rndm

     On Marketing

/// Came across a nice piece on Marketing Oneself today, posted via @lpvmagazine, which fittingly describes the bane of my (artistic) existence - as it seems, attested by this very blog and website you are looking at right now:

Kind of like developing yourself as a brand, so when people hear your name they know what they’re getting, when they see your pictures they know they’re by that photography - oh look, it’s a scary looking man with scribbles on the wall and a bunch of wire, it must be Roger Ballen. Me: Yeah, exactly like that. H: And you think that’s a good thing? Me: Well, it’s not a question of good or bad, it’s simply what you have to do. H: But you don’t do it. Me: That’s because I can’t do it. I’m too stupid, too indisciplined, too poor and daft and dirty to do it.

H: Because if you did, then you would become a brand. Isn’t that what it’s really all about - becoming a brand. It might be a journalistic or an artistic or an academic brand, but it’s a brand all the same. A brand where the bag and the outrage and the scarf are all part of it. And if you became a brand, isn’t that the signal of your complete failure as a human being, isn’t that completely contrary to what you or me or any documentary photographer or artist should want to become. Don’t you think that to have that level of consistency, to have that anal obsessiveness to always talk in one particular way - even when you know it’s bullshit - is alien to everything that is true and honest and good. Me: Um…