The View from Mudsock Heights: Marketing Photographs in the Modern Manner

The project finally got far enough along that I could do something with it.

For years I’ve carried around tens of thousands of negatives and transparencies, the result of a career of writing stories and making photographs. But the digital world has so taken over photography that the real, silver-based stuff is all but dead. Soon it will be so far in the margins that any work of chemical photography will be proceeded by the ubiquitous and annoying word “artisan.” So if all those many thousands of images were to have any further life, they would need to be digitized.

Which I have done. Started to do, really — I’ve scanned in about 25,000 images, with at least that many yet to go. Part way through the project, the inevitable question arose: Now what?

The idea had all along been to do something with the pictures. Many might well be useful as stock photographs, the kind of thing you might find in an advertisement or on a greeting card. Others are more documentary, involving some celebrities, some news events, even some news events of a sort that they have moved beyond cliche to become representative of a whole class of historical events. My plan was to make them, or at least some of them, visible to the world at large. Maybe I could sell rights to a few. In the happiest of my dreams, some nice deep-pockets publisher would come along, see my timeless capture of various moments, and suggest a book of my pictures with the stories behind them. For that to happen, of course, I’d have to go ahead and find a way to put them out where people could see them.

SOURCE: Dennis E. Powell

The Internet has made the distribution of photographs far cheaper than it used to be. But a new problem has replaced the old one: because it is cheap, everyone can do it, and everyone has. Where it used to be a matter of printing a very precise and painstaking portfolio, one picture at a time, the issue now is having one’s work seen from amid all the clutter. The Internet is now what we have, all we have.

After a little research I concluded that Flickr probably offered the best opportunity to get my pictures seen without my spending much money. With it, parent company Yahoo! has established itself as the standard online photo clearinghouse. Additionally, the company has a deal with Getty Images, one of the largest stock photo agencies. This made more sense to me than trying to make a site of my own then trying to publicize it, albeit at the loss of a little control over layout and display.

Scanning slides and negatives is a nontrivial task. If there is any hope of making high-quality prints from the scans, the resolution must be very fine — mine are at 6400 dots per inch. This means that a 35mm image printed at 300 dots per inch would by 21X32 inches. I seldom need to go bigger than this! It also means substantial file size. Worse, it means that any tiny scratches or bits of dust will be displayed in all their irritating glory. I became pretty good at dust removal using the GIMP image processing software. There are automated procedures for removing dust with it, but I found that the results were more to my liking when I did it by hand. This is a time-consuming job, but with a little jiggery-pokery even the worst motes can be eliminated.

If the technical issues are daunting, the organizational ones are no less so. A lot of my pictures are pleasant, artsy things taken in a variety of places and conditions. Some are picture stories, features that include world-record domino toppling, an abandoned diner in upstate New York, time spent at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and strolls around Kuwait City soon after the end of the Gulf War. Others are hard news: wrecks, murders, fires, plane crashes. How do I present nature pictures alongside the news feature of a Ku Klux Klan rally I covered in Davie, Florida? Though the pictures had and have different purposes, they’re of equal importance to me. Some are documentary, while others are decorative. Fortunately, Flickr offers some organizational tools and a limited choice of layouts (though I would love to have had much more available in this regard).

In due course I’d separated about 700 pictures to show online from among the ones I’d scanned; there were some others I’d shot digitally, including the aftermath of a recent tornado nearby. They were all sorted into groups, so that people seeking flower pictures wouldn’t happen upon dead body pictures. Also, I did not want to upload full-resolution pictures, which, it seemed to me, would make their misuse easier. So I sized them down to 1024×1024 or less. Then I uploaded them.

There are various applications for uploading pictures to Flickr. I’d love to use a Linux one but I found none that I could figure out, never mind get to work reliably. So I employed a little Windows program — I have XP running here in a Virtualbox cage for just such occasions.

My pictures uploaded and arranged, all that remained was for Getty to make me a rich man. That turned out to be a little more complicated than I had supposed. Due in part to changes being made in the system (and in my estimation some poor writing by those given the job of explaining it all), it was anything but clear. It turns out that one may submit 12 pictures — exactly 12 pictures, if the explanation is to be believed — during the first month of each calendar quarter. At some time, weeks or months later, Getty will then write back, perhaps with an invitation to join its stable of artists. The invitation is accompanied, apparently, by a contract whereby all your photographs — the 12 submitted and all the others you have on Flickr — are represented by Getty for the next two years, with the contract automatically renewed year-by-year after the two years expire. One has 90 days to decide whether to agree to the contract. I’m hoping that should a contract arrive, it will be explained a little more clearly, because as it is it’s a bit like an excerpt from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

I’ll let you know how it all turns out; in the meantime, feel free to look at and comment on the pictures, which are here. Be sure to stop by — especially if you are a picture buyer for an ad agency or greeting card company!

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.