Themes and Stories

Themes and Stories

13 August, 2017

Jennifer Schwartz in Atlanta wrote an interesting booklet titled Crusade for your Art: Best Practices for Fine Art Photographers. It’s available from Amazon and other places. She owned a gallery in Atlanta for five years, she says, but gave it up. The economics for brick-and-mortar galleries is grim and getting grimmer in light of competition from the internet.

While the book is an interesting and very useful read, she undermines her own first best practice very quickly. She promotes the idea that a photographer should work to produce series of works that have a common theme and tell a story, saying that’s what gallery owners want. A more shotgun approach of unrelated photos displayed with the idea that there will be something for everyone will often result in there being nothing for anyone. So we should work with expandable themes because gallery owners want this, but, on the other hand, galleries are becoming passé. Oh well - life without paradox is life unexamined.

A couple of years ago I had an open house here at home to which twenty-four people came, and I sold seven pieces. My works were not organized into themes, although I do have a few, in retrospect, and I am beginning to think in thematic terms. Story telling isn’t a strong point of mine, though.

I have a URL, welbornefineart.com, that I promptly as widely as I can. Currently it points here to my custom web site, eugene-norris.fineartamerica.com. Welborne sounds maybe a little pretentious, but there's a small story there. My given name, Eugene, is based on two Greek words that together mean well-born. That was my mother's hope for me. So far, it hasn't amounted to much. So I have a URL, http://www.welbornefineart.com, that also points to my Fine Art America sales site. Sales? Well, I’m not ready to give up my day job, which is retirement, for it.