This is it. The culmination of full time traveling in order to photograph small towns for The Small Town Photo Project.
The Small Town Photo Project era is over, and it was quite a ride. Thank you to everyone who supported it!
This is it. The culmination of full time traveling in order to photograph small towns for The Small Town Photo Project.
The Small Town Photo Project era is over, and it was quite a ride. Thank you to everyone who supported it!
I work exclusively in dumb ideas. The most unhappy I have been in my half decade of working for myself was when I was just trying to build a photography business that was tried and true: wedding photography. There’s a pathway to be successful there, there are no surprises. If you’re good at customer service, half-decent with a camera, and patient, one can build a very successful wedding photography business. Hence why everyone who picks up a camera seems to make an attempt at that route.
I really like taking photos of people, so the work of the actual wedding day itself was actually pretty fun for me. All the stuff around a wedding photography business is what I didn’t like, and I just didn’t love weddings enough to be able to compete with the photographers that really really love it. But hey, if one of my chill friends has a chill wedding and they let me go buck wild on the photos, then heck yeah I’d do it. I just love photography, that’s why I got into this.
Anyway, wedding photography isn’t a dumb idea. Neither is real estate photography. If people don’t look at me weird with that “How does that work?” Look when I tell them what I’m working on, I kind of don’t want any part of it at this point.
I don’t want to make dumb stuff for the sake of just being dumb, but I think there’s a desperation deep down to make this whole thing work. I’m in too deep at this point, and my whole adult life has been dedicated to this thing that I have to make it worth it. For the longest time, I had this idea to find growing small towns across the United States, and over time, photograph them all and then sell prints and other types of print related products to them all. I was scared of this idea for a long time because it’s so big, but you know, COVID changed people.
I got into my 04 Toyota Tacoma and just started mapping out towns that I found on top ten small towns lists and through research and made a list. I went to Florida, tons of spots in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas in that “COVID time”. I would come back home and meet with other businesses and tell people about what I was doing, and most people thought it was cool, but totally ridiculous. “How do you get paid?” “How is this a business?” All that stuff.
And the truth is, at the time, I just needed to go to these places and start creating images there. I figured the business end would become apparent, but I was also trying to steep myself in the “small town” world as someone who went from growing up traveling all over the world to living in a small town in South Carolina. It allowed me to disappear for a while and figure myself out. Not only that, but I just didn’t want to become one of those photographers who has a practical photography business, yet has all these personal project ideas that pile up that “they’ll get to eventually”. Eventually never comes unless we just get to it now. I’d rather do all the crazy ideas now, while I’m younger anyway. So, I just planned to break even for a while in order to do this whole thing.
I pursued this Small Town list for 2 years, basically non-stop. When I came home I’d find ways to sell prints and make money just so I could afford the gas for the next one. (Also, shout out to my wife by the way who has supported me through all of this for some reason) In October 2021, I decided I was going to make a two week long run at Texas. I wanted to take photos in Fredericksburg, outside of Austin, and I mapped out a route where on the way I could hit Laurel, MS, Natchitoches, LA, Fairhope, AL, and revisit Wetumpka, AL on the way back (which were OGs of the original small town list).
A couple speeding tickets, some unfortunate gas station meals, and a tropical storm later, I did it.
Even made a vlog about it:
Anyway, sorry. Uh…so I did the Texas trip, and that was when the full dumbness of this Small Town Photo Project idea revealed itself to me. I was exhausted, spent a ton of money, and I decided that it was time to face the music. It was time to use what I had so far and actually make it a sustainable business. In between these trips I had done pop-up shops, sold prints to commercial spaces, and whatever else I could do, but there was no real organization because I was just working towards the next trip.
I spent 2022 growing the commercial print side of my business, taking photos, but being a little more disciplined about building the infrastructure around this project. And now it’s 2023, and I’m continuing putting together that machine in a more polished way, so I can get back to the Small Town list, just a little less poor and with a guaranteed place to put these images when I come home. When I started this whole thing, I had 10 images of Thomasville, GA, and now, I have hundreds (I’ll though I’m sure I’m near breaking 1000 by now) of images of numerous growing small towns in the US.
Super dumb. I look back at the past few years and I have no idea how I survived doing that. A dumb idea requires that we not analyze the dumbness too much. We just have to start, and then when we snap out of it, we then will look back in horror and wonder “What the absolute hell was I thinking? I have a child.” But, you know, now there’s a path.
I was exposed to the stupidity of this project in 2022, and for a while there, contemplated its end. But since then, I’ve met people with the skills and knowledge to help me make it more sustainable. And now, my plan is to get back to the original list after tightening up “the machine” behind it a bit. That way I’m not bankrupting myself in order to pursue this. Bankrupting yourself works fine in your 20s, but once you cross into your 30s it’s a little harder to justify.
Photography is Dead is also a pretty dumb idea. I’ve been writing blogs since 2009 on the various iterations of willmalone.com and my old blogspot, and this podcast is simply those but with me recording audio of them. The problem is that I have to wake up at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning to write these things to make sure I have enough for a twice a week release.
There aren’t enough dumb ideas in the photography world right now. We complain about the internet not being a friendly place for still images anymore, but I’m becoming increasingly convinced that maybe that the internet’s influence on photography has a fatal flaw: It makes everyone pressured to do what works rather than what doesn’t. Those vanity metrics are addicting, even for someone like me who doesn’t have much of a following. I know that certain types of photos will get more likes than others, so when it comes down to it, I find myself posting images I know will get clicks. It’s a totally natural response that we don’t really realize is influencing us. Of course we want to post something that will catch more eyeballs, it’s logic!
Not only that, but we see a bunch of images from people that get a ton of likes, so we want to just copy or emulate what they are doing in some way. Look at wedding photography as an example: Every wedding photo I see is orange. Everyone has orange skin and there’s no green in the grass. They all look the exact same. I remember when the big Eclipse happened in 2017, I worked at the print shop then, and every photographer for the next two years got their eclipse photos printed. It was the same eclipse! Everyone was just printing the exact same photo over and over! I feel the same way about photos of the moon, and honestly, astrophotography in general. It looks cool in a social media feed, and one feels a sense of technical accomplishment in making them, but it’s like taking a photo of Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building. It’s just noise at this point.
My life now is a result of pursuing dumb ideas from age 17 to age 30. I’m compelled to do so. That’s left me without much money, but I worry that as I get older my practicality will get the better of me and my ideas are becoming less dumb as time goes on. In my early 20s, it was dumb idea after dumb idea, and I see the rate of those ideas slowing, and sensible, reasonable ideas taking their place. There’s a balance that I obviously need to strike, but if I lean too much towards sensible, this whole thing will crumble.
We need to make dumb things. The pressure to look smart and good at what we do leads us to make boring things. This life is the only one we’ve got, so if we spend it shooting orange wedding photos, can we honestly say that’s a life well spent? I’m just kidding. But man, I’m really sick of all these orange wedding photos.
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.
There’s a ton of opportunity in the photography world right now. We’ve accepted this narrative that photography is in some sort of decline, like the ability to dedicate your life to photography is getting harder and harder and harder.
But it’s simply not true.
Maybe it’s gotten annoying by now, but I keep talking about the need for “story” in our images. I wanted to expand on that idea, because, it can be hard to figure out how to apply it. Sometimes we’re too busy searching that we miss what’s happening right in front of us. First, it starts with asking yourself what you want. If being a photographer or artist is what you want, go a step further. Why? What do you have to say? Where is your camera pointed all the time? Who are you?
Next, you’ll have to keep asking yourself these questions over a long period of time. I’m writing this at the end of 2022, and I have a clearer idea about things than I did in the beginning of this year. At the beginning of 2022, I had a clearer idea about what I wanted and who I was than I did in the beginning of 2021. And so on and so forth.
It’s funny, looking back, I always think, “Man, I was so dumb back then. How could I not see it?” But we do the best we have with the tools we have at the time. As long as we are asking these questions, I think we’ll mostly stay on track.
I’ve talked to a lot of photographers over the years. A lot of the talk is usually in the negative, photographers love fixating on the things they don’t have anymore, and their perceived negative changes to the industry. Being a photographer is hard, and if you talk to other photographers a lot it can be tough to not internalize that a bit. I’ll be honest, I haven’t been super involved in the photographer community over the years due to trying to stay away from that stuff. Are they all wrong? Not completely, I understand why many photographers have a doom and gloom view of the industry. But I think many photographers struggle to delineate from how they feel about “the industry” and how they feel about themselves. Misery loves company, and the photography world tends to welcome misery with open arms.
But, photography is a communication tool. We forget that. It’s a method of recording and communicating an image, and it has its practical uses, as well as its artistic ones. When I take a picture of the front bumper of my truck after I hit a deer, I’m letting my insurance company know the extent of the damage. When I take a picture of an incredible sunset, I’m wanting others to come as close to the enjoyment of that moment as I was. In the same way, portraits are communicating perception the photographer or subject wants to have of themselves or a scene. That’s all we’re doing: Telling stories of a moment.
“Misery Loves Company” is the idea that someone is hurt or upset about something, and it spills out of them. They want to vent and involve others in their troubles in order to attempt to justify and ease their own pain. They want someone to commiserate with them, to tell them that they have a right to feel miserable about their situation. If photography is a communication tool, then photographers are ripe for both sides of this: Maybe you’re extremely happy and you want to share it with others, or maybe you’re totally miserable and want others to know. Either way, photographers carry a loaded gun with which to express those feelings.
We are all equipped with ability to tell a valuable story. We do it all the time whether we realize it or not, we just need to learn how to communicate it a way people can understand.
I started The Small Town Photo Project for myself, initially. I was taking a look at my life, a life of travel and going to cool places, and then I ended up living in small town America. Sure, I made choices that led me there, but I was trying to make sense of it all in my head. Some days I’d wake up kinda bummed about it, and other days I’d wake up really enjoying my surroundings. In my 20s, I really struggled with constantly looking at the exit rather than investing in what was right in front of me and learning to enjoy that. So, The Small Town Photo Project was my attempt to embrace my surroundings, and years later, I’m not sure I could leave my small town lifestyle. This one photo project helped me see a little clearer. It helped me realize that no matter where you live, if you invest in the community around you, everyone basically lives in a small town. Our goal as humans, in a weird way, is actually to live in a small town. We want support, safety, and community. The project is morphing into something else now, probably because I’m morphing along with it.
The camera doesn’t just help you communicate to others, it can also help you communicate to yourself.
One project, one goal. That’s where the story is told. Everything that comes out of that process are also part of the story. But in order to find something, you just have to start out by heading in a certain direction.
I get bogged down in focusing on too much. I really need only one or two tasks at a time, if I’m trying to do too much, I’ll end up doing nothing at all. Either that, or I’ll do a bunch of stuff badly. Focus on one main photo project has always been my hack for pushing forward in photography. I certainly really didn’t understand how to tell a story when I started, but now, I’m starting to understand. Now that The Small Town Photo Project is a few years in, people are beginning to tell my story back to me. People are beginning to pick up on things that I never really thought about, and that can only happen from sticking with it over time.
Creating all types of different images is fun. The world is a smorgasbord of opportunity and things to look at. I’ve said many, many times: You have to take a lot of pictures in order to find the pictures you actually want to take. But there comes a point where there needs to be some sort of through-line in your work, a “hobby horse”, a repetitive theme. I just saw the Knives Out sequel, Glass Onion, and it had nearly identical themes to the first film, but that didn’t make it less enjoyable. In fact, it helped me understand the writer/director Rian Johnson a bit more. There’s nothing wrong with repetition. There’s a spot on the way to Chattanooga from South Carolina that I have been photographing nearly every time I drive by for over 10 years now. The repetition actually probably gives it more value. If I felt like it was getting overly repetitive, then that means it was probably losing its meaning to me. If it has meaning to you, repetition is irrelevant. If there’s no common “repetitive” theme in your work, you probably need to keep creating a bunch of different stuff until you stumble upon what you’re looking for.
One project. That should be the goal. Maybe it’s short term, maybe it’s long term. A practical application of what I’m talking about when I talk about “story” would be to focus on the things you want to focus on. It’s all very philosophical, but before we sell prints or become artists or dedicate our lives to a medium of any kind, we have to dig deep and find those “themes” within us. Those things that fascinate us. The things that we can’t stop thinking about. The things that we can’t stop telling others about.
One project.
I think the secret dream of most photographers is to make a living by selling the work they enjoy making. And yet, we’ve gaslit ourselves into thinking it can’t be done. Seriously, it’s actually quite crazy how quickly we photographers can talk ourselves into Photography actually being dead, with no “long live photography” following it. As a group, photographers are pretty doom and gloom about the world of photography, and yet, we keep coming back for more.
But who doesn’t want the life of doing what you want and getting paid for it. Maybe I’m foolish enough to think that’s possible, and while I still have a long way to go, I see the proof that it can be attained every day. It just takes a lot of work on the front end.
And is that really a new thing? Sure there wasn’t as much competition in photography years and years ago, but to get someone to pay for your work has been a difficult endeavor since the dawn of time. Hence why a lot of artists get famous posthumously- it’s all about the right people seeing it and exposing it to other people, and Van Gogh didn’t have an Instagram or Tiktok to get his work out there. Let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment: things in this regard used to be way worse and more difficult. We all have a megaphone and a way to communicate on a larger scale than any other human in history, what we’re doing now, is basically just getting mad that everyone else has the same megaphone we do. We have more tools and opportunity than ever. And that’s just a fact.
The real grievance I think photographers have is that it just feels like an insurmountable task to compete in this game in the present day. There’s just so much. I think the difference in how I think about this is that sure, I believe there is a lot of photographers out there. No denying that. I just don’t think there’s a limit or point where we just can’t handle the critical mass. There’s plenty for everyone. Like I’ve said on this podcast before: many (if not most) photographers today are busy trying to offer value for themselves rather than truly offer value to others. When you think about it that way, it’s hard to see “over-saturation”. There’s a lot of value in the photography world on offer, but it needs to be offering a lot more.
What do I mean by that?
Go to any farmer’s market or art show. What do you see? Probably a photographer sitting on a stool in a 10x10 tent surrounded by large framed prints or aluminum or canvases, of their work. They are large to capture your attention at distance. Many people will walk over there out of curiosity, take some glances, see the obscene price tag and walk away. They extracted their value from these pieces already, without the need to buy them. They satisfied their “Wow, what’s that?” And moved on.
Now of course photography can have value past a passing glance. People do buy those big prints sometimes, but why? To fulfill a need. Photographers set up their booth at an art show and spend all that overhead on the hope that someone will be so blown away by their work that they will be overcome with emotion and like that Futurama meme start waving their wallets around saying “Take all my money!”
But that is an infinitesimally small subset of people. Those types of people are essentially…a white whale. Yet, photographers spend their weekends trying to capture those people, and when they never come, their faith in their art medium dwindles.
Not only that, but making images that are meant to overtake people’s rational thought is a tall order. Very few photographers have whatever voodoo it requires to make work like that. Peter Lik is an example of someone that can pull that off, but he spends a Scrooge McDuck vault of money on his galleries in major cities in order to present his photographs in an enticing way. He isn’t standing in a booth at the farmer’s market, desperately holding on to his inventory when a strong wind gust comes. He controls everything about the experience in order to reel people in.
But chances are, if you’re a photographer listening to this, you’re not Peter Lik. (And if you are Peter Lik, “Hope you’re enjoying the podcast”)
This is why we need to be providing value for real people in the real world.
Providing value to people in the real world isn’t as hard as you think. It’s hard to try to reel in random passersby that through a supernatural force is overcome by your glossy coated aluminum print of a mountain landscape. That’s why most photographers fail to sell their work- they are aiming too high. So, if you’re just starting out, and you haven’t found a market for your work yet, you need to sell your photography in disguise. Disguise your photography by attaching it to something that has been sold before. When you start off by selling expensive prints, you’re having to justify two things to a customer: 1. Of the limited wall space in your house, my image is special and amazing enough to be part of your collection. 2. You need to buy this expensive, luxury good because…you just do. It’ll make you feel good. I can’t really tell you why you need it, you just do.
And that’s a tough place to be.
If you put that image on a journal, stationery, postcard, or something else that people already know they need or have a use for, you only need to sell that. It makes the job a lot easier: All you have to do now is tell them why they need a postcard, and fortunately for us, postcards have been around a bit, so there’s already a why to that product.
The fact is, selling stationery and postcards isn’t sexy. But…people buy them. If photographers could get past this belief that they are Peter Lik despite selling prints in a tent on the street in Hendersonville, North Carolina, they could make some real sales.
The magical and cool thing about selling smaller products that already have utility is that your marketing is paying for itself. You’re selling a product that most people are willing to buy. A tourist walking around the Chattanooga farmers market has a long way to travel home, so they aren’t going to walk off with a 40x30, but they may walk off with a calendar. They’ll spend a year looking at that calendar, and after a few months, you may get a call. “Do you have a 36x24 on canvas of this aerial image? I think that print would be perfect for my man cave”.
So not only did you sell a product, but that product led to a bigger sale of the product you actually really want to sell. But they bought a 36x24 canvas on their own time and of their own volition. It was now their idea. And, even better: they didn’t have to carry it all over town awkwardly, sweating as they try to avoid damaging it after purchasing it at your booth on a main street somewhere.
Or maybe, they just like your stationery, and they just buy that. Stationery is literally meant to be mailed other people, so your photography can really get around that way. That’s what I mean when I say it’s a way to market while also making a profit.
So, you’re not Peter Lik. If you say this print of an abandoned gas station is only 1 out of 50, chances are, no one cares. Throughout this podcast I’ve talked about telling a story in order to give an image value. That’s true, but there’s a vagueness to that especially if you’re sitting there with 400 followers on instagram, trying to figure out how to start. So, start with making something useful with your photo attached to it. Maybe it’s not a calendar or stationery or postcards, maybe it’s something else an entirely. But at 400 followers, selling print editions of your work is a long road. You’ll get there, but start by wading into the water a bit. Make your job easier, and sell something that people already know they want. And once you start doing that, then people may start to decide they want to start spending money on your prints, all on their own.
I love art. I’ve lived in some facet of the art world for my entire career. Maybe I’m an artist, I don’t know. I know artists who would probably laugh at the idea of me considering myself as an artist. How about this: I like making things, and photography has always been the main medium by which I make things.
Throughout this podcast, which has become very enjoyable and therapeutic to me, I’ve had an extended dialogue about how to find “value” in a thing that the world wants to tell us is value-less. And my whole view around this has been made pretty clear at this point: the world is right. Nothing has value until it’s proven to have value. I think that’s general true for the world, but I of course am looking at this through the lens of American capitalism.
So while I’m using this podcast to hopefully help others find the value in their own work, I’m at the same time, having a dialogue with myself. I am constantly trying to make sure I’m honing in on where I have the most value in all these things I’m doing. We are often so close to the fire that we forget to look around and maybe observe ourselves from the outside. I have had many wake up calls during my career where I was providing value in ways I didn’t even notice, because I was too busy focusing on things that weren’t providing value to anyone but myself.
I come from the bland stew of intellectual thought that is modern day college. I can’t escape it, I was born and bred for the purpose of going to college, I then went to college, and now, I’ve unfortunately become self-aware like a T-1000 and I’m on the loose.
When you come from the bland stew of college, you’ll find yourself sitting around, neck-drained, as you make direct eye-contact with your naval as you ask very indulgent questions of “What is Art?” And “What’s the meaning behind this or that”, then suddenly you’ll be thrust into the world where no one cares and it doesn’t matter. All you know is you need to either figure out how to be an artist for a living OR get a job that allows you to be an artist in your free time. The world becomes a lot simpler really fast.
And don’t get me wrong, I love a good, long philosophical discussion about the nature of our reality. But such discussions come from privilege in one way or another. It’s why in every movie that portrays the mega-rich elite, you see them mingling and laughing with a gimlet in hand as they discuss the nature of these things as the common folk run around murdering each other on Purge night. A discussion like “What is Art?” Is a powerful tool for a writer to use to make their characters sound extremely pretentious.
Like I said, the world is pretty simple.
The world is WWE.
I’d like to say that’s an over-exaggeration but quite literally our culture has uplifted contributors to the actual WWE. I’ll let you do your own research on that one.
What I mean, is that if you want to become a famous artist and photographer, you kind of have to adopt some WWE strategies. You have to become a character that grips people and sticks in people’s brains. To do that requires a lot of exaggeration and gimmicks.
Many artists I’ve been around or went to college with would find this idea absolutely vulgar and grotesque. Do I think the “world being the WWE” is good for culture? No, probably not, but I do think it’s human nature to some extent. I think it just kind of is what it is at this point.
TikTok has really poured gasoline on this fire as it has created a meritocracy of creativity. I’m one of these knuckle-draggers that could stare at TikTok for absurd periods of time, and it’s very good at serving up interesting things. But it also allows users to scroll very quickly if they are not amused, so in order to stop me from skipping past your video, you have to try and grab me pretty fast. It’s why TikTok is such a trend machine: you have to keep it fresh constantly.
As a marketer, that’s totally exhausting. I can’t keep up with the creation needs of a viral TikTok. I just can’t. I’m not really wired to make quick clips around a single idea, it’s just not me. I’d rather write pages and pages of my thoughts and record them to a podcast.
Every single “character” who has millions of followers and is a major cultural force is fully a WWE character. A lot of the times they exaggerate on purpose to be more outrageous (hence the problem with our politics today. Or you know, the Kardashians) , or maybe they are just super interesting and unusual people via nature (I think Joe Rogan just is who he is). Either way, you’re remembering them. They all have a brand- you can close your eyes and imagine their essence.
I’m going to say outright that I don’t have what it takes to be that way at that level, not many people do.
I believe if a person is self-aware enough and knows their strengths, they can go as far as they want. How much of the WWE are you willing to tolerate?
I’m not even saying be loud and boisterous, I just mean, how much are you willing to lean on maybe an interesting thing you do- Brandon Stanton, started taking pictures of people in the streets of New York asked them about their story. He would post these pictures to Facebook with a blurb about each person. That became his thing. He’s The Humans Of New York guy now.
As much as we all hate being defined, we unfortunately need to be kind of definable.
In my town, I’m known as the Small Town Photo Guy. Not sure I’d hold up well against Hulk Hogan, but I have a characteristic that helps people more easily spread word of mouth.
Some people see that as a gimmick, and maybe it is. But “gimmick” is defined as “a trick or device intended to attract attention, publicity, or business.” In the age of TikTok, Youtube, and WWE political leaders, to me, that definition sounds a lot like the definition of “marketing”.
So what am I saying? You have to part with a piece of your soul to help the art you love be seen? No, I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that based on the reality of what you do or make, create goals in line with that. Is your art the type of thing that will attract millions, or maybe, 20,000 followers? How far do you want to go?
Then the question is, how far are you willing to go?
If you build it, they will come.
Not the case at all. In fact, no one is really browsing websites.
Our job is to get them to want to browse ours.
I used to work in a boutique print shop, so I used to talk to photographers on how to sell prints all the time. I worked with photographers who actually sold a decent amount, and those who just couldn’t get a single sale.
The ones who often wouldn’t get any sales would put the cart before the horse and start asking how they were going to deal with shipping all their orders out and packaging and all that stuff. They are worried about what to do with all their orders, when their chief worry should be the question “How am I going to get people to my website to even make orders?”
People are browsing social media, and even if they click a link to a website, they will spend all of .2 seconds on it before they move on. (I guess this is where I say Websites are dead. Long Live Websites)
That said, if people want something or interested in something, and you grab their attention in some way, that can change.
So, if you have a “portfolio style” website with a general selection of photography (portraits, product, events, landscapes) by trying to grab everyone, you grab no one.
Would you click on your own website if you were scrolling on social media? You know the truth deep in your gut.
What you need to do is focus on grabbing the attention of a particular type of person. Who’s your audience? Are your prints for young people, older people, men, women? Provide them value. What would that person want? What are they looking for?
The problem is often that we have an overinflated view of how valuable our images are, because we deeply care about them. But we can’t post a link to a print and expect all of our followers to have the depth of love for the image we have. We need to provide more value than simply saying “I made this. Please buy it.”
In my case, what do people who live in small towns want? They want to see their town in ways they’ve never seen before. I want them to pause and think “Woah, I’ve never seen Broad Street look so colorful and bright like that!”
Every story needs a surprise, as the storytelling guru Van Niestat explains in one of his videos. Our website is a story. So, what’s the surprise?
So other than a surprise like seeing a different view of Broad Street, what surprises do you have up your sleeve?
Here’s another question: Once they get to your site, what do you want them to do? Do you want them to purchase a print? Contact you for a shoot? Or just read your blog post? There needs to be a required action.
I don’t think “DM me for prints” is acceptable. The “DM me for prints” thing is a problem because you’re requiring them to do the work you didn’t feel like doing. If you want to sell prints, make it easy. Don’t add friction! I can tell you it’s a pain from a data entry standpoint to set up a print shop on your site, but you have more of a chance of making a sale if you take the time.
If you want to be contacted for client work, give them steps to follow. Sales-y-ier people than me call it a “funnel”. Get them to sign up for your newsletter, or just give them a step by step process of how to work with you. Make it easy to understand.
When I started The Small Town Photo Project, I made a big mistake with my website that ended up working to my detrimate: I made EVERYTHING available as a print.
What I learned is that people only ever were interested in the same 5 photos, and I kept burying them as I added more and more and more.
I transitioned to only highlighting 5 or so photos in each small town series, the best of the best. It’s still a lot but I reorganized and divided them up so choice wasn’t overwhelming.
It’s hard to do this with a print shop, but I fantasize about the “one page photographer website” Imagine you’re, say, a wedding photographer, and you, assassin-like get all the necessary information into one, single landing page. Simple. Simple. Simple.
Most websites feel like driving into a brick wall. Once someone clicks on your website, make it like sliding down a slide. Gravity should take them deeper and deeper into what you’re doing there.
The photographers who are effective at getting people to their website also have another thing going for them: social interaction.
You’ve heard of it: Networking, word of mouth, community. This probably the single most important thing for most people in going from 0 to actually building a photography business or website traffic. People buy from who they like and who they know. If you’re out there a lot, people can trust you, and eventually as you tell your story to more people, they want to come along for the ride. Simply throwing up a link and saying “Check out my Website” over and over is a waste of ones and zeroes.
Gary Vaynerchuk’s Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook strategy is the best way to make a system of accomplishing this: Give, Give, Give, then ask. Don’t just be the guy asking all the time.
Make free, valuable content, be a fixture of the community. If you get a reputation of authentic and genuine generosity and that you care, you’ll get it back from others.
So there’s my easy step by step strategy on how to drive traffic to a website? Simple, huh? All you have to do is figure out who you are and what you do, boil it down to something interesting, then build a website that makes it easy for people to digest and understand, and then go out, be patient and give people all the value you can muster.
Or, you can build a stale portfolio site with a bland about page that tells them nothing about you, and not get any traffic whatsoever.
It’s hard. All of it’s hard. I’m not going to lie and say that I’ve invested so much into photography that sometimes I feel like I painted myself into a corner. It’s not enough to take good pictures: present day requires that we be the whole package: Sales, Marketing, Artist, Entrepreneur, Dancing Monkey, all of it.
Because
Photography is dead.
Long Live Photography.
willmalone.com is 11 years old.
A website, for me, has served different purposes over the years. It started with a blog about photography and other things I love. Then it kind of became about movies for a while while I was in college. Then back to photography. When I would do 365 projects, it was primarily for that. Then it transformed into a portfolio site. Then a wedding photography site. And now, it’s largely dedicated to The Small Town Photo Project.
It’s my corner of the internet. Social media might change, but my website is still moldable and completely mine. It feels like a home base, a headquarters. Things may change out there, but I’ve always got a place to go.
Social media has replaced websites for many photographers out there, which I understand. Even Casey Niestat barely has a website, because everything you’d want to see from him is up on Youtube.
This podcast though, I feel is aimed to the more ground-level photographer. Maybe a big YouTuber can survive without a website, but I can’t.
There’s a lot of photographers, which means, there are a lot of unprofessional, professional photographers. How do you instantly rise above into another escelon of photographer? At the very least, have a website. Any business or brand you follow has one, so be like that. Be a real business or brand. I’d even say that you should drop the @gmail.com off your email and add your custom URL to your email. It just adds that little “chef’s kiss” of professionalism.
But what should your website do?
The theme of this podcast thus far is to cut through the noise in photography by honing in on who we are. A website is the easiest way to find out. It should embody you at the present moment.
Let’s start with the “About” page. The most underated part of a website, the part that so many kind of gloss over and phone in. This is the foundation of your website. Your mission statement. You should put almost more work into this part than the rest of your site. This is where you tell YOUR STORY.
I can’t even tell you how many photographer “about pages” I’ve read that say “I love photography because it’s capturing a moment in time” or something like that. That’s almost akin to saying “I press the button and the camera makes a noise that I like” or like if a pizza restaurant’s about page said “We have a passion for making dough into a circle and putting food on top of it”. It doesn’t tell anyone anything about yourself or what you’re about.
If you haven’t read the Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” you should. Or, you can really get the gist of it in a TED talk of his on Youtube about “Finding Your Why”.
Why are you a photographer really?
I know why it’s often so hard to answer: we don’t want to pigeon hole ourselves. We don’t want to put ourselves in a box and maybe lose out on opportunities.
Honestly though, being too general loses out on more opportunities. You want to stick in someone’s brain by being kind of odd, and maybe box yourself in a little bit.
Here’s my strategy on creating my about page. First, I describe myself and what I do in one sentence.
I’m a travel photographer who focuses on small towns.
The next thing you do for your about page is answer “why”?
Because I grew up traveling all over the world and all over bigger cities that have billions of photographers taking pictures of that city, and a small town like Thomasville or Anderson does not. My favorite pastime is to walk around taking photos and doing fun projects, thus I’m taking photos of small towns for The Small Town Photo Project.
Based on that prompt, here’s my resulting bio on my “About Page”:
“willmalone.com was created 11 years ago by (you guessed it) Will Malone, when he needed a place to put all his photo projects and creative exploits.
In order to excel at his craft, Will began doing daily photo challenges called 365 projects where he would shoot and post a photo every single day. There have been 7 or 8 of these, among them was a project where he made a vlog every day (which drove him a little crazy as you’d imagine) and one was where he shot a portrait every day. One of the most grueling projects (due to lack of sleep) was a 24 hour photo project where he had to shoot, edit, and post a photo every hour that encapsulated the last hour.
His current and biggest project? Now he’s driving around documenting and making fine art prints of small towns all around the country for The Small Town Photo Project.
Why?
After going to often-photographed cities like Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Brussels, and more, Will realized there’s still so much of life that doesn’t get photographed at all, and smaller cities that don’t have a photography culture providing images for that particular place. Now, Will sees it as his mission to focus on smaller towns and places not as often photographed in order to provide images and fine art prints for people who are passionate about their small corner of the earth.
Will currently resides and has a studio in the small town in SC in order to pursue his mission with his wife, daughter, and dachshund. Will also spends a lot of time being a total movie nerd.
You can order prints for your home or commercial space here on willmalone.com and have them sent directly to your door! Blah blah blah
I’ve actually updated my about page since writing this episode, you can read the new one on the site (link in show notes). Life has changed a little since I wrote this (don’t worry, I still have a dachshund) Your bio can change and doesn’t have to be set in stone, so “capture this moment in time” of WHO YOU ARE.
So here’s the assignment:
Write a short sentence boiling down what you do as a photographer. One that easily be thrown up on Instagram and where ever else when people ask what you do.
Then answer that sentence with “Why?” And based on that, the rest of your bio should follow.
Regardless of being useful for a website, it’s a valuable exercise.
Stay tuned for the next episode where I rant about how the movie Field of Dreams has ruined photographers lives everywhere.
I for one, welcome our AI overlords.
I’ve been reading a lot about AI in art and photography lately, which is a pretty interesting topic. A year ago, it wasn’t much of a conversation, mostly just on the fringes. Now, it’s everywhere.
Everyone seems pretty pissed about it. Well, maybe not “everyone” but there’s a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the issue.
One particular article I read was by an abstract artist who seemed very upset about Midjourney, in particular, saying the style of the Midjourney AI is creepy and lacking in “heart”.
Now, as a photographer, when I read about an artist who is upset that everyone can now paint, I lack a lot of sympathy. We’ve been dealing with the “ease” of taking photos for a decade (at least) now. Photographers are familiar with this feeling.
This was also a promise of the internet: a level playing field for all. And we love that idea, until we get leveled with it.
I sell prints to businesses for their office walls. Does a designer or office manager care much about “heart”? Maybe, maybe not.
Designers, I’d lean more toward “maybe not”. There’s a lot of considerations: color, shape, and how it fits in a space. I’m not sure designers often even care who the artist is, they are more concerned about how the piece works for them.
For the Small Town Photo Project, however, maybe “heart” is a factor. Well, I’d replace “heart” with “story”. I think what people like most (whether they realize it or not) is “story”. They want to be able to feel invested or connect with the art in some way.
Sometimes the artist is what people feel invested in: the photography YouTuber, Peter McKinnon made a whole video about The Bucket Shot (a shot he wanted of a lake in Canada during a certain time of year) and the journey to capture it. After many people asking in the comments for prints, he finally released them, and they sold out instantly. People went on the journey with him, and I’d argue that the fanfare around “The Bucket Shot” was less about the image and more about the story investment around the image.
Or
In my case, I’m highlighting landmarks and parts of towns that people are very invested in. It’s less about me, and more about me capturing something they love in a way they’ve never seen before. For instance, I recently hung a large metal tryptic of a low angle of the Thomasville, GA historic courthouse during an insane sunset, a photo that I’ve never seen be taken in Thomasville. I hung it in the lobby of a law office (hence the courthouse) as the main focal point of the lobby. The images in the lobby only made sense if they were Thomasville, they wouldn’t have picked out anything else from my selection of images. It was about Thomasville.
My courthouse shot is cool, and I’m very proud of it, however out of context on Unsplash or Pexels, it’s just a cool sunset photo that blends in with the rest of the cool sunset photos on the site. In the context of Thomasville and for the people of Thomasville, it rises to a different level.
AI art is still art, but without context. It doesn’t necessarily have that backdrop of “story”. Of course, until it does. It’s only a matter of time before artists take this “tool” (which is what I believe it is) and do things with it that imbue with with story and value. I saw some artist making weird AI birds and then painting over them and adding on to what the AI generated. We’re only at the ground floor of this medium.
And I believe it to be great for designers who largely buy art “out of context”. Many of them aren’t in the market for “heart” before AI art existed anyway.
My argument is, much like photography, artists, more than ever, need to imbue their art with value via telling a good story or helping spotlight someone else’s story. Like I said in the first episode of this podcast: That’s really hard. It takes a good hard look at oneself to pull that off.
The art industry is always changing. There will always be new snags and things that threaten the established order. A good story for someone to get invested into will never go out of style. The trick is to get really good at telling that story. The ones that tell a good story will inherit the earth.
The “how” of telling that story is a different question though. For travel photographers, you want to bring your audience along for the ride. It’s simple psychology: give people social currency that they can use to make themselves look more interesting and cool. Imagine you’re at someone’s house for dinner and you ask about someone’s print on their wall, and they answer: “Have you seen that video of that guy who travelled 5,000 miles just to get one photo? Check this video out!” Make it shareable, make people proud to show it off.
Personally, telling a good story is something I’m working to get better at. The topic of photographer websites are for a different episode, but the simple “portfolio” style photography website is basically just an expensive business card (and most business cards end up in the trash) We have to do more.
Taking a photo or creating the piece is only a small portion of the job. If all you want to do is enjoy taking the photos and making the artwork, then be honest with yourself and just do that. If you want to be an artist or photographer as a career, it doesn’t matter that someone out there is making photos or painting with AI. It doesn’t matter that someone took the same photo of a mountain that you did. The question you need to answer, is “Why is mine valuable?”