DDB Reply
I like this discussion - particularly the parts which validate my work, which is both context and story driven. I want to thank C. Harnell (of DDB I assume) for providing this quote for my latest email campaign:
"We get so caught up in our own mindgames and self delusion in design. We strive for beauty and perfection without realizing that it is an absolute waste of time. The only thing that matters is people dig it and buy it."
I have been doing very compelling, human nature insight kind of photography work independently for years. My ideas have been hijacked by TBWA (they based and ad campaign on a photography essay on Black Cowboys I published in 2002 - called me for contact info on models, then did a media buy in Vibe, etc) - yet I have yet to crack this industry, and I believe it's a combination of industry blindness and my own inability to communicate with production values.
Where the web has gone, my work with context and storytelling were there long ago. I utilize irony, narrative, and naturalism: all keys to the more sophisticated visual palate we are experiencing in a fully mediated society, a kind of Europeanization of American aesthetic.
Yet the whitewashing continues - or if it's gritty, it has to have a cheap ironic twist. I'm ready to start working with people who understand there is a long form, there is a long sell, there are themes which can be orchestrated and worked to show subtlety within the organized effort. Everything "happens in an instant," but at the same time, we are literally in the same place we were and will be for a long time - in a chair in front of a computer. That's captive. Why not work on the long themes? The narrative.
"We get so caught up in our own mindgames and self delusion in design. We strive for beauty and perfection without realizing that it is an absolute waste of time. The only thing that matters is people dig it and buy it."
I have been doing very compelling, human nature insight kind of photography work independently for years. My ideas have been hijacked by TBWA (they based and ad campaign on a photography essay on Black Cowboys I published in 2002 - called me for contact info on models, then did a media buy in Vibe, etc) - yet I have yet to crack this industry, and I believe it's a combination of industry blindness and my own inability to communicate with production values.
Where the web has gone, my work with context and storytelling were there long ago. I utilize irony, narrative, and naturalism: all keys to the more sophisticated visual palate we are experiencing in a fully mediated society, a kind of Europeanization of American aesthetic.
Yet the whitewashing continues - or if it's gritty, it has to have a cheap ironic twist. I'm ready to start working with people who understand there is a long form, there is a long sell, there are themes which can be orchestrated and worked to show subtlety within the organized effort. Everything "happens in an instant," but at the same time, we are literally in the same place we were and will be for a long time - in a chair in front of a computer. That's captive. Why not work on the long themes? The narrative.
posted by tobin at
2:11 PM
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