Category Archives: Craftsmen

Apr 07 0 comments
Advertising, Commercial Photography, Craftsmen, Design

Product and Packaging Design from 1958

Since I’m sidetracked right now with teaching my classes, this blog post is dedicated to my design students.

It’s the cold war. It’s the year after Sputnik was launched by the Soviets.

This 1958 film saluting the stylists of the automotive, industrial, interior and architectural design industry reflects the American obsession with consumerism and the future. It proposes that the American dream is here now. The opening features Finnish born and French educated Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center in Michigan, bathed in the light of a sunset before fading into a teenager picking up a Swedish designed Ericofon–a phone that Bell Telephone (today’s Verizon) aggressively blocked from import to the U.S. market for years. Ah, yes, the American dream of “fifties atomic-age minimalism.”

With it’s quirky, theatrical, dramatic, lighthearted, sometimes angelic and very 1950s music soundtrack, the film is filled with hundreds of wonderful designs – some of which our parents or grandparents discarded quickly after purchase, some which we still covet today.

This is only part 1 of American Look. You can find part 2 and 3 at the archive.org web site. Archive.org is one of my favorite places for ephemera.

Oct 22 0 comments
Commercial Photography, Craftsmen

Looking at the 10,000 Hour Rule

drug store dolls in a red plastic bag

Climbing to the Top of the Heap

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says, the amount of time required, working at any craft, to become “world-class expert” is 10,000 hours. He also writes that the level of success (I would go further to say that really means, meteoric success) you reach as a world-class expert rests on when and where you were born, something that you have no control over.

He uses the Beatles, Wayne Gretsky and Bill Gates as prime examples of these rules. But he doesn’t mention Richard Avedon, who must have done his 10,000 hours early on. He was born at the right time; he came of age in the heyday of advertising and magazine publishing (I don’t have any solid historical data on how much time Avedon actually invested, but his involvement in photography started as a teenager and, by the time he was 21, he was working with the legendary Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar). He was also really, really, obsessed with photography.

Ten thousand hours.

For us mortal photographers that’s pushing the shutter release (and mastering the camera’s programming and TTL features – plus studio lighting) for 3.42 years – the equivalent of spending your 10,000 hours in daily 8 hour segments – and  if you’re going to do your own Photoshop work, pushing around a few octodecillion (that’s 10 to the power of 57) pixels for another 3.42 years before you are truly good enough to be, well, good enough. And, few of us spend a mere 8 hours a day at our obsession. If you didn’t sleep, you could pull off becoming a world-class expert in your field in slightly less than one year and two months.

And, no, those 10,000 hours don’t include lunch breaks, snacks or stretching.

So. Were you born at the right place and time to be a great photographer? Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Instead, I propose that there may be a missing 10,000 hours for mastering marketing and social media, getting over the personal issue of making phone calls and socializing face to face – something many of us overlook (colleges, often miss this too) as being an essential component of the success equation.  There may be no additional advantage to when you were born if you market yourself with the same obsession as you do creating photographs. How few of us photographers actually have an obsession with marketing.

And so it looks like it would take about 10 years (less if you’re OCD – and you know who you are) to become a successful, world-class, expert photographer.

Sounds about right to me.

Dec 08 1 comments
Bookbinding, Commercial Photography, Commercial Photography, Craftsmen, Marketing, Portfolio

Moab Paper Features D.A.Wagner Hand-Made Portfolio Case

Detail D.A.Wagner Portfolio

Detail - Slipcase and Top of Book. Click on photo above to see the whole story.

The folks over at Legion Paper, the parent company of Moab, took a liking to my hand-made portfolio and featured it on the Moab Facebook Fan page. Made with Ballistics cloth, Rayon and Japanese hand made fabric, the portfolio pages were printed on Moab Lasal Matte 235.

And, as nice as the detail photos look, the inside of the book is much prettier, it has my photography in it.

Jul 01 1 comments
Commercial Photography, Craftsmen, Marketing, Personal Photography, Photography, Portfolio

Craftsmen Revisited…

Happy Go Lucky Goldfish

Happy Go Lucky Goldfish

When I was a kid, my dad had a workshop, his sanctuary really. There were countless days spent at his side, building or fixing something, always setting up some kind of power tool or hand tool, depending upon the project of the moment. Much of that time I would have preferred playing outside with my friends, but it was demanded of me to be my father’s assistant, like it or not. But, like it or not, I learned. I learned to wood carve, make moulding and furniture from scratch, frame out and build structures, weld pipes, repair radios, TVs, and clocks, wire electrical outlets, and on and on.

No matter the project, he would read up, dive in, then bitch and moan about something gone wrong – frequently crying out loud, “goddammit!” – but in the end the project got completed flawlessly, as if he were a master craftsman, when in real life he was simply a repo man for a truck company. His quest for excellence was overwhelming at times, as nothing short of perfect was ever acceptable.

What about all these bits and pieces I weathered in his shadow? I grew up having a real comfort level around power and hand tools and that now translates into improvising sets and finding solutions to the day-to-day challenges of photography. These days I don’t build so much; it’s more like I modify props and rig sets to suit my needs. Although I’m not adverse installing an outlet or replacing an old faucet, it’s a lot more fun drilling out the bottom of a fish tank to see if water spins in a vortex.

Jun 22 0 comments
Brain, Business, Craftsmen, Marketing, Photography

Something to Think About

The Crowd

The Crowd

Seth Godin wrote a very short blog entry, On the Road to Mediocrity. The basic point is, “The only way to get mediocre is one step at a time.” Don’t settle. Simply a brilliant insight. Well worth reading.

Jun 18 6 comments
Advertising, Bookbinding, Business, Commercial Photography, Craftsmen, Marketing, Portfolio

Seeking Out Master Craftsmen (Women, Really. No Joke.)

Portfolio Detail

Three months of lessons and lots of practice to make 7 of these guys.

A lot of advertising photographers invest in hand-made portfolio housings. They are the finishing touch to a lot of hard work and make for an impressive presentation. I hand-made my own portfolios and slipcases because it seems like a really important part of the process. How could I entrust anyone to the task of making a book for my work? I had just finished shooting for an entire year, working on a new style and vision, and the vision couldn’t just stop there. The craft should continue from the digital world and carry through to the physical one that wrapped around my printed pages. I’m a hands-on kinda person and I love research.

I sought out Barbara Mauriello, a brilliant and highly regarded bookbinder, conservator and artist, who agreed to take me on as her student, to become a one trick pony. That is, to learn screw post bookbinding techniques, the style in which many commercial photography portfolios are bound. I also joined the Center for Book Arts on 27th Street, to rent their bookbinding studio equipment, a remarkable resource for an archaic craft. I later assembled the books in my basement workshop.

After four long training sessions with Barbara and months making countless “test books” using dozens of different fabrics and techniques, the real books went into production, with the goal of making ten in total, knowing a few would be ruined along the way. Two Three of the books didn’t make it. After all, I was just an apprentice, more or less copying what the master demonstrated.

As an added element to my books I designed my own logo based on the iconic jumping goldfish photo to create a copper die for imprinting the covers. No, I didn’t make that myself, too, I sent that out to engraver, Owosso Graphics, in Michigan.  Sophia Kramer was my mentor on this part of the bookmaking and with infinite patience taught me how to use the kindly used, but ancient, Kensol 36T, three-ton press (ooooh, sounds impressive, doesn’t it?) at the Center for Book Arts.

They’re done, they’re gorgeous, and I’m sending them out in the world (not unlike my teenage daughter to college) to see how they fare.

Jun 11 1 comments
Advertising, Business, Commercial Photography, Craftsmen, Marketing, Photography, Portfolio

On The Topic of Master Craftsmen

Shooting from the Hip

In the Mirror...

In reading The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett, I was reminded of the guild hierarchy: an apprentice spent 7 years before becoming a journeyman and the journeyman, another five to ten years before earning the title of master craftsman.

After years of producing elaborate, complicated photography projects, my new style of work has become rather intuitive, natural and technically comfortable. Unconsciously, a natural perspective and a vision evolved out of years of experience. At first, however, I didn’t trust it; the process seemed too easy to me. Yet after a year of producing fun, new, portfolio images, I had to acknowledge my talent had become quite innate. I have become a master craftsman, not a charlatan wearing the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Sennett also notes that, “Masters should be pestered to explain themselves,” in a way that makes their process clear to others. That was meant in the context of training future masters, but I’d like to think it also pertains to relationships with clients. After all, everyone benefits from the dialog and the outcome is better work. And so I offer up this blog, without much pestering.

This new portfolio will never be finished. It’s a work in progress, always. Not just for the sake of marketing, but also for my own satisfaction and personal growth. I have to keep reminding myself, this portfolio took decades, not months, to develop—years spent honing technique and craft until it’s become second nature.

Now, I promise not to let this go to my head.

Or think that I’m wearing really nice clothes, when it’s just jeans and a t-shirt.