Here’s a video where I tackle 3 different paths to start thinking about where your photography prints fit the best: Retail, Wholesale, or Commercial? Which lane works best for you?
This Game-Changing Texture Printing Tech Will Revolutionize Your Art & Photos
Check out Art Warehouse: https://www.artwarehouse.biz
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006 Bringing Art into Real Life with Mark and Mitch Lakey of Art Warehouse
I’m thankful to be close friends with the crew at Art Warehouse in Chattanooga, TN. If you know me personally, you’ve definitely heard me talk about them, because they mean so much to me. I’m excited to have brothers Mark and Mitch Lakey on the podcast today to talk about their business and the state of printing.
Not only that, but I filmed about video about their new product, 2.5D Printing, basically, they have the ability to print TEXTURE on photographs and artwork now. That video comes out TOMORROW on my Youtube Channel.
I’m really excited for you to hear this episode of the podcast. Mark and Mitch are truly the best at what they do, and I’ve been lucky enough to be part of the incredible business they’ve built for a big chunk of my 20s.
You can get Will of the Future on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and more.
What if social media went away?
Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 Billion. The once publicly traded company is now privately held. That’s pretty wild. Maybe buying a social network is the modern equivalent of a rich guy buying a newspaper. Well, maybe there is no real equivalent to it. There’s a lot of negative takes on this whole thing, and I swing back and forth. I keep ending at the point where I remember that the guy built rockets that can land, so he can clearly see things that others can’t. Maybe it’s hubris on his part, or maybe he’ll turn Twitter into something better than it’s ever been. Either way it’ll be super interesting to watch.
The problem to me, is that lately Twitter has just been a bunch of talk about…the state of Twitter. And sure, Twitter is the place where you talk about the stuff going on in the world, and currently, Twitter is one of those things. The tone of it is kind of bizarre: one night every started tweeting their good-byes to the platform, and were mourning the loss of their favorite platform. But Twitter wasn’t dying. Days later, it was the same as it always was. And sure, Elon is transforming it and there’s a lot of internal pain associated with that, but the masses jumping to the worst case scenario is weird.
Elon is personally on the hook for $44 Billion. He has to make it work. Twitter may change, but it’s not dying. Chill out.
All year long, there’s been a similar wailing and mourning of Instagram. The algorithm has gotten too hard to crack for some people, and so all year I’ve heard about the so-called death of Instagram.
And we talk about these platforms as if they are life or death. As if, if one of these platforms changed or died, we would die as a society.
I’m not going to deny that these platforms don’t have enormous impact. Of course they do, and I love using them to communicate ideas and share my work.
But, what if they did just go away?
I’d argue that social media is responsible for most people getting into photography now. If you take picture, you’re probably going to post it somewhere, and that may be the end of the line for that photo. If you go on a trip to take photos, you’re going to want to share details about your trip. If you start a photography podcast, you’re going to want to tell people about it. Social media and most artistic mediums are intertwined with social media in a really deep way now, and if we got into photography because of social media, it’s tough to de-couple the medium from the machine. In a weird way, the machine has become part of the medium.
What would I do if social media just went away? What would be my plan for getting my work out there?
Certainly, I’d have a lot of time freed up, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t need to make behind the scenes reels or TikToks anymore.
It would be harder to reach a mass audience, so I’d lean into more of what I’ve been focusing on: local.
If social media is gone, the rest of the world kind of doesn’t matter anymore, so it would be hard to overlook your own backyard. Maybe we enter local gallery shows, or do what I’ve been doing lately, which is “in-person networking”. Art shows and trade shows would really start booming again. There would be a lot less time spent in an office in front of a computer other than editing work, because I’d need to be out there a lot more.
But really, for The Small Town Photo Project and what I’ve been doing lately, local has been my focus, which has made me reflect on the time and effort we put it focusing on everything “out there” rather than what’s right in front of us.
I was recently interviewed on a local podcast called Electric City Buzz, and one of the hosts asked me about what I think about the need for art in a town or city. Basically, my belief is that you can’t have growth, without art. Your mind can’t latch on to a place that has no vibrancy or anything visual to remember about it. That’s why in the HGTV reality show Home Town, the first thing they do when they revitalize a place in Laurel, MS or Wetumpka, AL is create a mural. Art is culture and culture is art. Chattanooga, TN has tons and tons of photographers capturing images of the bridges, and if you’ve been to Chattanooga or even heard of it, you can probably picture it in your mind.
What I’ve found when trying to get The Small Town Photo Project out there is that people in small towns either need to know who you are or know someone that knows who you are in order to trust or feel safe taking part in what you’re doing. Whether you like that or not, that just is how it is. So social media only works after you make that initial in person or word of mouth impression.
But honestly, seeing a cool double-exposure or sunrise shot in a small town has been a big deal to a lot of people. Photography is supposedly over-saturated, and yet, when someone flies a drone in or around Thomasville, GA I start getting texts from people asking if I’m in town. A lot of people in this country and around of world don’t live in the social media world, and since all of our work has been formatted to share on Instagram and Twitter for the last decade, we are leaving a ton of opportunity on the table. Not all work is great for local. Some people need to leave a place or focus on a different audience, I get it, but if social media just disappeared one day, what would be your first move?
Almost more interesting is what would happen to hobbyists? There would be a lot fewer of them I expect, but there would be a hyper-focus on small there as well. Maybe a hobbyist just makes coffee table books for their own house to show to guests, maybe they enter gallery shows on the weekends. There would be a welcome simplification, and the work would become more tangible again.
And that’s something kind of interesting to me: photography would most likely have to be printed more. Photography on a screen would inherently become less satisfying because it would have nowhere to go but a folder and that’s it. If there’s nowhere digital to share it, then the only other option is to print it and bring it into the real world in some way. Expense and the fact that we have an outlet for sharing our work has been an excuse to not print our work quite often. Over the years, printing has kind of been forgotten in a weird way. It’s a total mystery to most photographers now, when decades ago, it was just another step in the process. If social media were gone, it would have to be integrated back into our photography knowledge again.
This is an interesting exercise to consider, and honestly, if you have a small social media following, you may be realizing you live this way already. Maybe you share stuff on social media and it doesn’t move the needle for you much, so social media is an after thought. Social media is a hugely important tool that I think is enormously beneficial, so don’t think I’m down on it at all. I just think that if we think and worry about the “machines” too much, we lose sight of everything we sought to use social media for in the first place.
If you find yourself tweeting about the state of Twitter, or posting on Instagram about how Instagram is dying, then maybe it’s time to sit down and reevaluate the way you’re using your time. Maybe you need to log off and walk around your town and experience real life for a bit, and then come back and use these mediums for expressing actual thoughts and ideas.