Given a private income for 10 years....

tlitody said:
The best way to make a small fortune out of photography is to start with a large one.
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LOL
A teacher at a street photography workshop once said if you want a career in photography start studying investment banking

Personally I have decided photography will be my retirement hobby, now I'm just focusing on bringing my retirement earlier.

If someone absolutely had to follow a career around photography? I think the paradigm has shifted radically. I have no data to support it but I'm fairly confident that the general "photographer" population (pros + amateurs) buys a lot more than they sell. My advise would be to use your knowledge of the market, get on the right side of the cash flow and start selling to photographers: workshops, gear, printing, framing, subscriptions, consumables, books, other peoples' art. Then use the money to buy yourself time to do what you really wanted to do.
 
Turtle said:
Chris,

What projects would you really like to tackle (if you are happy to disclose)?
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I'd like to devote more time to my work photographing Fort Wayne. I have three related projects on my website that are about Fort Wayne. The Waynedale and Wells Street portfolios concentrate on two areas of the city that especially interested me, while the Fort Wayne project is everything else I have done in the city.

I don't feel like that I have gotten 'deep enough' in my exploration. Doing so requires more time than I have available, so that I can meet the people and go beyond the buildings. Right now, I am struggling to support myself and my son by selling my work off my website and doing web design and some commercial work to bring in the money, while working on my MA (so I can hopefully be employable if I ever do need a 'real job') and taking care of him on my own (his mother is mentally ill and not able to do much for him) and still keeping up with my photography work.

It is hard and I am very busy. My son feels like I don't have time for him sometimes, and that upsets me because he's right, but I have to earn money to feed us and I feel like I better get my masters in case things get so bad economically that I do need a job.

That is a huge fear for me, because before I moved away to Santa Fe, I applied for more than 800 jobs and no one would hire me. Only two places even called me for interviews! People privately told me that my art degree made me "Unemployable," which I believe given how none of my classmates ever found jobs either.

Hated moving so far from my son back then (his mother had custody then), but it was that or end up homeless. So, I left. A few yrs later, having made some connections out in NM, I was able to come back to Indiana and live off my income from NM clients and after I came back, people started buying my work online too. Soon after I came back, my son's mother was locked up by the state in a psych hospital for a year and I was given permanent custody of him. That first year he lived with me was really bad, because I just wasn't making enough money. I've worked hard to cultivate more work and to try and get local work too and things are a lot better now.

When my son graduates from high school (he will be a Freshman this year!) we are leaving Indiana for good. I am tired of struggling. I wish I had the money to concentrate on documenting this place, which is declining economically VERY FAST. Real unemployment is about 25% and the city government admits that 70% of the jobs here pay less than $9 an hour. No one can live on that, not even here with our very low housing costs. An individual here, no kids, can live on $11 an hour. Increase that if you have any kids! So, there is a LOT of pain here in the city and I'd like to document it in a deeper manner than I have been able to do so far.
 
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Chriscrawfordphoto said:
True Story: An old woman comes in the store, she's about 55 yrs old, and stoned. She wants to know what camera was used on the Apollo Moon Missions. She'd seen something on TV about it but couldn't remember the name. We enlightened her: Hasselblad. "I want one!" she declared. We had some and told her the price. About $3000 at the time for a used one with an 80mm lens and back. This place I worked at overcharged like crazy, but people there bought. Coulda paid half online.

Anyway, she looks it over and is in love with it. She wants to buy it. I asked her what she takes pictures of. She wants to photograph birds and wildlife. Yeah, sure...with a Hasselblad. We recommended to her that a digital SLR and a really long lens would be better, but she wouldn't consider it. Only the "Moon Camera" would do. She didn't even know what 120 film was, but the stupid old fool bought it.
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...well fellas, I think I may be in love :D
 
I'd make that 10 year income last 30+ by making some smart investments. I'd photograph everyday, spend time with my family, travel, and watch my health.
 
DougFord said:
...well fellas, I think I may be in love :D
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Suger Mama!

We had a man in his 40s come in the store once to buy his son a camera for a high school photo class. A lot of parents buy their kids cameras to use at school, which is really nice of them.

This guy didn't want the usual student camera though. Most parents bought a used 35mm SLR or a low-end digital SLR for their kid. Which depended on the class requirement. Some required film, some digital. Since most parents are not photographers, and the kids don't know anything yet (having not yet taken the class) they usually need some help.

This guy knew exactly what he wanted though! He wanted a Nkon D2x, which was the top of the line Nikon pro model D-SLR at the time. $5500 for the body alone! He read online that it was the best. The kid, who did not come to the store with dad, was getting ready to take his very first photo class (I could see buying the kid a high end camera is he was very serious and was about to graduate and go on to art school).

I asked the guy if he would adopt me, because MY dad doesn't love me enough to buy me a D2x! He just laughed. He did buy the camera!
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
My mom's age at that time (My mom is 60 now). To most people, mom and dad qualify as 'old' and she was certainly too old to be stoned and acting so stupid.
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"stoned and acting so stupid." Yep - that's normally reserved for youngsters under 50. :D

But getting back to the original question - I'm about to enter the state Frank referred to - retired and drawing my private pension. I too recognise my limitations in photography, and plan to keep on enjoying it as a hobby. Earlier in my working life I made the mistake of turning a hobby into a profession, and that killed the pleasure to a large extent.
 
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Probably something similar to when I had two years of income: pursue what I love, work hard every day, try new things, hope for the best.

I found that having that kind of freedom without worrying about income inspired me to push myself very hard in many ways, but to be laxed in others.

Lesson learned: always at least try to move toward a larger scale "next step." It's surprisingly easy to get lost in the day to day process.
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
Oh, I have. I know personally a lot of artists (including some photographers) who were born into wealth and have never had to work a day in their lives. My professor from art school was like that, had inherited wealth and never had a real job, and had no idea what it is like to have to work for a living. He wasn't paid much to teach, it was part time, and he told us he would do it free since the money they paid him was just pocket change to him. I also know a young woman, a photographer, whose mom and dad bought her a job at an arts nonprofit in my hometown by donating a lot large sum of money. She doesn't need the job either, she just wanted a prestigious title and the appearance of being important.

Those are just two examples I know personally in Fort wayne. In Santa Fe, where I lived for a few years, it was even more common. Few artists there needed to work, most had trust funds.
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It looks like I need to inherit some money, then! Unfortunately, a lot of the grants are given to those who seem to have an "in" and/or know how to game the system. Have you seen at the above-mentioned -funded portfolios? 95% of them are self-indulgent (the "self" being the academic world) are gravitate towards the same aesthetic guidelines...pretty much stuck within the same thing.

It reminds me of some classical stations, where anything pre-19th century played without "ancient tuning" or anything pre-20th century that has some sort of melodic line or tone adherence is dismissed. Painting themselves into a corner and stifling growth beyond their vogue.
 
On thinking more about the question:

Basically, I don't want to work very hard at anything I don't feel like doing, so mostly I don't, which is why my income for much of my life has been so low. The things where I don't mind working hard are, for the most part, so low-paying that I have to work hard in order to earn any money at all, and to economize wherever possible. But that's fine, because I'm doing what I like. Well, fairly fine, though I do sometimes wonder why financiers think they're entitled to the rewards they get, because most of them are doing what they enjoy doing, too. Just ask them why they're paid obscene salaries: "Oh, that's just a way of keeping score."

The biggest single thing with a decade's private income would be to get personal debt and allied outgoings down to zero. After that, it's surprising how well you can live on next to nothing. As Turtle has seen, that's what Frances and I do.

Something that also occurred to me after reflecting upon Arles is that the Voies Off ('fringe') photographers are often very much more interesting than the 'accepted artist' photographers, unless the 'accepted artists' are very old or very well known. An awful lot of 'accepted artists' (and a lot of awful 'accepted artists') seem to feed at the same highly conceptual trough. But then, I'm inclined to dismiss conceptual art as art that you don't really need to do or see: once you've written, or read, the Artist's Statement, the 'art' itself is nugatory.

Cheers,

R.
 
I'm 22 and I would do this in a heartbeat. I'm assuming in ten years time people will be working on short contracts so changing jobs will be a part of my life. It's just the way things are going, so if I can get 10 years of stability why not?
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
Santa Fe is full of them. They used to come into the camera store I briefly worked at to buy gear they had no clue how to use. Most of them spent their time smoking weed and dreaming of being artists.

True Story: An old woman comes in the store, she's about 55 yrs old, and stoned. She wants to know what camera was used on the Apollo Moon Missions. She'd seen something on TV about it but couldn't remember the name. We enlightened her: Hasselblad. "I want one!" she declared. We had some and told her the price. About $3000 at the time for a used one with an 80mm lens and back. This place I worked at overcharged like crazy, but people there bought. Coulda paid half online.

Anyway, she looks it over and is in love with it. She wants to buy it. I asked her what she takes pictures of. She wants to photograph birds and wildlife. Yeah, sure...with a Hasselblad. We recommended to her that a digital SLR and a really long lens would be better, but she wouldn't consider it. Only the "Moon Camera" would do. She didn't even know what 120 film was, but the fool bought it.
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Well maybe you would have sold her a Tele-Apotessar F8/500 and a 2XE and 1.4 converters to give her 500,707 and 1000 focal lengths. And also maybe a 140-280 variogon zoom for the closer work and she would have got what a lot of professional wildlife photographers have always used and what she wanted. Instead the shop assistant sold her something useless.
 
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