The commission that paid best came from a photo I almost didn't post
I nearly didn't put it up. Bad light, the smalti looked grey instead of the deep red it actually is, and you could see my slippers in the corner of the shot. I posted it anyway because I had nothing else ready and the algorithm is a hungry animal.
Two days later a woman in Zurich wrote to me. She wanted a panel two metres wide for a stairwell. Paid the deposit the same week, no haggling, no "can you do it cheaper if we skip the gold." I asked her later what made her write. She said the slippers. She said it looked like a real person's floor, not a showroom.
Meanwhile the professionally shot photos I paid a photographer 400 euro for, the ones with the grey backdrop and the careful angles, they got the likes. Nothing else. Likes and nothing.
I still don't fully understand what I'm doing out here. I post less now and half of it is badly lit. But I've stopped pretending the work happens in a white room, because it doesn't, it happens in my kitchen with one cat sitting on the tesserae I just sorted.
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The slippers bit is nice but I think the real thing she responded to was the grey. A polished red smalti photo is just a colour, it says nothing. The bad-light shot told her where the material actually lives, in a room, under ordinary light, near your feet. That's rarer than people think.
I work in print, and it's a similar trap. A perfectly photographed plate is already halfway to being a poster of the work. The proof with the registration off and the ink smudged is closer to the thing itself. Walter Benjamin would have had something to say about which one is the aura.
Careful though, I don't think "post the bad photo" is a strategy, it becomes its own kind of showroom in about five minutes. The version that worked was honest by accident. Once you're staging the mess, Zurich can smell it.
What did you make for the stairwell in the end? Two metres is a serious commitment.
You're right about the grey, and it stings a little to admit it. I nearly cropped the slippers out and left the grey, and now I think that would have been the better photo. The material only makes sense under the light it's actually going to live in, and a stairwell in Zurich is not a studio.
The proof with the registration off. Yes. I have a photo from a restoration job in Veria, half the tesserae still on the paper, and it tells you more about the work than the finished panel ever does. The finished thing can only be looked at. The messy one tells you how it was made.
What's the rest of the thought, the "careful though"? You cut off right where it was getting interesting.