2 Years of Photographing Small Towns FULL TIME
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!
Outsider
Growing up as a military kid, I had the uncommon experience of getting to stay in one place for my entire teenage years. I say I grew up in Hawaii because, age 10 to 18 was spent there. Those are the years of our childhood that I think are the most important to forming who we become.
That said, my first 10 years on this earth were spent moving from place to place, and despite staying in Hawaii for 8 years, we always had this sense that it could change at any moment. While we were there, it was never a guarantee that we could stay, it just worked out that way. Every two years we braced ourselves for a possible change.
That feeling keeps you from getting too comfortable in a place. We had a decent community, but still, it’s always hard to invest when you know you’ll have to leave the community you get deep into. This is, of course, the period of time when I picked up a camera.
Despite me going off and becoming an adult on my own life schedule, I still felt like there was an impending change that would blow me somewhere else. The government was responsible for that in my childhood, now as an adult, I’m not really sure what it was. Maybe it was my insecurity in who I was and what I wanted to do. This feeling kept me from getting too too deep into a community in Chattanooga, despite living there for 8 years.
I finally relaxed a bit when moving to a small town in South Carolina. If I was going to move from Chattanooga, I wanted to finally build a home base. I wanted to know what that was like. I was an outsider that desperately wanted to finally become an insider. And photography would help me with that.
I’m in year 5, and I feel like I’ve started to be part of the community where I live. The Small Town Photo Project has been helpful because I feel like I can provide some value despite me coming from elsewhere.
Fitting in is overrated. When I first moved to South Carolina, a friend brought me to a barn in the middle of nowhere where a “chicken auction” was taking place. I had always bought chicken from a grocery store at a set price, so I didn’t get why on earth anyone would take time on a Tuesday night to try to get a better deal.
That’s not what a chicken auction is, it’s where people who raise chickens on their land get chickens…among other things. I walked into this barn, past the snack bar where you could get a T-Bone steak to eat in the movie theater style seating as you watched others bid or waited to bid yourself. We sat in our seats (I skipped the T—bone this time around) as the auctioneer rapidly began auctioning off whatever he pulled out of a crate he was handed. He was surrounded by crates, and I remember thinking that this was about to be a long night based on the piles of rattling crates he was surrounded by. Once I got settled in, however, I could have been there all night long.
An assistant would hand the auctioneer a random crate and he would blindly stick his hand in. Amongst the creatures he pulled out were rabbits, ducks, geese, and of course chickens. Apparently, it’s a common hustle for teenagers to catch geese and ducks from ponds in the area and try to make money auctioning them off. There were also some pretty aggressive roosters that got many eager bids, and I’m not going to speculate on why that is.
But I will tell you, I never felt like more of an outsider in my life.
Being a “fish out of water” is a super common experience for me. I stand in the aquarium of life looking through the glass at all the fish that “belong”.
What I’ve learned, however, is that no one really feels like they belong. The distinction is more between blending in and not blending in. Once I learned that, I kind of quit caring quite as much. Not blending in is actually a huge benefit.
Photographers are all outsiders in some way. We are looking at life at a distance, rather than being part of it. Maybe it’s healthy, maybe not, but it’s hard to be a good photographer if you’re part of the crowd as well. Photography is people-watching at the airport. Photographers live on the outside of life. We are students of life, but much like perma-academics, we are cursed to never actually live.
Now that I’ve started a family, I’ve really had to start learning how to be in the mix of things. I can take pictures of my family and document, but they are fully aware of when I’m not actually there.
In 2023, my goal has been to get better at the sales aspect of my business of hanging my artwork in commercial spaces. As this business grows, I’ve asked myself, why aren’t more photographers doing the same thing I am? My conclusion has just been that most photographers absolutely suck at sales and marketing, because if I can do it, a monkey can. But instead of just ending my thoughts at “photographers sucking”, I’m wondering if there’s a connection between the voyerism of photography and the difficulty to build business relationships. We are safe behind the camera, no one can hurt us there. When I walk around taking pictures of architecture in a small town while listening to a podcast or music, it feels like a warm blanket.
The type of person that is really good at photography I think feels more comfortable behind the camera than anywhere else, and the type of person who is really good at building relationships uses cameras as more of a tool in their toolbelt rather than a lifeline of some kind. That’s an oversimplification, but I’d say is half-baked theory. Maybe even three quarters baked.
I knew when starting the year, if I want to get better at sales, I’m going to have to take a bite out of my creative output. There’s just no way around it. Maybe that’s an admission of how deeply I believe this theory: I can’t do both at the same time. It’s the Ron Swanson idea of how to live: “Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.” I catch myself all the time in the “half-assing two things” camp.
This year has started with its foot on the floor. I’m pretty deep into the “life” end of things right now between home ownership problems to fix, business fires to put out, time management to master, and so on and so forth. And while I think everything is going in the right direction, it gets me yearning for when I get grab my camera and get on the outside again.
Working for Yourself
What does a bookstore cashier, a pool boy, and a barista have in common?
They are all jobs that I have had at one point. I’ve worked a bunch of other jobs too, but those are the ones I remember specifically having a struggle with. By struggle, I mean, down time.
I’m not good with down time. I have to be busy doing something pretty much all the time. Maybe that’s not a good trait, but it is what it is.
Jobs that had a lot of down time took a lot more work on my end to stay engaged. When I was a bookstore cashier specifically was when I started working on a daily photo project for the first time. Maybe it was rainy outside and no one was coming in the store so I had to pass time by alphabetizing books or something. That was precious time for me to be able to dream up what my “photo of the day” could be when I got off of work.
Photography has given me an amazing power: it has given me the ability to always have something to look forward to. That power is able to get me through a lot, whether it just be down time, or a dark time. Any time life has not been going super well is when I come up with my best ideas and take my best photos, because photography’s my escape.
I’ve been a photographer as day job for 4 years now. I’ve been a “full-time” photographer for 13 years. No matter if I’m working for the green mermaid, a college pool, or a bookstore, in my mind, I’ve always been working for myself.
Now that I’ve seen both sides of employment and self-employment, being your own boss at your job has its perks. But it’s not magical. It’s just a trade off. One one hand you get have a steady paycheck but you don’t run the show, and on the other hand, you run the show but have to figure out how to get a steady paycheck. You may not even get a paycheck for a long time, but hey, you’re in charge now.
The mindset of “working for oneself” is what’s actually important to have whether you are self-employed or just employed. I think both types of people should have this mindset. It makes you invincible to what others think, and it leads to you doing your best work. The only approval you should be searching for, is approval from yourself. Living to impress a boss, parent, mentor, or critic is a dead end road.
I didn’t learn this until I created Will Malone Photography, LLC and sat in a coffee shop realizing that the only person that could make this work was the guy who’s name was on the door. (The proverbial door, not the Starbucks I was probably sitting in). It’s actually a crazy feeling. You’re exposed. You are now forced to be honest with yourself about who you are and what you want. No job or boss or assignment to protect you. If starting a business means you get to claim success, it also means you have to claim your failures as well. Everything from here on out is your fault.
That brings me to my friend Robert Schoolfield, He’s an incredible artist in Chattanooga, TN. (I’ll add his website to the show notes) He’s the real deal. He has a day job, but anyone who meets him would define him as an artist. He’s not self-employed, but he’s one of those people who understands what I’m talking about when I say all this. Making art is his job, and his day job helps to fund that and make the art happen.
We actually went on a crazy road trip together a few years ago when he did a project called “Special Delivery”, where he left paintings in public places all over the United States. I followed him from Chattanooga, to Nashville, then to DC, then New York, then Chicago, and another one of his friends took over the photo-taking from there when I had to depart from the expedition.
When you are willing to travel like that, with all the expenses that comes with it and put yourself on the line for a few weeks for your art with no guarantee of results, it’s pretty obvious who you’re actually working for. Sure, when you’re an artist and you have to go to a job every day, it can be a real drag. You just want to make stuff and not have to deal with skinny vanilla latte moms all day. But what we often don’t realize, is that “down-time” or drudgery often makes the art-making sweeter.
In October 2020, my friend Woody and I decided to take a whirlwind photo trip to Florida. We decided to drive from South Carolina to the east coast of Florida just in time for sunrise. It was an 6 hour trek starting in the middle of the night, and it was pretty brutal. I had been self-employed for almost 2 years at this point. My goal was to add Florida images to The Small Town Photo Project, which justified my leaving my pregnant wife for a few days to wander around Florida.
To this day, I have not sold a single print from that trip.
What that trip did do, however, was remind me of “why” I was into photography in the first place. That trip changed me and my mindset about why I do what I do.
We pulled up to a place near Amelia Island, Florida right as the sun was starting to come up. It had been raining that morning, so we were getting nervous that maybe this whole drive would end in failure (that would happen to us a couple years later, but that’s for a different episode).
We headed to the entrance of this beach park and realized there’s a trail we had to follow to get to the beach itself, so we ran down this windy trail until one of the most amazing sunrises I’ve ever seen revealed itself. It had been raining, so not only were there dramatic clouds, but there was also a rainbow.
It was one of those driftwood beaches so it was like an all you can eat buffet of photo spots. It was almost too much to take in.
When I say that trip changed my mindset, I mean that it reminded me who I was really working for. At that time, I was floundering. I was getting photo gigs here and there, but because I didn’t really trust myself, I was desperate for someone else to tell me what I should be doing. I had been self-employed for almost two years, but it was at that moment that I truly started working for myself.
Did the trip financially make any sense? No. But I don’t have to justify it to my bookkeeper either. It gave me a goal. It corrected some aimlessness I had at the time. What I knew now was that I just had to figure out how to be able to do stuff like that Florida trip all the time. It also woke me up to the fact that I can do things my own way, and that’s okay.
Maybe that’s an odd thing to hear from someone who was already self-employed. But life is a process and a marathon.
When I was sitting in my 2002 Nissan Sentra aka The Car of Gold that Smelled of Old (I had bought it from a Bolivian cleaning lady who chain smoked. RIP. Not the Bolivian lady, the car. Well who knows, maybe the Bolivian lady too) I was sitting the car, in college talking to my dad on the phone in order to tell him that I decided I was going to major in art, I still think about what he said, “I’m good with that, just know, you may have to work at McDonalds while you figure out how to make that work.”
And he was right. Except McDonalds for me equaled a bunch of different odd jobs and then finally working for the most difficult boss I’ve ever had. His name is Will Malone, and man, he’s a real pain in the ass.
What are you about??
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.
Long Live Photography!
You can find Photography is Dead on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Spotify Today!
Fade In.
We enter with a photographer excitedly reading a DM he just received from Home Decor Monthly.
“Can we use your photo for our publication and website? We will give you credit.”
Wow, I’m being asked to be featured in a magazine! I’m going to be published! I’ll absolutely let them have this image.
Weeks pass. The publication comes out.
The photographer eagerly takes pictures of the publication in which they are featured “with credit” and shares this to his Instagram feed:
“It is an honor to be featured in Home Decor Monthly, thank you for choosing my image to be featured in your amazing magazine!”
Rewind a few weeks to the offices of Home Decor Monthly. Well, it’s not really an office. It’s more like…a Starbucks. Well technically, it’s a table at a Starbucks. Well, technically, it’s a designer who is sitting at a table at a Starbucks on their laptop in Adobe InDesign laying out the latest issue of Home Decor Monthly.
This designer is troubled. Stressed. She’s trying to grow her brand and make a publication that really stands above the rest, but she has to spend most of her time trying to find content to fill the pages of her publication. It’s got to look good so that it gets eyeballs, so that she can get more businesses to pay for advertising space.
She finds the perfect picture from a photographer on Instagram to fill an empty space on page 6, and contacts him. She can’t really afford to pay him, but fingers crossed, he’ll agree to let her use the photo for a shout out in the magazine.
He agrees, and sends her the high res image. “Yes!” She thinks. I can finally send this to the printer. “My first issue is done!”
Weeks pass. The publication comes out.
The designer is eagerly awaiting a response on her social media of the reactions to her brand new publication.
The photographer just started up his business, and his hoping that, “being a published photographer” can give him the exposure he needs to get some photography clients. According to his Instagram, he’s already hit the big time, he’s been featured in a magazine! Certainly, he’s got a leg up on his competition already.
This is 2022.
Publications are desperate for content and photographers are desperate for attention. If you are a photographer and haven’t been published, you could probably find someone to publish your work by the end of the day, whether it’s local, or even national. You could even enter a contest and win an award somewhere. You can become an award-winning, published photographer almost overnight with just a little digging.
My sister likes to write, and a few years ago she was hard up for cash and started writing for websites. She would get assigned writing articles on those websites that are designed to be clickbait to sell advertising, like “The 5 Signs You Might Have A Heart Attack Today”. And no, my sister is not a doctor. In fact, she has no medical experience of any kind. And yet, she was assigned to write articles like that so that these websites could cash in on the clicks of frightened hypochondriac internet-goers.
To her credit, she quit this job when she was asked to start publishing articles about her medical expertise, but it revealed something about what’s actually going on out here: none of this is real.
The internet has provided incredible opportunity to people like me, my name is Will Malone by the way. And I was able to build a photography career from basically nothing.
13 years ago, I bought a bunch of photography books after getting my first camera, and I was hooked. I spent the next decade journeying through the industry, trying to figure out where I fit.
I finally found a good spot in what I call the Small Town Photo Project, where I sell prints of my images of these growing small towns to people for their home or business. Now, I mostly focus on selling oversized, custom prints on aluminum or canvas to clinics, law offices, hotels, and more, but it took a long time to get there.
If I could do it, hundreds of thousands of other people can too. 263,609 people to be exact. (That’s according to the website IBIS World) That’s the number of photography businesses in the US.
There’s a desperation in the air. A desperation for free content. It doesn’t even have to be all that good.
There’s not just a desperation for content, but out of those 263,609 photography businesses, how many are desperate for their content to get seen? So desperate, in fact, that they’ll give away the store?
Credit and exposure isn’t money, but 2022 has convinced us that it is.
When something is given away for free it loses value. Photography, on its own, no longer has any value. Photography is dead.
I’m not sure we can turn back time on that. When you can get amazing, free images on Unsplash or Pexels, pretending is sort of impossible.
That is, until we, as individuals, find ways to imbue it with value. If you, as a photographer don’t know what makes your photography special, you either have to play pretend that photography on its own has value, or be totally ignorant that it has been lost.
It requires a hard look at ourselves, and needs to be more than simply the desire of wanting to be a photographer. We need to find out who we are as people and what we have to offer.
I respect hobbyist photographers who have no ambitions to do it for a living. They are living in paradise. A place of low-stakes and total enjoyment. It could be argued that photographers that have a day job make more meaningful work than someone like me. They don’t need it to provide like I do, so it doesn’t end up being as forced as my work sometimes feels.
They don’t have the desperation.
Much of the photography world lives in a fantasy land. Maybe it existed at one time, but it doesn’t anymore. And that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
The goal of this podcast is to, much like many photographer’s about pages, “capture this moment in time”. We are at a transition period in the photography world, and I can’t help but feel like we are at the end of an era. I want to talk about reality, what’s going on out there, and where we go from here as photographers of all kinds.
Because
Photography is dead.
Long Live Photography!