Best Business Practices for Photographers [10]
Turnage was not alone in regarding Adams' recognition of the importance of commercial work and the business of photography. Michael Adams, Ansel's son, notes during an interview in the documentary that his mother "was sort of the unsung hero. My mom had the business in Yosemite—she inherited from her father, after he passed away in the '30s— and that enabled them to live and for Ansel to do the creative work. Commercial jobs were very important, but her support financially allowed him to do a lot of things that he might not have otherwise been doing." And Andrea Gray Stillman, editor and assistant to Ansel Adams, noted that "when [Ansel's wife, Virginia] gave birth to their second child, Ann, in 1935, Ansel was not there. Virginia was in San Francisco; Ansel was in Yosemite on a commercial job."
Frames from the Edge is a documentary about Helmut Newton. When asked, "Are your works for sale? And if yes, how much?" Newton responded, "Not through museums. Museums are not the kind of institutions that sell photographs. Of course they are for sale. For me, everything is for sale. It's just a question of the price! But I do this for a living. I work because I love it and because I love to make money."
To many photographers, appearing in print and achieving a photo credit in a prestigious publication are the ultimate goals, but as poet Dorothy Parker said, "Beauty is only skin deep; ugly goes clean to the bone." When you encounter an offer to work primarily (or only) for a photo credit, and the costs of doing so are greater than your revenue, the beauty of that photo credit is skin deep, but the ugliness of what you are required to sacrifice in order to achieve that goes to the bone.
What's in a photo credit? Validation of your worth as a photographer? Bragging rights? Can you deposit that photo credit in the bank? Pay your rent or mortgage with it? Go to dinner on it?
As I was writing the final chapters of the first edition of this book in the summer of 2006, I had several of my images appear in a number of prestigious newspapers, all of which are viewed with some level of contempt by many in the photographic community for their low pay and insidious contracts. Yet countless photographers line up to sign their contracts, and photo credits read like the names are a revolving door, with photographers staying around for a year or two until they can't afford the "privilege" of working for these publications. My images were not my first, nor will they be my last, appearances within those papers. The images, however, were not produced as a result of an assignment for these papers; instead, they were produced on behalf of other clients—ones who paid a fair assignment fee, paid me for each electronic transmission (read: e-mail), and enabled me to keep my rights (of which being made available to editorial outlets was a part). I stipulated what rights I would license and what fee I would require to perform the work, and I was paid that.
For a long time, friends and colleagues would express joy at appearing in every publication under the sun, literally from A to Z, whatever the name—especially the marquee national and major metropolitan publications. My biography lists a few of the many publications in which my work has appeared, in large part because people who are not in the know judge me and my work based upon this. For those who do, this is such a disservice to both me and my work. A prosaic image suddenly becomes validated because of where it appeared? I think not. My work—and yours—should stand on its own and be valued regardless of where it appears. Yet many of today's problems with contracts,