It's alive!

www.thomasbroening.com

Oh dear

From an anonymous Art Buyer on Bitter Photographer via Jackanory:

"I wish I too could be honest at my job. When I review a car photographer's portfolio I wish I could say: "wow thanks for showing me this amazing car book that looks like every other photographer's portfolio. You really nailed it. I love the moody skies. How did you think of that? I also love how your trying to sell this piece of crap like it's real art and not just another advertisement for a fucking car."

Please keep up the great postings.

Anonymous Art Buyer"

IN NY

I am meeting with potential agents this week and it is going well. The response to the work has been really positive and I am anxious to see where it will lead.

I got to meet with fellow bloggers Robert Wright and Andrew Hetherington and I think after a few hours we were able to solve all the isssues in contemporary photography.

Website

New website is close to completion.
You can see it here:

http://m-i-lab.com/thomasBroening/build7/

Looking for a new Pad

Back in the day Doug Adesko, Timothy Archibald and I all had reps. Doug had been with his for a while but Archibald and I had just signed with new reps. Tim's reps were a couple of women who started an agency called Tidepool.


Doug (on the phone to Tim) : How is Lilly Pad treating you?

TA: What?

DA: Lilly Pad. Didn;t you just sign with Lilly Pad or something?

TA; Tidepool. Not Lilly Pad.

DA: Same thing.

TA: Not Pad. Tidepool.


So of course, hours later, Archibald recounts this story to me and from that day four years ago a new word has entered the lexicon:

Pad :meaning agent.

As in:

Have you heard back from the Pad about that job?

Oh yeah I know Lars' work. Who is his Pad?

Here in SF, the retouchers have Pads. The stylists have pads. You are no one without a Pad.

I am in the process of

putting together an application for Review Santa Fe. I have never liked having to explain an image and felt that any image that needed explanation was a failure. The closest I have come to putting words to my pictures comes from the T is silent:

"love the cacti from el paso on the blog - i can feel the search your on in this photo and some of the others from reno - this "quest" is very earnest and it shows in the photos. When these photos are working(the cacti definitely is), as a viewer, i feel i'm wandering, searching for nothing important and at the same time the most important thing, meaning. steven shore and alec are great but i see a yearning in these images of yours that is inthralling - A professor of mine explained the deference between documenting or illustrating a project and embodying an idea or concept- the difference between lauren greenfield documenting kids and jim goldberg or larry clark embodying their projects. this difference seemed barely noticeable at first but the more i looked at photos i could start to tell the difference- the embodied works were the ones where i felt something, they were the books i checked out again and again, i think your work is on this path, very exciting. i commend your search and hope you are finding what you are looking for -"

Book

In an effort to trick a new rep into thinking I am not just a big old commercial hack I have been making a bunch of books through Blurb and have been pretty impressed by the quality. I only include work that I have made since the beginning of last sumer and it only includes work from the Copy Stand and urban landscapes.

Is there room in commercial photography for photography?

I have noticed something interesting during my discussions with potential reps. There seems to be a east coast vs west coast difference in terms of what is the best kind of photography to show.

The WC reps prefer to show work that looks very much like advertising. The idea is that agencies need to be able to demonstrate to a client that a photographer not only is capable of executing an image but has in fact made the image previously.
I shot a cow once. It was part of a personal project where I shot the interior of an old movie theatre, shot farm animals in a studio and composited them together in post. The series got some attention and an art buyer saw it in CA. She had a campaign for a giant cow feed conglomerate and needed a cow shot. She saw my series and I was hired to shoot a cow for the agency. I used the same animal wrangler from the movie theatre series and we shot the same cow.

The art buyer moved from a midwest agency to a NYC agency. I talked to her and she assured me if she ever needed a cow shot at her new agency she would be sure to call me. I have been shooting for 20 years and have only shot one cow (twice) but I will always be seen as the bovine shooter by this one art buyer. Talk about being pigeon holed.

On the other end of the spectrum are agencies that bring me in early in the process of coming up with a campaign. I got a call from an agency. They had a client and needed help coming up with an idea. They gave me a rough outline who the customers for the product were and I was charged with putting together the campaign. I pitched my idea and we shot in a few weeks later.

I am in the process of changing the kind of work that I show. The new criteria will be the strength of the image and no longer whether the picture looks like an ad. I used to be puzzled when I saw the pictures other photographers showed. What the hell was Nadav Kander thinking when he showed those pictures of empty hotel rooms? Yeah they were emotionally compelling and looked like real photographs but what product did it look like he was selling? What about Carlos Serrao's pictures of a lion on a dock? Yeah they were cool and looked like nothing else out there but they looked like nothing else out there. You are supposed to show work that looks like other work that has been published. That's the rule right?

Last One

My productivity definitely fell off as the week went along. Because there is such a small window when I like to shoot in the day it is really important for me to have a plan. I saw this water tower from the freeway and made a point of coming back at dusk.

Entry Point

From Tim Archibald:

Entry Point-An image that works in both the commercial and art world.

El Paso Day 2

I got up early and checked out the area around the hotel. I scouted it the night before.

Call Sheets: How not to do it

I am in the process of booking a hotel in New York for an upcoming trip to meet with reps. I used to stay just stay in the cheapest hotel I could find but as I get older my personal comfort is becoming all important.

We shot a job in LA last year. There was a little wiggle room in the budget for a nice hotel so I ended up staying at L'Ermitage in Beverly Hills. This is by far the nicest hotel I have ever stayed in. I think the room had more square feet than my house and put the P in Phat. They provided me with letter head and business cards with my name on it with the hotel contact info on it. So I settled into my room and checked my email.

Oh look the producer has sent call sheets. I see my name and my assistants name with our respective numbers and rooms numbers at L'Ermitage. Let's see where everyone else is staying: Oh Dear. They are all staying at a Best Western in Long Beach. All of them the client and agency people. Yikes this does not look good.

The next day at the preproduction everyone made small talk and made sure to stay clear of discussion of accommodations. The weather is always safe. Or at least in LA you can always talk about the traffic.

El Paso Day 1

My plane landed at 430 and the sun set at 530 and managed to grab this on the way to the hotel. I shot this plant a bunch of ways but liked this approach the best.

El Paso

Photo Safari

When I worked as an intern at a newspaper in Florida when I had a day off I would jump in the car and just drive and take pictures of things that interested me along the way.

All my children and my wife has been sick for the last three weeks and I am starting to go a little stir crazy. Everyone is on the mend so I am off. A big storm is about to hit all of California so after some weather searching I have picked El Paso to begin my safari.

Flight leaves at 1130.

Reno encore

Another series of pictures of nothing or almost nothing.

15 Hours in Reno

Coming home

I came across this church on the way into Dallas from DFW. I think it is called Trinity Ministry Broadcasting. There were a bunch of buildings in the complex along with a virtual realty tour and a production facility. I spent a couple days shooting it.

The first day I parked a mile away and lugged my equipment across a series of medians and gullies. I was convinced the church had a ton of security and did not allow any one to photograph let alone park nearby. The next day I just parked in the church parking lot and walked around.

Shooting landscapes means you spend alot of time waiting for light. Often I will have to wait for a couple hours for a shadow to move or for the sun to get where I like it. In Dallas it got me thinking about my own church experience.

As a kid I was in a boys choir for 10 years at an Episcopal church up the street from our house in Baltimore. I was raised an atheist and spent the $10/month I was paid on candy and Dungeons and Dragons figures. My brother and I would go into the church so he could play the massive organ while I photographed him. He went on to get a Phd in Music theory and I can still barely carry a tune. During rehearsals and performance the choir leader would always make wild hand gestures at me to indicate it might be best if I sang more softly or better yet mouthed the words.

Many years later I found myself at a different church: The Oakland Coliseum. My girlfriend at the time (now wife) and I had decided to" take a break" and I was in a world of pain. I was lost and was searching for something to hold on to. I saw a billboard on the highway saying that Billy Graham was coming for a three day revival. In the Bay Area you are more likely to have some one admit to having a special relationship with a farm animal then admit to being born again.

I sat way up high on Mt Al Davis, hundreds of rows above the field and waited for him to speak. I had to sit through Christian boy bands , rock-bands and the worst: Christian rap. Finally way down on the filed I saw a man with silver hair whizzing toward the stage in the passenger seat of a golf cart. The Reverend Billy Graham.

He was an amazing speaker and told the story of his religious conversion as a boy. He told how he found Jesus and how it changed his life. He then invited any one of us 60,000 poor souls who wanted to turn his life over to Jesus to come forward. And slowly like little ants approaching an ant hill I saw hundreds of people moving foreword. And I felt the pull. Here was an answer to all my problems and here were all these other people who seemed to think Jesus was the answer.

But I couldn't do it. I had no connection to Jesus and never considered myself a Christian nor had I ever read the Bible.

So I climbed off Mt Davis, got back on the BART and over time repaired the relationship with my future wife. Years later we have four children and some kind of faith in something out there.

Sometimes when I am driving alone through the central valley coming back from LA I turn on AM radio until I come across a preacher talking about Jesus and I feel the pull and think about those ants heading home to the hill...

Dallas

There is a fine line between a picture of nothing and a picture of nothing that really works. I often mistake one for the other.

Co-Best In Show

Fellow bathtub photographer Emily Merrill and I discuss her decision to make me Honorary Co- Best in Show (HOCBIS) winner at the APA Show last night. We talked about reprinting the party invitations with MY image on it but fugured the APA bigwigs would never go for it.

Better Art Direction than Photography

Here is one of those cases where the art direction was alot better than the photography. Wachovia Bank.

Where's the helicopter?

Got back early this AM after shooting Tostitos for The Marketing Arm in Dallas. It was a beautiful day in a beautiful location. Not a bad way to make a living. Got some personal shooting as well so tune in for that.

Da Show

Retouching all the life out of it

I worry that sending an image to the retoucher sometimes takes the life out of a picture that is better off left alone. It is not the retocuher's fault. Maybe an image is better the more imperfect it is. Maybe it is more alive.

Bombing

I photographed this comedian this week. He had a big show that night and I asked him if he ever got stage fright and he said no he had been doing it too long. And then I sheepishly asked him if he ever bombed on stage. He said no it had been a really long time since he had really tanked.

It got me thinking about myself of course. When was the last time I made a truly bad image? It has been a while for sure. In fact I remember it well. It was raining. The art director was there and I was working too hard to make him happy and ended up with something nobody liked. Of course it ran as a double truck and it still makes me wince to think about.


I remember when I was 16 working for the local weekly. I had turned a bathroom off my bedroom into a darkroom. In the summer in Baltimore it was so hot that I would process in my underwear. Once I put the fixer in before the developer and ended up with nothing. I felt like I was going to faint. I called the chief photographer who hired me and he said not to worry I could reshoot it for the following week.

Nothing feels as bad as blowing it.

One one more

Archive Ad

Archive magazine came in the mail today.

Thomas Broening: Father of the Year

I love reading in blogs and agent/photographer websites about how devoted these shooters are to their children and how it is all about the kids. I have a ton of kids and unlike my colleagues sometimes I miss the mark in terms of the parenting/ work balance.

This summer I was with my kids at Totland Park in Berkeley. I was trying to land a pretty big job via conference call and for some reason thought it would be a good idea to have the call while at the playground. In my defense I think that was the only time the AD was available but ...

Everything was going great and the client was on the phone as well and the concept was actually cool and something I wanted to do when in the corner of my eye I see my youngest child fall off the swing and land on her stomach. She is 3 1/2 and starts balling. I run over and pick her and see that she is fine. She has had the wind knocked out of her and is just a little freaked out. So I am trying to hold her in one arm and cover the mouth piece with the other. It is not working well and everyone on the call wants to know what is going on and I reassure everyone she is fine and will stop screaming any minute.

I look at her and tell her she needs to stop crying. This of course does nothing but make her cry louder. So here I am in this jam. I want to stay on the phone to land the big tuna but I also have this distressed child. So I do what father's have done since we all lived in caves. I put her down and walked away. And then.... the looks started. The Berkeley moms at the park were so appalled by what I had done that all they could do is look at me with their squinty eyes and hemp baby slings.

Looking back would I do it again? Probably not. I should have just called them all back later or not had the call at the park in the first place. But when you are out in the wild hunting wearing nothing but a bear skin thong your judgment sometimes gets a little clouded.

Bldg

Shot this building this weekend. I think there is an image here somewhere but not sure I found it. It is a mile from my house and I remember being in the lobby a couple years ago for a meeting and thinkng I should come back here someday. Maybe I have been looking at Jorg Colberg's blog too much.

at-edge

It always amazes me to see the process of coming up with an idea, shooting it, editing it and then seeing it makes its way into the body of work that I show.