I have a piece in today’s Guardian Education section about the Young Carers Revolution. Their film will be launched on June 11th but the fantastic trailer can be seen on the Guardian website. It also contains a few of my stills, and the full film should contain more.
My young carers audio slideshow will be going out to schools along with the film on the DVD. It’s a relief that this won’t be wasted because I haven’t managed to place it anywhere in the media, either paid for or free. That is not for lack of trying and despite many people telling me they liked it.
This gets me seriously wondering about all this energy me and other photographers/journalists are currently investing in multimedia. I love taking audio and in many ways find it a more effective way of interviewing than writing everything down in shorthand, as I was trained to do. I love working with people’s voices and pairing them with images to construct narratives, which I think of like solving a huge audio jigsaw puzzle.
BUT, what’s the point if no one wants it? A three-minute audio slideshow takes me up to three days to produce….and for nothing. I can’t even give them away with my written stories. So who are we making them for – other photographers?
When William Blake was alive he couldn’t get anyone to buy his poems or his engravings – so he published them himself. When Amy Johnson took off on her solo flight around the world, only one reporter turned up see her off.
If they’d given up because no-one was interested would the world be different today? I don’t know, but I know slideshows, podcasts and online video are art forms in their own right and individually and collectively powerful and important forms of storytelling.
Of course the mainstream media aren’t interested, they’re these behemoth operations who have their own motivations, their own ways of doing things and their own tight budgets. I think we’ve all got to be more creative and lateral in thinking how we fund this type of stuff, but we definitely shouldn’t give up.
No-one else is doing what you’re doing with Streetfighters…if you gave up now, who else is going to tell their stories?
I do take your point Adam and I agreee with much of what you say, but self-publishing everything doesn’t help pay my mortgage does it ;-)
And while in some ways I celebrate the fragmentation if the media and the loss of power of some of the big media outlets, the reason I still like to get my work published by them (aside from being paid once in a while) is to get it out there and seen by real people.
I’m not interested in naval gazing, which I often feel the photographic industry in particular is very good at (much more than where I have come from).
I see the need to create bodies of work on important social issues and understand that artists tend to have to do this for free. I don’t mind this but I have to sell spin-off stories along the way or I simply can’t sustain myself in the way I currently work.
I want as many people as possible to know about the young carers or the people losing their homes under Housing Market Renewal. The downside of the shifts in today’s media is that my just sticking a slideshow on my website or on Vimeo, this doesn’t happen. The payoff just doesn’t seem to be there.
It’s really great that so many colleagues appreciate my regeneration work for example, but when the numbers of visits rank in the tens, I can’t help but have my more questioning days.
I’m not giving up. I’m just having a down day.
thanks for your comment, and for your optimism :-)
Adam,
I’m with Ciara here, it’s all well and good doing projects for the better good, but life commitments often mean you need to consider. My biggest annoyance with photographers and indeed freelancers, is that they often have some of the worst business heads in the business.
Ciara, I love the project but I’m not surprised to hear no-one is running with it. This is the biggest hurdle we all face, getting those to put the money where the “we like it, we really do” is.
What about the NGO side of things?
Hi Ciara,
I’m with Adam on this, don’t give up!
You are doing terrific work, plus you have a good launching platform on this website/blog.
Things are going to pick up… sooner or later…
Keep calm and carry on.
Cheers,
Ar
good piece and, as ever, some great pics for a truly worthwhile project. But on the larger debate, about fragmenting media. It is one facing all freelances. Tinternet is part of the problem – and also the solution – as people migrate from old media to new, both as consumers and practitioners.
There are Darwinian forces at work here. Look how some blogs thrive and others wither on the vine. Being a survivor in this new jungle means sharp teeth and a ruthless instinct. And talent.
And nobody owes us a living. Orwell spent years unpublished and unpaid, pursuing his own lonely furrow. But all the while he was honing his skills and finding his true voice.
So dont get dispirited. Your work speaks for itself and your commitment to the forgotten people is, gradually, being recognised. Hope this doesnt sound patronising. It is well-meant.
cheers all – some good thoughts there.
Daniel – in my experience NGOs don’t want to know if it’s a finished project you are bringing to them. Charities aren’t interested in independent journalism if it isn’t commissioned by them in the first place or stick to their narrowly defined message. which is fair enough, since they are businesses with an agenda after all.
Photographers and freelancers may well be poor business people but when you work on my payscale time and resources tend to seriously limit how much you can put into the marketing side…I have to judge how much time I can invest into things because after all everything I do that isn’t writing actually costs me in lost income. When you are spending more than half your week creating material for the love of it but no money (as I am at the moment), obviously there are limits to what is possible. It’s a catch 22 situation.
keep the faith and all….the multimedia piece is at least going onto a DVD which is going into hundreds of schools. so it’s not wasted.
I’m going to stop moaning now. Honest.