In this business the ground is moving all the time and perception is reality, regardless of the reality.
You can show 45 architectural photographs and two nudes and I promise you'll be labeled as a someone who shoots nudes.
You can show 100 color images, but 10 beautiful black and white portraits and your the black and white guy.
I'm not being negative because a few rare clients will get the fact that your versatile, but most will label you, usually where you don't want to be.
Now the strange thing is an AD can work on a beer campaign, coming from a soap campaign, working on a jeans campaign and nobody blinks.
Anyway my point is find your market, even if it's more than one genre and make sure the market is viable. You may need to build separate micro sites not to confuse your market, or just bomb them with a huge body of work, it really depends on the client.
There are no hard and fast rules, but most of the time you will not shoot what you love, you'll shoot what the client needs, though you better love it or it will show. I know, confusing.
Rob C is an exception. When fashion wasn't working he shot semi nude calendars and did them very well but he defined a market found a client(s). If you look at his work he really was shooting the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition before there was a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition.
He had success and it wasn't luck, it was work, but he had a market.
Define your market and always have a compelling story of why you should be chosen.
I could write a book on this, but it's not a good idea in an open public forum, though I wish you the best because your heart is in it.
IMO
BC
Markets: and that's where the difficulty always comes from in this business, and you had better always remember that that's what it finally is: business. If you can't get paid for what you do, you'll end up standing in line for relief.
As BC says, I started in fashion and did it for many years, from Scotland, and for much of that time I was a fairly lone fighter, the competition far more interested in shooting whisky bottles and beer cans, if only because that work was more plentiful, made money and fashion didn't turn many west-of-Scotlanders on. For me it was an interest, born of the 50s and made real for me as a gift of the 60s when the northern public consciousness opened up to what was happening down in London, and some local businesses began to thirst for some of the commercial action. And that's where I came in because I was already very interested in that kind of photograph - and girls. The biggest single break (fashion) for me came from a man flown in from Harrods to troubleshoot another of the House of Fraser department stores. I was introduced to him and took along my portfolio, to which he responded by telling me it was just as good as the stuff he'd been used to buying in London. A series of half-page newspaper ads for him followed and was sustained over time, and those, in turn, opened the doors to manufacturers and regular trips abroad doing collections for them, and also my first calendars, conceived as by-products from the same assignments. This Scottish-based activity opened the doors to the International Wool Secretariat (IWS) which, in turn, led to
Vogue, more international travel and so on.
And then, almost just as suddenly, everthing changed again and fashion work became as rare as hens' teeth, and I had to find something else I could do with whatever abilities I had developed; it wasn't photographer competiton ended fashion for me, it was the economy, and the surrendering of local clothing manufacture to the Far East, Israel or anywhere else than Scotland - read Britain. Which is where the calendars really came in to save my neck. Until they, too, became victims, this time of PC and even more turbulent financial times, with calendars the most easy things for a big company to do without. I still had stock, but then came digital and the rest, to almost every photographer making something out of stock at that period, is history that would have been far better not written.
The moral really, is that the goalposts are being moved all the time, and things that once gave one the sense of career hardly exist anymore, and that motion certainly does appear to be the final frontier, as it were, and is something that will probably always survive if only because it will have entertainment support systems for seeing it, and people will always crave visual escape from their reality well after print has vanished into Noah's new ark.
More than ever I think you have to find what you are good at, concentrate on it for all you are worth, but retain the ablity to move sideways just enough to guarantee the best chance of continuing to do something.
On the self-promotion aspect: I would use a website strictly as a portfolio for your
work desires/achievements, absolutely
not as I do, which is little more than a mix of past professional life and present entertainment, as well as a record (for myself) of what I'm doing these days, all in one convenient box that saves me having to hunt around in a variety of HDs. (Also, I live in the hope that it may prove to be more long-term secure than I expect my own digital security to be.) I don't think mixing so-called personal work with paid work in one site is a good idea: it can confuse would-be clients into thinking you don't share their interests closely enough.
Rob C
