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It's all about photography...

I have been thinking, smelling, seeing, tasting and doing photography for the last five weeks as much as I didn't for the whole time before.

The differences
I mean I've been interested in photography for quite a long time now and it constantly grew over the time. I dealt with it even more and more in the last one and a half years since I just stopped always talking and thinking about it without doing it. But I just can't compare these times to my time in New York City now. It's a hell of a difference! In my eyes Austria is not the best place to be as a photographer. New York might not be as well if you want to start working and start to earn a living with photography. There are just so many photographers in New York (well, I guess if you are good enough you can do it wherever you are).
Anyway, Austria and Vienna (where I come from) is just a little lame in that field. We've got a Leica gallery in Vienna which is great and we've got... not that much else. At least no galleries or institutions which dedicate theirselfs to documentary photography or photojournalism. Yeah, we got photo agencies in Austria as well but to be honest they can't really be compared to the good ones in New York or Paris though. There might be one agency in Vienna which I'd consider to be a good one, at least partly.

Learning and Experiencing
So New York is so much about learning and experiencing photography for me. A big part of that is of course my work at Magnum Photos. But that's not all. There is the International Center of Photography in New York, other institutions to do workshops or take classes, there are many, many galleries specialized in photography here, there are photography exhibitions all the time. You can start visiting these exhibitions and galleries one day, and by the time you finished seeing all of them you might be able to start over again from the beginning since there's always something new to see.

And of course there are the people I meet which are into photography one or the other way. That might be people from Magnum, photographers, staff or interns, that might be a photographer from the Redux photo agency I met at the Aids Walk in Central Park, that might be photographers from New York I met over my website or whereever. So it's possible for me to talk about photography with a lot more people than I could back in Vienna. Probably I just seem to know a view people who are into photography there.

Basically I wake up thinking of photography, I get up thinking of photography, I go to work thinking of photography, I work thinking of photography, I go home thinking of photography, I feed my photoblog thinking of photography and I go to bed thinking of photography. And of course there is my girlfriend I am thinking of! :-)

Yesterday evening I was hanging out with Karen and Justin, both from Magnum to look at each others work. Kind of a personal portfolio review. It was really interesting and inspiring to look at their work, and talk about ours. We all three had very different styles reaching from very artistic, to very Associated Press like photojournalism to classical black and white documentary photography. So it's not about competing with each other but about exchanging.

Getting established
I talked to Hiroji Kubota, a Magnum photographer, the other day and he told me that the next years will be very hard for me if I plan to seriously get involved into photography. He told me that I should be established by the age of 30... I thought about that and I guess that should be possible. I will be 26 in September so there are another four and a half years left for that. When meeting Karen and Justin we also talked about the meaning of being established.
Being established to me doesn't mean to be famous, it doesn't meen to be rich. For me it means having the freedom to work on projects you are really interested in, to work on long term projects, doing stories which last. Of course you have to earn money, you have to live and eat but that will work out in one or the other way.

Networking
And there is another thing I am thinking about. How important or helpful is being able to do networking with people from the business? First of all I am really not good in that at all.

I went to a Aperture party this evening. It was kind of a relaxed party in the very nice loft of the Aperture Foundation. Probably about 300 people have been there, nearly all of them I didn't know. There have just been a handfull of people from Magnum which I knew. And all the others... Strangers to me. The thing is that I start to get very uncomfortable in such situations which has kind of a physical impact on me (I start to float away) which makes me even more uncomfartable. Not a good premise to meet people. But these events, especially at Aperture are great possibilities to get to know important people out of the business I guess. There have been photographers like Alex Majoli (a Magnum member), Mary Ellen Mark, Jonas Bendiksen (a Magnum nominee) or Antonin Kratochvil (member of the VII photo agency) and a lot of people from different agencies, galleries and publications.
I might get used to these events somewhen but I still don't know how important these networking things are... Beside the fact that it would also just be interesting to get to know these people.

So if you have also thought about these things, I am interested in what you have to say about this theme. I'd appreciate every comment on that!

Posted by Martin Fuchs on June 3, 2005 11:56 PM