Hey Diary,
It wasn’t so much the email barrage that I sent out that is keeping me from sleeping. I didn’t throw a thousand dollars of my family’s grocery money out in to a windstorm, flush it in to the ocean, or burn it in hellfire like I did when I sent out the post card. Neither created a single call. But it was the post card, (created by marketing experts by the way) and the shame I had to return to my family with when it failed that hurt so much.
And it’s that I don’t have any answers. I don’t know why it failed. I wake up at 3:48 am and stare at the blackness: maybe the post office lost it, maybe the printer never delivered it, maybe I had the wrong phone number, address and studio name on it. Maybe a reverse Santa snuck in to their houses and took the post cards and left a cookie and warm milk.
I can never know.
It’s too bad my timing is off right now. Maybe I can find a way to hang on for a year or so, but I don’t think I can absorb a mentoring session from the person someone recommended. Not after I saw her portfolio.
I just want to cry about what I saw there. It’s so sad. It’s so heartbreaking. It’s so gut wrenching to witness what is happening to photography: the lens choice that distorts bodies, the horrible lighting that can only be described as accidental when it looks like lighting at all, the total disregard for posing, composition, color.
The complete lack of taste.
The pillaging of the industry, the snapshotty abomination and arrogant disregard of all the hard work of those who have previously sustained this art form actually makes me physically ill. It rips at the core of all I hold sacred.
But you say she knows marketing? That’s too bad. Then the profession may indeed be doomed. To have the power to litter the world with this unmitigated garbage without the responsibility to the profession from which it is derived is a recipe for catastrophe.
There can only be hope if she and the millions like her who are diseased by their ignorance can be saved by an appreciation for what the craft could offer if they would only learn. Maybe that’s my job. God help me. God help us all.
If I have to abandon all I hold dear to my soul to continue in this profession by not condemning this atrocity then, at the risk of sounding arrogant myself, it’s photography’s loss, it’s society’s loss, it’s humanity’s loss.
Sincerely,
Todd Kunstman, M.CPP
KenMar Photography Inc
Amen to that!
I second that “amen.” A few years ago, a noise at my front door prompted me to investigate. I saw a young woman walking down my drive, heading to the street, and I assume, the neighbors homes.
She left a cute little hanger on my door, beribboned with a craft paper bow… On the front was a lovely image of pumpkin bread, and on the back was a recipe for said loaf. Oh, and her business info, almost as a byline. I wasn’t sure what the purpose of the hanger was… A few months later, I happened across the site of a guiding prominent photographer many young women follow… that mktg advice was the source of the cookie recipe. The distributor had no images on the hanger, no website, no email. Just a number, name, and type of photography.
tsk tsk
Money better spent tossed into the fire.