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Introduction
Although there are some photographers who are happy to hide their light under a bushel, most of us would like it if our work got plenty of exposure. In fact, we’d all like to be making boatloads of money selling our photographs, but most of us end up settling for just getting the work out there and seen by people. And, in the end, if you want to sell work, you first have to get people to look at it.
It seems to me there are four major ways to get more exposure for your work:
- hanging work in gallery shows (preferably solo shows)
- getting your work published in a magazine
- getting your work published in a book
- putting your work up on the WWW.
But some of those methods are hard to achieve, expensive, or both. Some of them generate a lot of exposure, and others generate very little. It’s worth considering the cost/benefit tradeoff of the various avenues so you can best decide which to pursue (or, if you prefer, which to pursue FIRST).
Gallery Shows
Getting gallery shows and gallery representation is a time-honored, traditional approach. You approach a gallery, portfolio in hand, and persuade them of the merit of your work. The gallery shows your work, entices people into buying it, and takes a cut of the proceeds. Costs of making the prints for the show are typically borne by the photographer. Depending on the gallery and how famous you are, the other costs of mounting the show (mounting, matting, framing, publicity, artist’s reception, etc.) might be borne by the photographer, by the gallery, or split. The gallery cut of the proceeds from sales varies (again by gallery and by how famous you are) but generally runs between 40% and 50%. This means that the cost will vary, ranging from a low of the cost of making the prints, to a high of making, mounting, framing the prints, paying for publicity, and paying for food and wine at the reception, and paying a cut of the sales. Depending on the prominence of the gallery, you’ll get varying levels of exposure, but if you figure the show runs for a month (typical) and that it’s visited by 100 people a day (which is probably high for the venues I have access to) then total exposure is along the lines of 3000 people viewing your work. The net result is that, as gratifying (and frustrating) as shows can be, they don’t actually generate much exposure for the money and time invested.
Gallery shows also have a crippling factor in terms of exposure. I mount about one show a year, in a local venue. For folks who live close to that venue, it's pretty easy to get out and see my work. For folks who live a couple hours drive away, it's quite a lot harder. For people further away than that, it's essentially impossible to see the show.
The big win for gallery shows, of course, is that the viewers are looking at actual prints. That might seem like small potatoes, but if you’re sensitive to the quality of the presentation, I assure you that there’s nothing to compare to getting actual prints, properly lighted and well presented on a wall, in front of some actual living, breathing humans.
Magazines
Getting your work published in a magazine is another traditional way to get exposure. It’s interesting to try to quantify how much exposure magazines get you. The magazines which publish the most portfolio work (like Lenswork, View Camera, Camera Arts, etc.) have circulations between 15,000 and 20,000. That means if you manage to get your portfolio published, somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 people will see your photographs. That’s a lot of people, but the downside is that you need to do the work to get your photography in front of the editors, and your work needs to stand out enough to get their attention, AND it needs to beat out the competition for the limited space in the magazine. It’s not impossible, but it’s not an easy task, either. Still, the good news is that in terms of financial outlay, it’s probably cheaper than mounting a solo show and absorbing all the costs yourself.
And, of course, it has the added benefit that unlike with a gallery show, the magazine continues to provide some residual exposure even after the magazine has published the next issue. People save magazines and look at them later; they give them to friends, and libaries subscribe; it perfectly possible that 15,000 copies of the magazine might add up, over time, to considerably more than 15,000 people viewing your work.
Unlike the geographic limits of a gallery show, magazines get fairly broad geographic distribution. Many of the magazines which publish portfolios are well distributed not only in North America but in Europe as well. It's not heavy exposure but it's some, at least.
Finally, the display quality in magazines varies from indifferent (for the narrower niche magazines and smaller distributions) to extremely high quality (for example, LensWork Magazine has outstandingly good reproductions, albeit fairly small.
Books
Publishing a book is the biggie in terms of establishing reputation. Again, the big hurdle is convincing someone to publish your book. You can self-publish, of course, and that path grows easier and easier with the advent of print-on-demand and easier access to short run publishing. Still, if you self publish, you’re left with the same problem – now, to sell your book, you need to generate exposure for the book. Ack! Back to square one!
Just how large are the costs? Michael Reichmann self published a book (see the details here), and his costs worked out to $15 a copy, for 1000 copies. Yes, he plowed $15,000 bucks into the book. He's selling the books at $30 a pop, and I expect that given the prominence of his web site (more on this anon) he'll succeed in selling out the entire run, so that he'll actually reap a profit on the exposure the books buy. That's pretty awesome.
The big hurdle with books, though, remains that you need to already have pretty good exposure (Reichmann used the great exposure of his web site) to move the books and get more exposure. Print on Demand publishers like lulu.com give you a way to get your book listed on Amazon.com and other big bookselling sites, but unless someone stumbles across your book, that won't generate exposure, it just provides a decent way for someone to actually purchase the book.
As far as quality goes, books pretty much span the range. Books via print on demand technologies like Lulu.com are, at best, not quite as good as the low end of the magazine quality. As the technology advances, the reproduction quality is improving as well. Books done by outfits like those used by Michael Reichmann can offer outstanding quality (but it comes at a price).
The World Wide Web
And finally, there’s putting up a web site. I’ve had my web site up on the WWW since 1998. Traffic to my web site has slowly grown from a handful of hits per day in the beginning to where it’s now running something like 600 unique visitors per day today. Some 100 of those visitors are folks who have visited the web site before. Not all of the visitors to my web site look at my photography – lots of them look at one specific article, and then move on. But this is true of a magazine or a gallery show as well; not everyone looks at everything in the magazine. So let’s run the math. 500 new visitors/day amounts to about 15,000 visitors per month. Hey, that’s not too shabby – one month’s viewership for my web site is on a par with getting into LensWork or Camera Arts.
But here's where web sites really win: the photographs and articles I put up on my web site in 1998 are still getting hits. The exposure from a gallery show stops completely the instant those prints come down off the gallery walls. The exposure from a magazine drops nearly to zero about a month after the magazine is distributed. The web site, however, is like the Timex watch in those old John Cameron Swayze ads - it just keeps ticking, generating exposure for your work month after month, year after year.
That means that although the exposure from my website is about the same as the exposure I'd get from having my work published in LensWork, or Camera Arts, or a magazine of similar prominence, it continues to do that month after month, year after year. It's like getting my portfolio published in a magazine every single month.
With the WWW, there's literally no geographic limit to where your work can be easily viewed. My website has been viewed from more than 100 countries scattered all over the world. This global reach is impossible to get through any other venue.
The downside with web exposure is this: the quality of display (while improving steadily) is still low compared to real prints or to well done magazines or books.
And the costs? Decent web hosting is cheaper than every before, and the barrier to putting together a web site is getting lower every day. The 'donate' buttons on my website (basically begging for money to help me put up more useful content) generate a small but steady stream of revenue which more than covers the costs associated with running a web site.
Applications like Apple's iWeb make it easy for just about anyone to put together a fairly simple web site - and a simple web site is just about all you need if you're trying to get exposure for your work.
Some Conclusions
It looks like, by objective measures, the exposure you get from a website is massive compared to the exposure you get via gallery shows, magazines, or books. That's both true, and perhaps a little bit simplistic.
Consider, for instance, that not all exposure is the same, because not all viewers are the same. Landing a show in a prestigious gallery would generate a much smaller number of viewers than my website, but it would consist of viewers who had a very high probability of being fairly sophisticated viewers who, in turn, were likely to buy my work. In contrast, it's fairly hard to pin down the demographic of visitors to my web site, but it seems likely that while some percentage is the same crowd as the sophisticated gallery visitor, some percentage is also random visitors who happened to land on my website because of what might be called a 'serendipitous accident' - they type something into google that just happens to match the content on my website, and end up browsing for a bit. I'm not saying that those people are not 'good exposure' but if you care about demographics, it's clear that not all viewers are equal.
Nevertheless, it's clear that for me, the exposure generated by this website swamps the exposure I'd get from the other venues, and that as the WWW web grows and I continue to promote the web site, that will only become more true in the future.
