livebooks blog

World-renowned conservation and fine art photographer Art Wolfe is in the process of reinventing his business model — upgrading to a liveBooks website and selling his stock images directly through a Photoshelter account that is linked to it. Art will be contributing to RESOLVE regularly, but we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to record a few words of wisdom while he was visiting last week. We shot the short interview below with Art and Jim Martin, executive director of Art Wolfe Inc. and an accomplished photographer himself, near our San Francisco office.

When Art started to see diminishing returns from stock sales years ago, he reworked his business around selling images himself through his website. Understanding that “fur and feathers” stock photography was not sufficient to keep his business afloat, he also did what many photographers are now learning the value of — he diversified. On top of stock and print sales, Art is also reaching millions of viewers through his TV show Travels to the Edge and is reworking his workshops for more intimate, challenging classes.

"Hay Bales" © Brian Kosoff

At the end of my last post I had decided to close my studio. I open this post with the admission that I’m glad I did! I still keep in touch with many of my old clients and studio-mates, but talking to them about work is not a cheery walk down memory lane — it’s a bummer. Fewer and fewer photographers have their own studios. The majority share, but in cramped conditions. Now you’ll find five photographers sharing 2,000 square feet: a ratio likely to create stress and conflict. Some photographers I know shoot family portraits for the general public, something that would have been embarrassing for them to pursue ten years ago.

My work is much more solitary now and I miss the camaraderie of other photographers, assistants, and stylists (and the catered lunches!) that I had in the studio. Sometimes I don’t speak with anyone in person, except a motel clerk, for months. I joke that when I get back home from one of my trips, I hand my wife a credit card and ask for a non-smoking room. Still, I consider myself very fortunate. On an almost daily basis I get to see some truly magnificent sights and I get to drink some of the best and worst road coffee out there. (Best: ANY Scandinavian country. Worst: the U.S.).

"Dune Silhouette" © Brian Kosoff

As for my landscape photography, it’s still a work in progress. I‘m relatively new to it, and while it didn’t take too long to master the technical aspects, I’m still trying to figure out why I’m drawn to certain subjects. It took me a while to realize that my fondness for a minimal style, often having a center oriented composition and a high-key or white background, was a direct result of having spent more than 20 years shooting minimal, center oriented, often white background product photographs. I guess that even when you change directions, you still carry some of the momentum from your earlier motion.

Change is inevitable and it’s often feared, but I consider my change from advertising to landscape photography an opportunity. For me now, my work is more satisfying than ever, and life is simpler. That’s a change for the better.

"Refinery" © Brian Kosoff

Over the course of my advertising career I followed a pattern of continually trading up to larger studios and adding more subtenant photographers to lower the overall cost per foot of the studio. My first NYC studio, in 1980, was about 2,000 square feet. All mine. My next studio, which I built in 1985, was 5,000 square feet. With this one I decided I would rent space to other photographers. My thought was that this would keep my costs more reasonable, and if I were busy there’d be more than enough space to produce the work.  Ultimately I had two other photographers in that space with me. This worked well for 15 years, until the dot-com bubble (the internet!) caused rents in the Photo District, where my studio was located, to go skyward. I had to move.

For my last studio, built in 2000, I partnered with another photographer and we shared responsibility for the space. This space was 7,500 square feet and we built facilities to accommodate us and three other photographers. Around this time the dot-com bubble burst (the internet!). The economy and the ad industry slowed down. I still had a large client list, but they were producing fewer ads, also in part because print media was less effective in a media environment diluted by the Internet. And what they were paying for each assignment was lower. The assignments themselves became less photographically challenging and less satisfying, due to a switch from still life photography (my specialty) which required the creation of sets that illustrated mini environments, to more silhouette-type photographs that could be photo composed into digital environments or stock photos. All the signs said it was time to move on.

Fortunately for me, a few years earlier I had started to shoot landscape photos again. I got married in 1999 and moved to a cute Hudson River town just north of Manhattan that had several galleries, including a few co-op ones. My wife encouraged me to join one, and I thought it would be a good excuse for me to actually print up a few of my landscapes, so I signed on. In April of 2001 I had the first solo show of my work since 1976. It did extremely well and was very profitable –- enough to make me think that I might have found an alternative to advertising photography and the high overhead of a Manhattan studio. Within a week of the show I had representation offers from several galleries in Manhattan. I ended up at Edward Carter Gallery and my new career shooting landscape really began.

"Snowy Ridge" © Brian Kosoff

A few months later were the September 11 attacks, and the aftermath devastated the NYC economy. A large chunk of lower Manhattan was closed off. For the galleries in Soho, it could not have been worse. Many businesses came to a screeching halt. Ad agencies had massive layoffs. The amount of work now available to advertising photographers was dramatically reduced. It didn’t seem like there was a real future in that field anymore. For the first time I thought that I might close my studio and leave Manhattan.

It’s not easy to walk away from something that you built over the course of two decades. My business was still viable, I still had a large client base and they would start to produce advertisements again, but there was a larger change. Even if it was still profitable, the kind of work that client’s wanted was more about cost than content or quality. That’s just not where I wanted to be. So at the end of 2002 I made it official and closed my studio.

"Contrails," an image by former advertising photographer Brian Kosoff. © Brian Kosoff

When I began working as an advertising and editorial photographer in 1979 I joined an industry that hadn’t changed much for 50 years. People made a product, someone would have to photograph or illustrate it, and then someone else would put that image in a publication. How much could that paradigm change?

My first encounter with digital technology’s foothold in the graphic design world was in 1984. I went to see a client, a design firm, and one of the designers pulled me aside and pointed out a small computer on his desk. “This is going to revolutionize design,” he told me. I looked at the little box again, focusing on the small screen and wondering how designers accustomed to drawing on 24-inch pads with hundreds of color markers would be able to work on a 9-inch black-and-white screen using a “mouse.”

Of course, a decade later the digital revolution had arrived. The world of graphics and printing changed dramatically –- typesetters disappeared and art directors also became computer experts –- but it was the effect on photography I really felt.

I bought a Mac and Photoshop in 1991. Previously I had done a lot of special effects photography for clients. The type of thing where you have five cameras set up on five sets and take the same piece of film and multiply expose that film to precisely masked and composed scenes. The Mac changed all that. Now all I had to do was scan film at the local service bureau and then move the pieces around almost effortlessly in Photoshop. Well not that effortlessly, it would take hours sometimes for the Mac to complete a Photoshop command. I can recall holding a loupe to my screen to check if the progress bar indicated whether the Mac had frozen or was still working. Seeing the bar move a single pixel in 90 seconds meant that PS command was going to take all night. Of course it usually ended up freezing first.

For most advertising photographers of my generation these were the good times. Very little had changed for us except we had more and better tools. But the same tools that made photo composure so easy for photographers also made photo retouching easier and less expensive. Why pay for a highly skilled photographer who could produce images needing little or no retouching when you could hire a less experienced and far cheaper photographer who’s work could now be inexpensively retouched and enhanced? You could argue that the more experienced photographer brought other values to the mix, but in many cases lower cost trumped quality. Still, the old hierarchy persisted. The photographers just starting out got the lower paying assignments, the high end photographers still got substantial day rates, and the mid-level photographers got a mix of both, an agreeable situation for all. More »