Photo Trade Show Hangover

I spent last week in NYC going to events, then 3 days on the floor at the PDN Photo Expo and I’m a little fried from talking shop all week so I thought I’d throw up this recap jumble for the moment.

My favorite part of flying has to be the visit to Hudson News to survey covers, scan headlines, look for trends and see in general what piques my interest. The first thing to jump out at me was the new Rolling Stone book size and paper which eerily looks very similar to Men’s Journal. I bought a copy to check out the Sebastiao Salgado essay and read a 12 page story on the death of David Foster Wallace. I also grabbed a copy of The Atlantic after reading about the redesign because I wanted to see how it feels in the hand. I was impressed. I noticed that portfolio hasn’t run one of those lovely abstract covers in awhile and hope they haven’t completely abandoned those in favor of the more traditional personality based ones. The new Radar redesign looks great… too bad they pulled the plug on it. Bon Appetit covers are grabbing my attention now because they feel grounded/authentic and I see that Craig Cutler has shot the last couple. The cover flap for literary and news magazine seems to be a new trend and is likely tied to their need to sell, sell, sell on the newsstand but remain tasteful on your nightstand. I wasn’t going to buy the new GQ because my bag was already weighing a ton but I couldn’t resist a 32 page photo essay by Jeff Riedel (I’ll have to see if he’s up for an interview about it). I also discovered a piece inside on covering the presidential campaigns for news magazines that talks about the un-objectivity of the whole affair and nasty way that the flacks influence the press.

I attended and blogged about the Lucies (here) and while there are several things I think they could do to improve it, I was moved by several of the speeches and overall it’s a much needed event in the world of photography. My very simple fix would be to give more awards to young upcoming and hot now photographers and maybe include some academy like mass voting in the process. While I think honoring some of these legendary photographers is very important and gives the event serious street cred, there is a real need to elevate hungry young photographers into the spotlight and give validation to projects that require publishers and editors to take chances on lesser known photographers. That being said, the honorees were the ones who gave speeches that reminded me of the power and importance of photography.

I had two days between that and the the start of the trade show and ended up out both nights with photographers, photo eds and agents. Everyone now begins a conversation with me by saying “this is off the record.”

Thursday I headed for the trade show and the place seemed to be packed with people. I was there to meet people, observe what it might take to have a decent booth for my website company and hand out some cool stickers I made. The serious fawning over gear is somewhat lost on me (I’m not a photographer) so, I kind of walked around observing and meeting up with different people. The most interesting phoneomenon has to be the “live photo sessions” where photographers with model(s) and lights are shooting live images in front of a crowd of people. There’s also a lot of slideshows where photographers talk about technique and how the images were made. Some of the crowds were impressive and Vincent Laforet seemed to be drawing the biggest. I can only assume the blog is partially feeding this and that is an awesome development.

After the show it was time to party and I headed out with Andrew Hetherington (his official report here) to 3 in a row. The highlight of the evening was Monte Isom’s self promo party. Yes, instead of a promo card or emailer that you track Monte has a guest list, DJ and booze. Clients are handed flash drives with his photography on it when they check in. I guarantee he sees a return on this mother of all promos and I hope he keeps it up because it’s a good event for photographers and clients to mingle and party unlike the PDN self promo event where they shut off the booze and kick you out just when I was starting to settle in.

I had some interesting conversations with industry vets much of which was concerned with the cliff we just fell off. When it comes to advertising in magazines there seems to be a lot of chasing demos going on which amounts to creating content that will attract a certain demographic age, income level, education and ratio of male vs female readers. This has really been going on since 2000 but now in earnest because of the urgency in the situation. I think demos will dominate the conversation with potential advertisers going forward along with words from the web like uniques and hits.

My argument against chasing demos is that the cost to appease these fickle readers who care very little about your core values is enormous. Both in terms of the number of people needed to produce the junk content and the watering down of the core content. If you’ve every wondered how a magazine with millions of readers can shut down it’s because of the sheer weight of trying to maintain a huge circulation of people who barely like what you produce. This is a very scary time to be in magazines as I was told by several people that no advertising is being sold in 2009. None. Everyone is making a decision after the election and waiting for some sign in the economy. Only the strong will survive. In the end chasing demos has no end game it’s just a temporary fix as numbers rule the conversation right now but eventually it will fail as we return to the value of original content and readers who are invested in the product.

Overall it was a great week in the city and I met an incredible group of people who are committed to making this industry a better place: John Harrington, David Hobby, Joerg Colberg, Mark Tucker, Kristina Snyder, David Burnett, Cameron Davidson, Eric McNatt, Chris Bartlett, Evan Kafka, Jonathan Saunders and Allegra Wilde.