty price tag also. We’d love to hear what you think about its potential and problems.
• Big congrats to beloved Scotsman Harry Benson for receiving a CBE from Princess Anne at Buckingham Palace yesterday morning! Check out Harry’s insightful advice for young photographers here on RESOLVE.

An image from Obama's inauguration, which Alan published on the BAGnewsNotes blog. ©Alan Chin

The biggest continuing problem is that, although Michael has established himself as a non-profit, and  fund raises in that sense, let’s be realistic: This is a tiny, tiny amount of revenue coming in compared to traditional media. So while he has been able to pay, to support what I’ve done and what other people have done in terms of our original contributions to the site, thus far that remuneration has been more symbolic. I should say it’s more than symbolic, because when you consider how little the magazines pay these days, even to get the equivalent of a couple of day rates is actually pretty significant. But at this point I can say it still doesn’t replace getting a traditional assignment.

Like everybody else, we’re trying to figure out how to make money on the Internet. Major newspapers and magazines are going bankrupt every day; they don’t have a clue what to do. Presumably they tried their damnedest and hardest, hired the best people they could, and still they fail. So our task is exceptionally daunting. But we have the advantage, at the moment, of being lean and personal and we have the faith of idealists and revolutionaries. But will that be enough?

The reason I’ve done it is there is hope in this model. Of course right now we’re not making a lot of money, and we’re barely breaking even. For example, we spent a week at the DNC in Denver. We were able to post dozens of images. The content we published was really strong. But to field an operation like that costs money. It would cost a lot of money for Time magazine, and it cost a lot of money for us. So Michael was able to throw some money my way to pay for lodging and transportation and also a little bit of money so that my time isn’t entirely volunteer, but at the end of the day it cost thousands of dollars to do that. And of course we can’t really compete with Time magazine. But in terms of what we’re able to do on-site, the level of discourse and the level of imagery is excellent. What the blog medium allows us to do is very dynamic. I think it’s the future of our industry.

We’re doing a lot of great work, but we’re still at the very beginning. During the DNC Michael was getting, I think, one day 40,000 hits, which actually crashed the picture-hosting server for a while. So we make mistakes, which we know we have to avoid in the future. But in a way I think that was very encouraging. If you have 40,000 hits, it’s not the million people that read the New York Times or Time magazine, and in that sense it’s very humbling. But 40,000 people who are actually going to go to a website, they actually care. They are committed to seeking something, as a opposed to all those copies of magazines and newspapers that circulate, but do people really care what’s in a paper at any particular moment? Whereas the people that come to our site, we know that they care, because the Internet being what it is, you don’t go anywhere on the Internet unless you really want to see what’s there.