A couple weeks ago I announced my entry into the Baker Artist Awards. Since then I have been mystified and impressed by the nomination and voting process. More than any other juried competition I've seen, the Baker Awards are public, interactive, and multi-faceted.
For starters, most competitions are very anonymous: you send in your work, hoping it fits with what the jurors are looking for, and find out later what other pieces entered the fray with you. The Bakers are very public from beginning to end. At any given time, I can go online and interact with the competition.
In fact, this sort of interaction feeds the process. Sure, the big prize comes from the jury, but the pool of images they consider comes from the top vote-getters. The Baltimore's Choice Award is chosen entirely by voters. As stated on the Baker site, "the process is designed to open the nominations to the broadest possible community participation using the Web."
Interestingly, the site does not reveal how many votes you have gotten. It also doesn't give any hints on the “hidden goals” set by the foundation: benchmark achievements such as viewing ten nominations or promoting your own nomination that give you more voting power on the site.
Overall, I hope this model serves as an inspiration to other art competitions nationwide. Our generation is all about accessibility via the Internet, and it's encouraging to see this sensibility making its way into the competitive art world. Curated exhibitions within the site will add another layer of fun as local cultural figures choose their favorite art works from the nomination pool.
Whether or not they give me any money, recognition, or added traffic to my site, the Baker Awards are fun. How many competitions have I entered where I could say that?
- Does a new hybrid camcorder/DSLR signal a shift in the digital media world?
- An engineering professor at Penn State University has used lots of photo trickery to capture usually-invisible air currents. The practical application? Studying air movement in human coughs to understand more fully how diseases spread.
- More abandoned stuff caught my eye this week. This time it's amusement parks.
- The Internet's role in this presidential election was unprecedented, and the more I read about it, the more it astounds me. Did you know a search for "Obama victory" now yields over 12,000 results on Flickr?
Today the deadline passed for the Towson ARTS Collective “Travel Exhibit: Where have you been?” Within the week I have nominated myself for the Baker Artist Awards and submitted more creative non-fiction to the Urbanite. I marked the travel exhibit deadline on my calendar and set a pop-up window to remind me two weeks in advance. I narrowed down my travel photographs to four favorites.
On Thursday, with application in hand, I decided not to send my work in. Suddenly the idea planted itself in my mind that these were just travel snapshots, and it was just coincidence that they had been taken by a photographer with a nice camera. Sure, they looked great, but that didn't make them gallery-worthy. And could I write a convincing artist statement to accompany them?
At the time, my decision seemed informed and practical. After all, if I send my work for an exhibition in the future, did I want to be remembered as that woman who sent in her honeymoon snapshots for the travel exhibit? It was only prudent to hold work that wasn't intellectually up to par.
I could have predicted the regret I'm feeling now. How often I forget, I usually have nothing to lose by applying to something. My travel pictures may or may not be worthy of hanging in a gallery, but how will I know if I don't offer them up for consideration? There's no use mourning an opportunity come and gone, really, but I do need to remember this experience for next time.
Sometimes it just gets difficult to keep marketing my work and putting it out there because it demands a certain level of egotism, self-assuredness, and determination that these images warrant the world's attention. I heard it on my first day of Introduction to Photography back in the day, and it's true: everyone wants to be a photographer, and sometimes it seems like anyone's success is more or less by chance.
I think it's important to touch on these feelings from time to time, however briefly. I'm not at a point in my life where I experience a whole lot of self-doubt, but it happens to all creative people from time to time. We need to acknowledge it and move on, knowing not every submission can be perfect but at least we're getting feedback and getting our name heard. Art isn't a perfect display, it's communication. It's taking an image and preserving it just as you saw it, making it special. And there's certainly no reason to hide your work because you don't think it's “good” enough.
- Found a new addition to my RSS reader this week: Web Urbanist. It may end up being too trendy and hip for me, but for now I'm thoroughly enjoying both the subject matter and the writing style.
- Incidentally, Web Urbanist recently put up some classic, texture rich color photos of abandoned hotels, churches, and hospitals. Who isn't a sucker for photographs like these? They reminded me of a photo book I absolutely fell in love with sometime in spring 2007: Stephen Wilkes' Ellis Island: Ghosts of Freedom. I just wish I had the extra cash to buy this book instead of just looking at the whole thing over the course of an hour in the Barnes & Noble.
- 1000 Words Photography just featured some interesting work by Pawel Jaszczuk. I thought it was some sort of commentary on the the quasi-homeless drunks that inhabit our subways. Then I thought to myself, "that guy is wearing a pretty nice suit," and read the description. Salaryman is actually about white-collar Japanese workers, among whom heavy drinking is "naturally accepted" as a "compulsory catharsis" to escape from their high-stress jobs. Apparently these scenes are more the rule than the exception.
- Maxim photo editor Kelly Stuart was riding the NYC subway at around 12:30 a.m. on election night when a group of people unfurled a giant American flag in the subway car and everyone started singing the national anthem. How often do you see that kind of patriotism while using public transportation? I don't care who you voted for, that's really nice.
Check out my nomination page, vote, and (if you live in the Baltimore metro area) perhaps even enter your own work in the running!
As the initial momentum settles from my current work around home and the domestic, I have a little breathing room to flip through the pages of my journal and analyze the kernels of ideas written there. Now is a good time to take inventory and gather ideas on how I actually intended to present these images.
From the beginning, I wanted to make these pictures as much about words as pretty photos. So far, the following ideas look good to me:
Combining journal writings with images in a diptych fashion, using high-quality scans of handwritten work.
Somehow creating a zine to accompany the photos, an interesting revival of an art form from my teenage years. I am yet undecided whether this would be available as a take-home, by mail, or some other way, but the zine would follow viewers home and become part of their domestic landscape.
Creating postcards from the images and asking people to mail them to me with on-topic musings. I'd like to see the postcards strung up or otherwise inviting interaction from readers/viewers. This is maybe the toughest idea to connect to the base “meaning” of the work.
Regardless of viewer interaction, these images demand a clean, simple, aesthetically pleasing presentation. Unlike any of my past work, I am celebrating (elevating?) the everyday, taking the small details and making them sacred. At face value a clean, traditional presentation implies images of a very photo-worthy subject.
How photo-worthy is my bedroom lamp? Dust clinging to the edge of an old box? Who would put these things in a gallery? At the root, I think this question connects back to the idea of incorporating journaling or postcard musings. What do these pictures show us? Do they reveal different meanings to different viewers based on context? Why are we looking at these images in the first place?
Ah, now that I'm asking these questions I feel like I'm back in art school again.
- I've thoroughly enjoyed reading seminar notes from the PDN Photo Plus Expo on the PDNPulse Blog. Of special interest to me were Website Dos and Don'ts and Boosting Your Site's Search Engine Rankings. Definitely some good technical stuff in there for me to try out this weekend.
- I'm sick and tired of talking, hearing, and seeing electoral politics. November 4th, you can't come too soon! However, I was really impressed by photojournalist Callie Shell's images of Barack Obama on the campaign trail -- then and now.
- My husband -- a software engineer by trade -- has been looking at many, many strange visualizations online this week. Tonight he sent me Shape of Song, visualizations of popular songs by computer scientist and new media artist Martin Wattenberg. Here is Mozart's Jupiter Symphony:
All rights reserved by copyright owner.
My eye caught on a specific pile of dust on the floor. Through some bizarre pattern of foot traffic or air currents the threshold to the upstairs bathroom serves as a catch-all for lint, dust, and tumbleweeds of cat hair. I ran for my camera.
With my belly on the oak floorboards I spun the aperture dial to let in plenty of light, narrowing depth of field and intensifying the pure, white sunlight making fuzzy highlights on every stray hair.
Of course for a time I troubled my mind over the validity of photographing the intimate details of my house. I expected most photographers proved their worth by way of innovative subjects, new places to shoot, seeking and finding. In the end I couldn't deny my captivation with domesticity. I stole many sunny mornings before work to document the quality of light across the floorboards, the particular arrangement of a stack of library books on the table, crumbs, a dish out of place, a warm halo around my bedroom lamp exposing a deep, blood-red wall.
As I fumbled around on the floor to frame my shot I was briefly concerned about getting my sweater dirty. Had this much dust really accumulated in a week? With each smooth motion of the shutter I reinvented my space. I saw my home anew. At once I wove an elaborate story and documented my surroundings simple as they were.
I continued on my way eventually, replaced the lens cap and vanished into another household project. Those images I created stayed frozen in the camera, waiting to be pulled out and pressed and polished, made into something altogether unique and not at all the mundane bits of dust settled on the floor.
- A coworker recently signed up for Google Reader and what came with the default "photography" folder but A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania. I wondered why the next township over from where I grew up in Bucks County warranted such attention, but I learned as soon as I visited the site. These are stereotypically beautiful images capturing the quintessential vision of America. Right now the current picture is Silver Maple Leaves Falling into the Delaware River at Dawn, and it makes me a bit homesick.
- A friend of mine works as a runner for the Dr. Phil spinoff The Doctors, which makes for an interesting iPhone-powered Posterous photoblog. When he posted "Me and a pile of lard" it gave me pause, but imagine my surprise when I see the next post is "I am driving human fat around Beverly Hills." Now I'm wondering, what kinds of weird jobs do people get themselves into when they move to LA?
- A blip on the PDN Pulse blog (brought to you by the editors of Photo District News) that I'll be sure to mark with a star and save for later: making a good impression when you're marketing your work to gallery owners, photo editors, etc. The article really stresses being able to speak articulately about your work: know what it is you are doing and have good words to express that to the folks you want to impress. Duly noted. I'm glad I carry around a notebook so I can jot down any thoughts I have about my work during the day. There are some good "business of art" pearls of wisdom in there.
- Ordered my Moo MiniCards this week (see previous entry) and had a lot of fun cropping my images into tiny rectangles. Hopefully they turn out as unique and beautiful as the free samples I got in the mail on Monday.
Today I prepared a little something about thinking and writing about my work on a regular basis, and how that process is essential to having materials at ready for exhibition opportunities. Then I came home from work and discovered my free mini-card samples in the mailbox.
I recently took advantage of the 10 free cards Moo offers to new Flickr Pro users. Moo interfaces with your Flickr account, making it super easy to order business cards, mini cards (half-size, trendy business cards), stickers, postcards, and more.
Tempted though I was to order a full 100 cards right away, I wanted to take advantage of the free sample offer in case I got them and they were low-res, flimsy, or had some other shortcoming I'd regret spending $20 to discover.
What arrived in the mail today proved to me the massive value in giving away free samples. Just like the man at the farmer's market who enticed me into his tent with spicy ginger tea, these cards gave me a little taste and left me feeling like I could not go another day without buying more. They are printed on sturdy card stock with a depth and quality of color that really does the images justice. The proportions are a little odd, so giving someone a card is like giving them a little free sample of your work – hopefully they are intrigued enough to want more.
The back of the card is a blank slate, completely flexible. In addition to my vital contact information, I chose a Creative Commons license and the exposure time of the photo shown on the front of the card (automatically pulled from the image data on Flickr with no added effort anywhere on my part).
I will definitely be ordering a set of 100 of these cards this week. Self-promotion is so important, and at this level it needs to be done in a way that I find fun and comfortable. My husband remarked that these cards are “too pretty to give away.” Hopefully they make that much of an impression on everyone, because I've been searching for the business cards that are “just right” for my personal taste and style and these just may be it.
Recent Images
Domesticity
Reclamation
Night