Dollars & sense

Like a lot of other freelancers I know, I didn't enter into the editorial fray with a clear picture of photography as a business. It was everything else still when I left college and started my professional career... a calling, a mission, a refuge, freedom, an art, a passion, and a friend. Luckily, it’s still some of those nice things for me at various times, but first and foremost it is a business and I, as owner and president of John Loomis Photography, LLC, am the head of a corporation. That still doesn't sound quite right to me.

So fast-forward past a lot of the growing pains shit with the first couple of years of freelance. You can picture the Disney/Bruckheimer montage of the struggling artiste knocking on doors, pockets turned out, trying and trying, paying for coffee with found change from his Aunt Linda's couch, nervously anticipating each measly check for $700 as if its a wind-fall fortune, borrowing money just to accept an assignment from a new magazine client.

This post is about what comes next. You are comfortably in a place where you are shooting 60-100+ days a year editorially. You are being paid for your services and customers are satisfied and returning for their next jobs as well. You are traveling more, extending your geographic range of potential commissions. You have built enough flexibility into your finances to accept short-term debt fairly easily when assignments require it (last minute trips to very expensive French islands, perhaps). You are saving money, paying off old debts, planning for the future. You are running a business!

But at the same time, from month to month, you know that if a few checks don't come when they should (should: cynically calculating they will only be late by 30 days), and if, God forbid, your car needs any significant repairs or you get sick, you are right back to the dramatic, wind-swept edge of the cliff, nervously looking at the impending due date for your Platinum business AMEX (a bill swollen by the up-front expenses of your clients) and rent check.

And this is the big rub... in photography, wealth (or even being comfortable), seems to be an illusion. If you are working a lot, getting paid handsome fees, selling a few stock images here and there, and not blowing your cash or working within a ridiculous amount of overhead, you should be making some coin, right?! Well, maybe.

It all depends on cash flow and diversification of income streams. No matter how much you are making on paper and how many invoices are 60 days out, if you aren't getting a regular stream of checks you will fail. Being owed $30,000 or $100,000 doesn't mean a fucking thing when you can't afford your $1500 rent or $3000 mortgage. And when you add the sometimes insane cycle of being paid late (or very, very late) to the all too frequent instances of photographers (like me, fresh out of college) starting their BUSINESSES with a pile of debt (and incurring an even larger pile while trying to get things rolling in the first few years), then not getting paid is the edge of the world, and if you aren't very very careful, you will fall off.

The solutions are several folds, but most of them sting or require a lot of patience. First of all, we are all trying to provide for ourselves and families from a very volatile and increasingly distressed editorial market (which already has fallen way short of compensating even the established freelancers, let alone the dozens of rookies who join the ranks every week). Counting only on the editorial market right now for your mother's milk is the epitome of high risk. And thus the rise of wedding photojournalism, corporate photography, multimedia production, and any and every little other way to get paid well for sort of doing what you love.

The friends of mine who are truly doing well are the ones who have taken a conscious step away from relying on editorial work for the majority of their bottom line. Turning down calls about 1-day portrait jobs requiring them to drop everything and shuttle themselves across the state or country, they are being paid a lot more for similar work in advertising or commercial fields (which admittedly is really hard to get), and loving life (though their expenses are also rising, so its not perfect I don't think). On the other hand, here's me, who is still trying to figure out how to carve out just 10-15% of my annual income into the advertising/commercial bread basket, but failing fantastically thus far, while still relying on magazines for 98% of annual income.

I've been lucky and have worked really hard, and as a result have been very busy editorially for the last 9-10 months. But from October '06 until just a few weeks ago I was in some pretty bad financial shape, simply because despite my ever-growing stacks of invoices I was not getting paid in a reasonable period of time. 3 days before Christmas I received my bi-monthly check in the mail from Redux and found inside only $75.00, less than 1% of my invoiced billings at the time. Ho ho, mother-fucking ho. (It should be pointed out that though the check comes from my agency, they have nothing to do with me not being paid - they want to be paid as badly as I do).

Since that dark day I've been able to ride the storm and come out on the other side is solid shape, having finally been paid a large percentage of what I had been owed for a few (too many) months. I've put that money into the last of my debts and into savings, and also invested in a new set of portfolios and a NYC trip aimed towards getting future work. But in an industry where you regularly don't get paid for 60-90 (to 180!) days, and incur a lot of upfront expenses that must be accounted for within 30 days, it takes a long time of patient and hard work before you are in front of the giant wave of death/money.

Long-term, the editorial market is heading straight towards the biggest wave anyone has ever seen. Any editor who can actually dress themselves in the morning is scared, as they see their colleagues being laid off left and right, and their budgets dwindle (can anyone say stock photography?). There is this concept out there that we all believe will save us... this shining cross of a word, the Internet... but when, how, in what way? Until the industry shifts its business model and/or shooting for online becomes something more than a footnote on my annual report, we are all going to be hard-pressed to find a real solution for continuing to earn our livelihoods as magazine photographers.

My own footnote on this very cheery topic is that recently I've been hearing a lot of discontent and fear coming from the newspaper photographers who I know (the ones who still talk to me). They are wondering how much longer they'll have jobs, and some of them are seriously starting to save money to make their transitions into freelance easier. Um, guys... seriously. I'm not sure you've thought this through, not that you really have another choice. Maybe its time for places like Blueeyes to really step up and see what can be done online.

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Comments (2)

I think we need to reconsider this business model entirely. I wrote a long piece on my blog:
http://www.robertwrightphoto.com/writing/?p=54

Good luck!

Hi John,

Informative and "real" as always. I look forward to your posts since they are direct, personal and honest viewpoints on the state of the industry. Every photographer student or hopeful should read your posts as a reality check.

Keep it up.

-Sherman

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