Not only can you not please everyone, you shouldn’t even try.

Why? Because all those “anyone’s” can’t even agree what they like anyway.

The first seven or eight years of my photographic career were spent trying to figure out what “they” wanted to see. Should I have more black and white? Should I separate out the black and white from the color? More product / less people or more people / less product?

It was a quandary every single day. And trying to dial it in seemed impossible.

Out the door to an agency showing… book is tweaked and ready. Agency CD looks through it quickly and mentions that they mostly do more ‘produced, big set shots’ which I knew – intellectually – was pure bullshit. I could see the work they did on his FKN OFFICE WALL. And it was the kind of work I was showing. I was a fit.

No matter… back to the studio with one burning thought… “must do more big set productions, must do more big set productions…” A new mantra was born.

The next meeting with a different agency would find an AD saying – “wow, I like your food stuff but you are a fashion photographer right?” Well… uhh… I am showing you food and you are discussing images you haven’t seen in a book that has never crossed your desk. And – you didn’t hire me for the food stuff, even though you said you should, because you heard I was a fashion photographer?

“Need more fashion, need more fashion, need more….”

And on and on it would go. Always taking a random thrown out statement as some sort of ‘golden nugget’ of advice and a solid lead on what I needed to do to ‘get the gig’.

Sad. Lonely. Maddening.

Then one evening the local ASMP hosted a “round table” of some of the big name AD’s and CD’s in the area. There were four of them sitting there and we got this kind of stuff:

AD 1: “Never send me direct mail. I hate direct mail… goes right the can.”
AD2: “Direct mail is the only way I will see your work. I rarely look at the annuals and we will only call in books if we have worked with you before.”
AD3: Direct mail… eh. We occasionally will bring all the AD’s together to look over a couple of weeks pieces, but honestly it is catch as catch can on that stuff.”
AD4: I LOVE direct mail. Keep it coming, guys…”

Seriously?

AD1: “The only kind of portfolios I like are loose prints. If I can’t spread them around the table, I am not really gonna look that hard at them.”
AD2: “Small books are best. 8×10 – 9×12… and not more than 30 images, please.”
AD3: “I like the really big format… even 16×20’s are cool. Book or loose prints, it doesn’t matter much.”
AD4: “We prefer to find the work we like in the annuals, and if we need to see a book we will ask you send it over for us to look at on our leisure. We don’t care much for large books, but we do love when they are super designed.”

Seriously seriously?

There was no consensus on anything that evening. We heard that direct mail sucks and keep it going because it is effective. We learned that design of your portfolio was totally unimportant except when it was absolutely a dominant force. The enlightenment continued with the admonition to separate black and white from color and oh, BTW, never separate black and white from color, only separate genres except when the book has a more flexible, organic flow.

I realized that I was trying to please a ‘them’ where there was no ‘them’.

There were only individuals, and they all had different criteria for what they wanted to see.

I stopped worrying about them. I started worrying about me. What the hell did I want to do? When the taskmaster of madness is lifted and all you have to worry about is the work you LOVE to do, it can suddenly dawn on you that you are not really sure what that is.

After years of trying to feed the beast, it became abundantly clear that it was a faux beast to begin with… and it may be too stupid be fed.

I learned that I had to be comfortable with what I shot, and build that work from the ground up without checking in with the Blackbook or the Workbook or any other ‘hip’ annual to see if I measured up to what everyone else was doing. I wanted to measure up to what I WANTED to do.

Within a year the book was totally different than it was a year before, and the clients I was shooting for not only liked what I was doing, but wanted me to do more of it.

And no, it wasn’t every agency in town. It was a few agencies, and a few designers, and a few corporate MarComs… but they added up to busy weeks and lots of billing.

I was shooting exactly what they loved because I was shooting exactly what I loved and the individuals who hired me were in sync with that.

Trying to please everyone will end up with you pleasing no one.

I remember one of Avedon’s assistants telling me one of the things that surprised him was that Avedon didn’t get every gig he tried for. Sometimes they picked someone else. For all sorts of reasons. Can you imagine?

You simply cannot please everyone.

You shouldn’t even try.

(And if you ever hear someone say, “this is what they all want to see”… well, consider that full on, totally awesome bullshit.)

Photo notes:
I was asked to shoot tools for a construction company. They prided themselves on very detailed and hand done work. I chose a set of antique tools and shot them on 4×5 Polaroid Type 55, then contact printed them and toned them with copper. I left the ragged edge of the Polaroid on the contact sheets to give the images more ‘reality’. They ran as 4×5 images quad toned and floated singly on a white page with text on the opposite page. The brochure turned out to be an award winner.