Just thinking about the role of photography in branding and marketing non-profits.

Promotional shot for a Zachary Scott Production of "Spelling Bee of......."


 I recently had reason to pause and reflect on my relationship with a non-profit theater that I do a lot of work with.  A fair amount of the work is done as a donation.  Every once in a while some staff member does something mindless and venal that really tweaks me and it set into motion a weird calculus wherein I sit back with the mental transactional calculator we wish we didn't have in our brains but all do, and I calculate the benefits and detractions of donating the work I do.

In the plus column are many things:  1.  The actors don't make a lot of money and put a tremendous amount of time, talent and heart into each performance of each play.  2.  I generally work without impediment or undue direction when I'm shooting a dress rehearsal or similar project.  When we work on a bigger project, like a season brochure, the collaboration is generally friendly and intelligent.  3.  The sets and stage lighting are very competent which gives all of my reportage style photos a big head start.  4.  We've won numerous ad industry awards and have been published in many theater publications.  5.  Everything I produce has a big credit line adjacent.  6.  In theory, I get all the comp tickets I would ever want for every show.  7.  Every year I have the option of getting the entire house for a private show.  I've generally chosen their superb holiday production of David Sedaris's, Santaland Diaries, and it's been fun to ring in the holidays with 150 of your best clients and dear friends with a first class, classic comedy. 8.  I get to try out the latest gear in highly complex situations without the fear that momentary failure will end my career.  That means I get to take more risks and really come to understand the capabilities of the equipment I'll be pressing into service for national advertising clients.

There is, of course, the benefit of hundreds of thousands of advertising impressions of some of my best work.  Delivered to the best household demographics in the best market in the entire southwestern United States, with my credit adjacent to every image..  And, 10.  I really, really enjoy the live theater ethos.

Occasionally I'll run afoul of a mal-adjusted designer or technical person and I'll get my feet stepped on.  In most cases it's because they are myopically focused on their section of the production and really don't get how the creation and maintenance of a visual brand make such a huge difference in motivating subscribers and individual ticket purchases, which are a large part of the funding for the theater.

I can only suppose that they think I'm being paid enormously well and they resent it.  The truth is much different.  And that's where the other side of the calculus comes in.

Most of the work I do is shooting dress rehearsals.  In these intensive shoots I'm always attempting to distill the play into fragments that tell the whole story.  Snippets that translate the emotional character of the work, and vignettes that give potential audiences a whiff of the sweet or tangy texture of the work.

This requires a heightened vigilance, very quick responses to changes in lighting and composition, the best gear, the best lenses, the best reflexive responses to the action in front of me.

I'm generally coming in to the theater after a full day of work with advertising clients; a demanding situation in itself.  I arrive around 7:30 pm to be ready for an 8 pm curtain call.  I'm carrying two Canon 5D Mk2's and an assortment of lenses.  There's a 24-105 glued to one body and a bunch of fast primes that leap on and off the second body.  I'll shoot between 10 and 16 gigabytes of imagery over a three or four hour time frame.  Sometimes technical issues will push the start times back to 9 or 9:30 pm and often we aren't out the door till long after midnight.  A tough schedule when you've been up since six a.m. and you've got a 7 am call at a location for an ad client the following morning.....

Occasionally, the marketing director will want to set up a shot and will request that I bring lights and softboxes.  I bring along a set of Elincrhom Rangers and heads for these times.  We'll shoot the entire dress rehearsal and then shoot what we call set up shots.

The drop of the other shoe is the scheduling.  Many times we're right up against the publication deadlines for the only local paper and the theater marketing staff will desperately need images the next day.  If we're already scheduled with clients on that day it means that we download, edit and burn to DVD anywhere from 800 to 1500 images and stick them on our studio door for an early pick up the next day.  By the time the photos are picked up we're off in another corner of town, making happy faces at corporate executives and their handlers.

This doesn't include the time spent on special shoots for season brochures and all the other attendant marketing projects that we get roped into.  And, as I've said, most of the work is donated.  Just as the time of the board of directors is donated.

I've been doing work for this client for nearly 18 years.  The board of directors loves our company and recommends us broadly in the community at large.  And that's nice but the flip side are the numbers that come when we add up the services we've provided.  If we charged our full rates for all of the projects we've delivered we will have created between $200,00 and $360,000 worth of intellectual property.  We are the visual brand, the institution's visual memory, and the day to day photographic content of all their advertising, marketing and public relations collateral.

Is it all worth it?  Is it worth my time?  It's hard to say.  At times, when the images look astounding and the accolades come rolling in, and you share in the spirited euphoria of the actors and creators the answer is a resounding "yes!"  When someone drops the ball on the comp tickets they promised your big client or when a tech person pushes you out of the way during a shoot in order to get bad snapshots for their personal portfolios you have to wonder just what the hell you're wasting your time for.

Like I said, it's a big and complicated calculus.  An intertwined and conflicting matrix.  But in the end the fact that I've been doing this work for nearly 18 years provides the real answer.  I love it and I'd be sad to abandon it.  I do it for the images and for the actors.  And the actors do it because they love their craft.  Nobody is getting rich here but in many ways the impact in the community is both contagious and worthwhile.  And isn't that what art is all about?  Doesn't real art explain what it is to be human?

What sweet power to be the visual translator of a rich, rich creative community......

(All the images in the above composite were shot with Olympus digital cameras and lenses...)

Nuts, Bolts, and Mindful Looking.

Copyright 2010, Kirk Tuck.  Primary Packaging, New York.


I'm going to try and make the argument that mindful looking trumps "skinning" a shot with technique.  First a few definitions.  Let's start with skinning.  It's from our friends that turn wire frame CAD constructions (drawings and renderings)  into what are commonly called CGI's or computer generated images.  Everything starts as a skeletal wire frame and once the shape and details are rendered the artist(s) apply the color, tone and texture; or the "skin" to the construction.  This is what makes it real.  Skinning also includes the application of shadows and highlights to the "skin" in order to complete the illusion of reality to the virtual object.

I'm using "skinning" in this instance to refer to the overlaying or application of a set of filters, actions or techniques to an existing photograph in an attempt to make it a personal expression or to add value or excitement to an image.  This could include:  hand coloring a traditional black and white print,  diffusing a print in traditional enlargement, using HDR techniques, the "David Hill Look", any one of a number of PhotoShop's native filters,  etc.

The idea of "mindful looking" comes from the practice of Zen Buddhists of being aware of one's consciousness and attention in the moment.  In a nutshell the idea is to look, without an agenda, at all the things that come enter your consciousness.  "Experience this moment" or be "present in this moment" are some ways people  talk about this philosophy.  In the practice of meditation ( and in certain realms of "Gestalt" psychology ) the idea is to sit quietly and examine thoughts that come to your attention without judgement.  And then to let those thought pass.

I'm stealing the philosophy and warping the meaning.  Not because of any dire intention but because I lack the talent and insight to really use it correctly.  What I mean by "mindful looking", in the context of photography, is the practice of approaching each subject without the conscious intention to change it's meaning by altering its perceptible structure.  Without altering it's integral and organic construction in an attempt  to make a new presentation or interpretation of the subject. Especially because the changes are done in the service of our egos.

The basis of Buddhist philosophy is the interconnectedness of all things.  In a way it's a repudiation of egoistical differentiation and an affirmation that we're all in this together.....along with the rocks, trees, stars and more.  From my photographic point of view each object has it's own objective appearance, although each of us probably experience it through our senses in very different ways.  We also filter our interaction or appraisal of objects through a filter of our experiences and our very DNA.

Because of our individual filtering, all of our seeing as photographers is flavored or filtered to some extent.  But here's the gist of my point:  If you have a technique or stylist post production tweak in mind as you go about your existence as a  photographer you will consciously and subconsciously begin to look for subjects that are most conducive to the style you have in mind.  You will begin to reject subjects or compositional constructions that don't fall into the set of parameters that constitute a glide toward the post production appliques.  When you hit this behavior you resist or reject different ways of seeing subjects, or seeing light on subjects, or even different angles of approach to your subjects.  In essence, you reject any potential image that doesn't hew to your protocol driven, post capture parameters of skinning.

I think this is fundamentally limiting for an artist and also establishes a feedback loop that replaces truly creative seeing with a "sub-routine" that adds a comforting reference while stripping the act of photography of its essential representational power.  The mastery of the "enhancing" technique delivers the comfort of skill mastery in general and gives the impression of artful expression while supplanting the individual creative vision (which is powered by the act of subject selection and timing or interaction with the subject at the time of acquisition ) with a culturally "accredited" sack of techniques akin to religious rites of passage to an elevated priesthood.

In the image above I've imprinted my creative point of view thru selection of actual point of view, selection of capture tools and the gesture and timing of the subject.  It could be argued that just in taking these steps, coupled with the selection of one frame from a group of many, that I've made as many subjective adaptations to the image as anyone else along the wide spectrum of the creative endeavors, but I would make the point that, had I a post processing application in mind I might not have been able to see the image I took here because my mind would have negated the relevance of this frame while searching for frames with more pliable characteristics.  In effect, the above sample probably a poor one since the argument can be made that just in knowing that all the images in this project would be rendered in black and white I have already subconsciously rejected shots that use color as their primary attraction.....

While I've argued that adding gratuitous technique to already well seen images is mostly aesthetically destructive, and that trying to save marginal images through "filter boost" is a waste of time, I'm not really making a judgement here.  What I'm trying to say is that the mindful seeing should always come first.  Any other way of looking at and filtering subjects is a drag on the primary creative process that takes place in the unfettered mind.

If you must aggrandize an image to meet your subjective vision, so be it, but I would argue that while looking for images it's best to leave the mental impedimentia of post processing routines at the door and enter the house of exploration, selection and interpretation in as streamlined a way as possible.  I find that when I go looking for art it is elusive.  It's elusive because, at a certain level,  I've pre-defined the search coordinates and constraints and I reject, subconsciously, anything that doesn't fit that claustrophobic matrix.  If I go out with an open mind and no roadmap of conquest I am much more likely to be the beneficiary of chance or the grace of my muse.

If I do my best to capture the object and find that it can subsequently be improved in post processing I won't hesitate.  But I would wonder about the disconnection from what I search out, and the gap between the right seeing and the final altered realization if I have to routinely subject my images to the (un)tender mercies of PhotoShop.

So, I'm probably just rambling after spending long hours photographing a three day conference.  In a nutshell I'm basically admitting the we all do some post processing from time to time in the service of our images but I think it would be a good idea to go into each session with an open mind and a mindful attention to the nature of the objects we photograph instead of pre-defining that which we'd like to see as the end result.  Wow.   That was a long way to go for one little thought.....but I guess not every blog can be perfect and so sometimes you get to suffer along with me as I do that human thought process thing for a thousand or so people to see.

I don't have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions. - Garry Winogrand