I stopped photographing my work for Instagram and started photographing it for the person who might buy it
For years I shot everything the same way: tripod, two softboxes, neutral grey, fill in every corner so nothing was lost in shadow. Correct, and completely dead. Then in November I delivered a small interior to a client in Villeurbanne and she had already hung it before I got my coat off. Afternoon light coming sideways across the room, one half of the canvas frankly too dark to read. She was delighted. That is what the painting does in a real room, and I had spent a decade photographing it as if it were a passport photo.
So now I photograph the new work where it lives. Same corner of my studio, north window, no lights, one shot at three in the afternoon when the light rakes across and the impasto shows, and I let the darks go dark. Enquiries went from almost nothing to about one a week, and the people who write are the ones who noticed the light, which tells me they will notice it on their wall too.
The obvious objection: a client cannot judge the whole canvas. True. I send the full flat documentation to anyone who asks, privately, and nobody has ever been unhappy to receive it. The public image is not the record. It is the invitation.
Bof, and the flat grey shots are still on my site, in the archive, where they belong.
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This is a good point you are making, ji. For long I was photographing my paintings flat, straight, all light even, because the cooperative told me the buyers want to see the work fully. True also, in a way. But once a lady in Patna sent me a photo of the painting hanging in her pooja room, with the lamp light falling on one side and half of it in shadow, and it looked more alive than my own careful photos. Some of the work cannot be shown in flat light. The fine line work of Mithila is made to be seen by lamplight in a home, not in a studio. Only worry is when people buy from the photo and then it reaches them and the colour looks different. So I do both now, plain photo for honesty, room photo for the feeling. But you are right that the dead correct photo does not sell anything.
The lamplight thing is the whole argument, I think. Mithila line work was never meant to be lit like a document, it was meant to be lived beside, and the lamp is part of the reading of it. Your careful photos were showing the work to nobody in particular.
But the worry you name at the end is real and it's the same worry I have with my own: a photo that shows the piece as it actually behaves is also a photo that shows it as it behaves in that room, with that window, that hour. The buyer in another city gets the mood but not the object. I don't have a clean answer. I've started sending one honest flat shot alongside the atmospheric one, almost as a small apology, and the atmospheric one still does the selling. Maybe that's the split: one photo for the desire, one for the truth.
"Showing the work to nobody in particular", ouch, and true. A grey card does not have an opinion about the painting.
Your worry I will argue with a little. If a buyer in another city gets the mood and not the object, they have bought the mood, and the mood is not a lie, it is the half of the painting that a flat document never carries. What worries me more is the opposite failure: a buyer who sees the flat version, receives the painting, hangs it in a room with one lamp, and thinks something has gone wrong.
Your one honest photo plus the flat one, that is the answer, I think. Not one or the other. I have been doing the same without saying it out loud. One in the room, one on the easel, no softboxes on the second either, just north light. The worst of both worlds is the studio photo that pretends to be objective. It is neither the object nor the room, it is a passport photo with better equipment.
Send the honest one first, always. Let them meet the painting the way it will actually live with them.
The pooja room photo, yes. That is exactly it. And you are right that Mithila work is not the same animal as mine, the lamp is not ambient decoration there, it is part of how the line is read. I would not photograph that flat either.
The worry you raise is the real one and I don't have a clean answer. What I do now: one honest photo in the room, and one flat, both on the listing. The room photo is what makes someone want it, the flat one is what lets them check the drawing. Nobody has complained yet. And if someone arrives and the painting is darker than they imagined, that is a conversation about light in their house, not a lie I told. I have had that conversation twice and both times the painting stayed.