Digital Challenges from the Photographer’s Perspective

by Mike Shatzkin

reported by Aggie Villanueva

Few things I read give me an “Aha!” moment like this.

Recently Joanna Penn (creator/teacher of Author 2.0) sent me a link to this article by Mr. Shatzkin, who publishes Idealogical blog, which provides strategic thought leadership to book and journal publishers and to their trading partners. This day Mike addressed the issues facing photographers; lucky for me as I’m both a writer and photographer. And like most of us, I am in the process of branding myself and photos and learning to market them. This process can get so convoluted that it’s inspiring to find it explained so simply.

Mike’s article was just what the doctor ordered for me, and I pass it along in hopes it will stimulate the same for you. A few key phrases are excerpted below (with Mike’s permission), with a link at the end for you to read his insights in their entirety.

My friend Michael Yamashita is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met and his 21st century intellectual property challenge is to challenges what he is to people.

He’s a photographer who has shot enormous projects, mostly for the National Geographic, over the past 35 years. He has shot the US-Canadian border end-to-end, the Mekong River from the source to the mouth, the path of Marco Polo’s journey from Venice to China on the Silk Road (which runs through Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan), the entire length of the Great Wall of China, and countless other places that are documented by very few people. And a camera in Yamashita’s hands is like a guitar in Clapton’s or a bat in Ted Williams’s….

So Mike’s instinct was to protect the copyright and price of his pictures, not to follow the increasingly conventional wisdom of making them viral. When you know the crowd can’t duplicate your work, it means it can continue to command high prices….

And even as he continues planning and working on three major assignments in Asia that will keep him busy for the next 18-24 months, he sees that his stock business is cratering, the funding for major assignments such as he has done for several decades is disappearing, and his future employment will be about exploiting his “brand”: teaching, lecturing, and producing and hosting documentary films about the places he knows that almost nobody else does (a career which he has already begun.)

What we realized through conversation was that only a small percentage of Mike’s pictures have the characteristics that make them (theoretically) worth “protecting….” We further realized that the value of the brand Mike is nurturing, his name, is directly proportional to the number of people who know it and, even more important, to the number of people who own it and treasure it. That argues for free and viral distribution of his images (as long as they are prominently “branded”….) The other thing we realized…..Read Entire Article

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