A little over a week ago I came across Liz Kuball’s web site and blog (she is this week’s featured photographer at 52Photographers.com). She puts out some lovely work, and has some interesting thoughts on photography.
On 1 August, she opened up a print sale, only to close it on 12 August, after poor reception/sales. She says this about the experience:
The one encouraging aspect of all this is that, despite the mild embarrassment at having so misjudged things, my reaction hasn’t been at all what I would’ve thought it would be. If you’d told me that I would go live with a print sale and sell only a handful of prints in over a week, I would’ve guessed I’d be really bothered by it in some kind of deeply personal way. Instead, I’m wondering what the hell’s wrong with everyone. I love this photograph, and I know I’m biased but I don’t love everything that comes out of my camera. The fact that I’ve been rejected and come out with my confidence stronger than ever makes me feel like I have some hope of actually lasting in this crazy art world. Now I just need to get off the ground.
I’ve been giving experiences like this a lot of thought lately. I regularly post photos to flickr, and groups on flickr, such as critique groups. Sometimes photos that I absolutely love get very little views/comments, while photographs that I think are just “okay” sometimes get a lot of views. Some groups moderate which photographs get included in the groups photo pool, and one in particular has yet to accept one of my photographs. Every time one of my images is not accepted, I feel very much the same consternation that Liz feels about her failed print sale. “They’re great photographs? What’s wrong with you?”
I even experienced this a little in the few shows I’ve hung, such as my B.F.A. show. Sometimes some people paused longer at certain photographs that weren’t particularly my favorites.
As Fine Art photographers—rather, all Fine Artists in general—we are constantly putting ourselves out on a limb, taking risks by showing work that we worked long and hard at creating, putting into the work our proverbial (sometimes quite literally) “blood, sweat and tears”. We take that work and show it on our websites, blogs, photo sharing web sites, galleries, coffee shops, where ever we can, and sometimes the work, either the whole body of work or just one or two images in a body of work, isn’t well received. Or as highly as we would hope.
At that point all we can do is chock it up to experience, realize that we’re not always going to produce exquisite artwork. Edward Weston went through twenty-nine peppers before he produced Pepper No. 30.