It’s cool to be successful. It’s more cool to be successful and cool.
One of my mantras is that it’s classy to maintain a sense of where you come from as you become more successful. I devote an entire section of my book to the topic. Never assume that success and fame grant you a license to be an ass to other people. In fact when you act the opposite of the anticipated prima donna behavior, your words and gestures have more meaning.
In a post on the blog of screen writer John August he answers a question from a reader who incorrectly uses the vernacular of the movie industry in an attempt to come off as ultra groovy. Rather than barbeque the reader and embarrass her into oblivion, Mr. August handles the situation with extraordinary grace.
These are the kinds of questions that reflect almost no understanding of the film industry — which is fine. You’re brand new to all of this, obviously. I would ask similarly uninformed questions about lawn bowling, textile manufacture or warp drives: using the lingo without really understanding what it meant.
So I want to answer your questions while simultaneously explaining why they’re awkwardly wrong questions to ask.
Read the rest of the post on John August’s blog here.
NY Times writer Maureen Dowd, the wannabe fashionista.
I’ve never met columnist Maureen Dowd. For all I know behind her turgid writing she may be a perfectly nice person. I’ve also never met Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue who is featured in The September Issue, the RJ Cutler documentary about the making of the biggest Vogue issue of the year, but she’s on my top ten list of people to meet before I die. I’m articulating these disclaimers so that this piece doesn’t get misconstrued as a personal attack on Miss Dowd to defend Miss Wintour. It’s an attack on Miss Dowd’s article about Miss Wintour.
It took me ten years as a fashion shooter before I actually felt like I was truly part of the industry. Not because there is some protracted hazing period, but because the fashion industry is fascinating in its complexity and it takes ten years of immersion to truly understand it. Which is why Miss Dowd comes off a such a moron in her piece about Miss Wintour. To write a humorous, critical piece about anything you must have at least a cursory knowledge about the subject. In Miss Dowd’s appalling piece the only thing she demonstrates that she has any knowledge of is the movies about the fashion industry that she mentions to buttress her pathetic humor. Utilizing a well circulated stereotype about Miss Wintour as the basis for her article, calling Miss Wintour an alien, is about as lazy and boring as it gets. The way she wrote her piece reminds me of a person whose parents submitted her teenage photos to a modeling agency, but was turned down and never became a model only to cite that as her “modeling career” when she meets someone in the fashion industry.
When I see a unique assembly of clothes, make-up and hair walking down the street, my mind jumps to conjure a location and a story to wrap the look in. Friends of mine who are designers, stylists and makeup artists have the same Pavlovian response to colors, textures and just about everything that they encounter on the street. It’s a way of life. When you talk to anyone who is passionate about fashion, you get a sense of it immediately.
Then there are the posers and the wannabes. I’d explain what they act like, but Miss Dowd does an exemplary job by example in her New York Times piece here.
Is giving credit all that hard?
Today at The Post and Review, Michael Biven intelligently addresses an issue that is a plague to photographers and artists. No attribution for borrowed work. In my controversial position in favor of piracy for notoriety, I contend that we should let our work get lifted in exchange for exposure on the internet. This exposure can only occur with attribution links. Without attribution, the work languishes benefiting the borrower, and screws the creator out of the only value to be derived from having the work snatched without permission.
The same goes for artists like Shepard Fairey who I chastised for not attributing the source photograph of his iconic Obama image to photographer Mannie Garcia. If you use an image as a source for your own work, throw a thank you and a link out to the creator of the source.
Tracking down the creator of an image isn’t all that hard. Michael Biven rightly calls to task the web sites he uses as examples in his post. Attribution has become standard practice for the major blogs, even when the image is public domain.
So listen darling if your gonna lift a photo or art work for your fabulous blog from someone else’s site, take a few minutes and find out who created it. And then give them some link sugar. It’s the right thing to do and sets a good practices precedent that will go a long way to preventing the orphaning other peoples works.
Lather, rinse, repeat – chop.
A few days ago I wrote a piece for the Resolve blog about a photographer who used his talents to aide the impoverished children in the Dominican Republic. The story prompted a lot of emails. Thank you for those.
Out of all the emails I received, there was one about a young fourteen year old woman named Daniella that really stood out. Two years ago Daniella’s best friend’s sister sadly passed away from cancer. Until the day she died the best friend’s sister wore a wig from Locks of Love, an organization that provides hair pieces to children suffering from long-term medical hair loss. As a gesture of love to her friend, Daniella set out to grow her hair long so that she could donate it to the Locks of Love. After two years the big cut occurred this week.
In the fashion industry I’ve selected models for shoots that we decided would need a radical hair cut to suit the needs of our job. The model gets additional financial compensation for allowing the significant alteration to her hair. Looking back, I wish I knew about the Locks of Love. There are a lot of wasteful things we do in the creative industries for the purposes of our vision that, given a little forethought, could benefit someone else. Please keep this in mind as you move forward through your career. Because we are nothing without our audience, and that audience is a diverse group of people, some of whom may not be in the best straights.
I was tempted to go on a rant about some of the absurd hair vanity I’ve encountered in Hollywood, but I think the images of Daniella’s actions are enough to make us all stop and think. Well done Daniella.
Why shooting for free almost always pays off.
No one has more power to change the world than photographers. Yes, yes, doctors are regarded as the human deities of the world, but with few exceptions photographers are embraced with open arms everywhere they go. Because whatever your photographic discipline, and no matter where you travel, you can barter your talent as a shooter for just about anything. Including the well being of children in a far away country.