One of the things about working for yourself is that you need to don lots of different hats. I actually spend the least amount of time with a camera in my hand, taking photographs. Most of my time is spent marketing and promoting my work, viewing and re-viewing my images to see ways of improvement and looking for different projects. I regularly get in touch with new publishers and continually try to push my work further afield. I have found this to be very important because you never know which publisher will have the right audience for your work and create sales. As much as I would love to just get lost in photographic art, it’s crucial that it pays for itself and supports my family and lifestyle in order to continue.
Ive recently realised the importance of competitions.I have mixed views about photographic competitions. On one hand, a lot of photographers use them to increase their exposure, gain recognition and generally promote their skills and craft, all of which I can see being valid and a good reason to enter in to them. Not to mention the possibility of winning ‘something’! But, on the other hand, competitions are subjective, art is subjective, so who’s to say one viewers eyes are better than another at ‘seeing’ and why should we listen to anyone else’s praise or criticism anyway. We should be following our own photographic path, surely? If I create a photo which Im pleased with but no one else seems to think much of it, does this decrease it’s value. Equally, if an editor or critique is favourable and the same image is featured in prestigious publications and gains great exposure, does this now make the same image better, just because so-and-so says it is? I had a series of images appear in a national newspaper a while ago and the editor decided they would try and interpret what I was trying to capture and therefore judge how well they thought Id managed to achieve this even though I was not asked my thought process or any salient information. Unfortunately their online website wasn’t set up to allow the photographer to comment on the editors critique which seemed a little pointless and one-sided, so I asked them to remove the images unless I could comment on what my actual intentions were, rather than their guesswork. The images were removed.
This made me start to think about the whole process of marketing and competitions. If Im not going to listen to, or take on board ‘negative’ views of my work then I should also do the same for positive comments too because they, after all, are in the same vein – someone else’s opinion. Instead of acknowledging all praise and turning a blind eye to criticism I have decided to tread my own path. However, rightly or wrongly, in order to sell your photographic art there is a need for marketing and exposure to increase your profile, and if that takes on the form of competitions I will see where this leads me in the future.
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Paul Cooklin,
self-promotion 
