On the train into Seattle a
few weeks back the morning sunlight streamed in the window and onto the face
and wonderfully braided hair of a young Latina
woman sitting in front of me. I asked her
for a photograph and she said it was ok.
After a few photographs I gave her my card and my standard “Send me an
email so I can send you a print.” then showed her a couple of samples of my work
that I “just happened” to have in my shoulder bag. I She
oohed and aahed at them and asked if I was on Instagram. I allowed that I was not and she said “You should be! People would see your photographs!”
I get that comment from time to time.
I’m certainly not averse to people seeing my work. Rather to the contrary.
I do have a website.
The traffic to it is, well, modest —
a couple of hundred page views a month (not counting mine). I have made some contacts, met (in a virtual
sense) some interesting people, sold some prints, sold some books through
people finding my website by keyword search.
One as far away as Poland. So far it’s just enough to make keeping the
website up to date worth the trouble.
I do have a subscription newsletter with a vanishingly small
(by internet standards) audience that grows slowly. (Unpaid advertisement: see ronfstop.com to subscribe) However, the
“open” rate is 80%. The average “open”
rate for an online newsletter is 20%.
Hmmm. I would rather have my
newsletter go to a few people who are interested in what I’m doing than go to a
larger audience most of whom don’t even bother to open it.
But Instagram? I
suppose I could let those who subscribe to my newsletter and those who reach me
through my website know that I’m on Instagram and ask them to “follow” me. So what?
I just looked it up: there about 40 BILLION photographs on Instagram and 95 MILLION go
up each day. The probability of anybody
who isn’t already familiar with my work finding it amidst that tsunami of
images is vanishingly close to 0.00000. If
I went full court press and did all the right things with marketing tricks to
bring my work up out of the noise level maybe I could get the probability up to
1% (but I doubt it).
This leads to an interesting question. How does an aspiring photographer “get the
work out there”? The signal-to-noise
ratio of the image sharing sites is so low that’s no it. Neither are the portfolio reviews that (see a
previous rant) are little of anything more than a cash cow for the sponsor. “The media” is depending more and more on underpaid gig
photographers or volunteer PWC (persons with cell phone).
You don’t get your work in a gallery without a reputation and you don’t
get a reputation without gallery representation.
It is no shock that in an annual survey of professions “photographer”
was rated as one of the worst —
both in getting into it and in making something vaguely resembling a living out
of it.
There are other benefits to Instagram, as a community of visual artists. I have been surprised by the reach, often thru hashtags. It's a pleasant place to browse, and to share my process as a visual diary.
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