The photo that sold the piece had a coffee ring on the paper
I stopped photographing my work the way galleries want. No seamless backdrop, no tripod, no little grey card for the white balance. I shoot it where it lives. On the studio floor with the tray of cut smalti still spilled beside it, the broom somewhere in frame, cement dust on everything.
A gallery person told me last year it looked "unprofessional." Fine. The last three pieces I sold went to people who saw them on my kitchen table, next to a half-finished cup of coffee and a cat tail at the edge of the shot. Two of them told me it was the floor mess that made them trust it, that the polished shots looked like something from a catalogue and they stopped looking.
Meanwhile the gallery took its own photos for the exhibition. Beautiful. Bright. Completely dead. A visitor walked straight past the actual mosaic on the wall, which is standing there glowing, and looked at the printed photo on the label card for forty seconds. I watched her do it.
So now I'm sending out images with my knees in them and my father's old tile nippers lying there and I've made 2 sales this month from DMs about the background clutter, not the work.
I don't fully understand it. I just know that the beautiful photo has stopped doing anything.
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This is true, what you are saying. I am doing Mithila painting here in Madhubani, and I also stopped with the white cloth and the proper light long back. When I put a photo of the painting on my table with the brushes and the small bowls of natural colour still lying there, people reply more. One lady from Pune bought three pieces because she said she could see the work is hand done, not printed. The gallery people want everything to look like it came from a machine. But our art is not from a machine, it is from the hand and from the house, so why we should hide the house? The coffee ring is honest. Only thing I will say, keep one clear full photo also, front and straight, because the buyer wants to see the whole design properly. The mess photo brings them in, the clear photo sells it. Both are needed.
"Why we should hide the house" is the best sentence in this whole thread. And your buyer from Pune understood the thing exactly, she was not buying a painting, she was buying proof of a hand. That is not a small distinction. I paint in oil and wax here in Leipzig, so no bowls of colour on my table, but the same instinct tells me a studio photograph with everything swept away is a kind of lie about how the thing was made, naja, a polite lie that costs nothing and convinces nobody.
"A polite lie that costs nothing and convinces nobody", I will be stealing that, thank you. Oil and wax, so no bowls of colour, but I bet your rags tell the story just as well. The wax especially, that stuff leaves a trail.
What I keep coming back to is that the swept-away studio is a lie about time. It makes the thing look like it arrived, not like it took three weeks of somebody crouching. My floor says otherwise and buyers feel the difference even if they cannot name it.
Madhubani, wonderful. Yours is the real thing, painted on the floor of the house, and they want it lit like a product in a catalogue. "Why we should hide the house" is exactly it. The house is where the work happened, hiding it is a small lie and people feel it.
One lady from Pune seeing hand and not print, that is the whole game. And she is right, you can see it, the line wobbles and the colour sits uneven in the brushstroke and a print cannot do that. Keep the brushes in the frame. The gallery will survive. 🙂