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August 02, 2005

Who Is Lou Jones?

Celebrity Profile by Pat Hunt

Who Is Lou Jones?

Better said, who isn’t Lou Jones? Lou is the epitome of the perfect photographer to profile. He has covered every aspect of business in his thirty-year career and has spanned the gamut of corporate marketing, commercial advertising, publishing, teaching, stock photography and a sought after leader of world tours. And that’s nothing – Lou is just getting started.

(Pat) Please give me an outline of your specialties over the years.

(Lou) We’ve done almost everything. (“We” means his staff, which Lou always credits.) First line of defense has been advertising and collateral work, including annual reports and brochures, which has been very consistent over the years. We also handled a lot of stock. The corporate, industrial, and lifestyle work sold well. We didn’t do much shooting for stock. It came from the commercial work, and sold well for many years, creating the working capital. We also do fine art in terms of exhibitions, books and the selling of individual prints.

(Pat) What was the most fun?

(Lou) Fine art has been the most fun, and the most complicated. However it generates the least amount of money. In order to get started in that area, you have to have a good background like teaching, or some other foundation to make money, and ours has been the commercial work. The rest supports the fine arts. We see curators at galleries, directors at museums, and managers of school galleries. They give us exhibitions and exhibitions give us visibility. We regurgitate that back to the commercial space and send invitations to Art Directors.

(Pat) Do shows at the university level add up?

(Lou) Yes. Shows at cafes and libraries contribute very little to a good resume in the gallery world. But starting at the bottom you learn how to show a portfolio to a person who is going to exhibit you. You learn how to mount the show. You learn how to ship shows and how to deal with content, and cut your eyeteeth on the smaller shows to learn how to make them travel well and be less expensive to mount. But they don’t contribute much to the real world. Galleries on Boston’s Newbury Street, in New York City, or overseas, are where you make real sales in prints and books. If you are lucky enough to have a book you can sell books. Catalogs are worth their weight in gold in the art world, so if you can actually show five to ten pictures in a catalog to a gallery, and send it off with two or three other catalogs, that’s the weight that gets you into the DeCordova’s and the MOMA’s and in the galleries in Washington, DC and San Francisco. The catalogs are really what you strive for.

(Lou) The Universities are good because they are thirsty to fill up every season. Sometimes you book a show two or three years out, but they do catalogs more often and do shows not near your house. You may be in Kansas City, Tennessee, Missouri or Chicago, and you can invite your constituency to the show in those areas. It really makes a big difference when you can touch your mailing list.
If you can get someone to come to a show once, you can get them to buy books and prints. You have to have a resume. That’s the only thing museums look at. Somebody else has already given you their stamp of approval for what you are working on and the higher up the food chain you go, the more sophisticated the work has to be. You will have to break new ground. The case and point being that Death Row was very, very consciously done to be provocative. Whether or not curators were in favor of the death penalty, they were motivated to go see what it is all about.

(Pat) Tell me about Death Row and its evolution.

(Lou) The name of the book is Final Exposure, Portraits From Death Row. The exhibition is up at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire right now. At one point, I had a full studio with five people working for me, doing annual reports and showing the portfolio, and I had a rep that showed the book to advertising agencies all over the northeast.
I realized that somebody might see an ad, and say: “Oh Lou, I love the ad,” but most often your name is not attached to it. You may have stock in a company and get the annual report that I shoot, but you don’t know my name. My legacy as a photographer was very ephemeral if all I did was commercial work. Because I love this business and the career of being a photographer so much, I really had to put a stamp on something. Now I had been moving toward fine art and doing small shows, but I realized that I finally had to do something that was a real project. And it took me a year and a half to come up with an idea, an idea that was not derivative, such as taking pictures of landscapes or pretty girls, and things that other people had done. In order to break into the field of fine art, you have to do something non-derivative, something interesting and rarely done. The death penalty was something that I had an argument with my father about as a young boy, so it was something that I was passionate about, but how to make it into art----? I had been doing the gallery scene and had done parts of books, but this was the first book that we did from beginning to end, plus marketing it - we, meaning my staff.
They got me on the airplanes; they did all the legwork to find people. I composed the letters and got on the phone to talk to people at critical moments. Hundreds of letters went out to lawyers and social workers just to get us to the first death row inmate. We must have sent out 250 letters.

(Pat) That sounds like a challenging and difficult process?

(Lou) It’s impossible (in an exclamatory way)! Have you heard the term: “Art is process”? The death row project is hopefully a decent art project. You can look at the photography and see that someone is on death row and understand their story. BUT, the book is about the process, and how long and how hard and how arduous the process was. And that is what ART in the fine art world is about.
Once we got in, what do we do with it? We learned along the way. This book is as much our learning about people on death row, and what prisons are and what the judicial system is, and what you do to get this work in front of curators.

(Pat) I assume you got releases?

(Lou) We got releases up the Wazoo! We were not going to put ourselves in any kind of position where we could be in trouble.

(Pat) Did you find that these people were glad talk to somebody?

(Lou) No. Being in the process of exposing themselves like this gets them killed so there is no incentive. The lawyers say it’s against their religion to let their client say anything. If you get the two of them to say yes, the prison will say no, so we had to convince all three entities. The book is really about how hard this project was. And that is what art is. You go to Christo and see 7500 gates and say - I could have done this - well DO it! Twenty million dollars and twenty years of life to get the city to put it up------!

(Pat) How long did this project take, and how did you publish it?

(Lou) One year to convince the first inmate to say yes. Six years once we finally interviewed twenty-seven inmates, and it took me nine months to write the book. That’s from conception to buying the book. The first publisher came to us. That was the only lucky thing that happened. We did a little exhibition for the Photographic Resource Center in Boston and a Northeastern University Press publisher came to the talk. He came up to us right after and said they’d like to publish the book.
University presses are a good way to break into the publishing world. Again, you have to have a project that is different from other people but they knew that nobody else had anything like this. Now, publishers are a whole other world. The fine art world is one minefield, and the publishing world is another minefield! Publishers are really, really bad. They have one secret that nobody is willing to admit to. They know that you will sell your mother to get your book published, so they can manipulate that. And they are very sophisticated in doing so and working that little nerve. They will pull back and they will manipulate you and change your book according to what their vision is by chipping away slowly so the book is not really originally what you had in mind. Second book - maybe you are sophisticated enough to watch out. But for early books they know they have you over a barrel.

(Pat) You have 2 books?

(Lou) I have one full book now, and the second one is in the hopper. We’ve been involved in compilations, and other book projects. We have had the Death Row book published twice. The second publisher was the AFSC.

(Pat) So how can two different publishers work on a book without stepping on each other rights?

(Lou) That’s part of the secret of how you publish. You don’t want to give away rights to your publisher forever. And they want you to, so you won’t be able to sell the TV rights, or the European rights, or the serial rights, which allow you to sell it in sections to other publications like magazines. They really try to tie you up, so you have to watch. My rep at the time had a background in publishing so she tried to protect that. Finally, when we realized that they weren’t going to republish it even though it was selling well, we went about getting back the rights to republish it.

(Pat) Why do you suppose that they weren’t going to republish it if it was selling well?

(Lou) Because that’s what publishing is. Publishers are the devil incarnate and they are evil people.

(Pat) Can I quote you on that?

(Lou) You can, absolutely! I tell it to every class I teach on publishing books because you need to know that! You need to watch for that going in because they are trying to make money. They only care that they know they can sell 4000 books and they know what their price point is. They know exactly how many they have to sell to make a profit, and they know how much it’s going to cost to make the book. So they will tell you that they will publish 4000 books, and when they republish you get half the profits. Isn’t that a great deal! However, they are never going to publish 4001! Ever!

(Pat) You are working on publishing your second book?

(Lou) Yes, we are publishing a book on travel photography. It’s a little closer to: “how to go about being a travel photographer.” Each book that you publish has to have the right publishers. You can’t assume that just because you have a relationship with a publisher the next book will be there. This publisher publishes text books, photo books, and ‘how to’ books and they have been doing it for years so that’s their market and they know it well.
We have had to do a lot more research on who the constituency is and whom the book will appeal to, as they don’t do that for you. The sales and the marketing of the book now fall on the authors and artists. You have to be aware of that. You have to tell them before they will even talk to you who the market is for this book, in a statistical way.
You may need to find an affinity group. The most obvious example is cookbooks. Cookbooks do well because everybody wants to eat and everybody wants to cook, so people will go out and buy two and use one. So you can always sell cookbooks. It’s a well-known affinity group. BUT, if you want to do pictures of dogs, you have to find out how to get in touch with clubs and publications that are interested in dogs, in order to provide the publisher with a statistical analysis and a framework in which to market the book. They only do a small amount of that work.

(Pat) You keep talking about teaching. How much teaching do you do?

(Lou) I do a few workshops every year on different subjects. I come in and talk to people who invite me. Now I am getting paid to lecture so that is becoming substantial revenue every year. They pay me a stipend. That’s part of the fine art/publishing business. You can actually get paid to talk. You can make chump change to about $1000 but I am trying to get it higher. There is not much money in the photo world. The thing is that I can go and sell books. It’s almost a closed circuit.
The only books that make real money are textbooks. Selling 5000 photo books is a huge success. That’s a very good book. You get a small royalty check every month.

(Pat) But it can give you major credibility?

(Lou) It’s the best calling card in the industry. When you toss a book on somebody’s desk, whether it is an art director or a gallery director, it’s unbelievable what a difference it makes.

(Pat) Let’s go into the commercial business.

(Lou) One wears a lot of different hats in this business. The really good photographers specialize in one thing and really learn how to do it so they know how to market their commercial work. They know the Art Directors, and their mailing list is very sophisticated. My mailing list is outrageous because I have gallery owners, art directors, creative directors, and marketing directors of companies. Twenty-five years ago when I was struggling, a photographer friend of mine said: “if you really want to make it in this business you go directly to the companies.” The marketing directors are the people who are loyal and easier to see.
We started to do more complicated annual reports and brochures, and we pushed the limit trying to do a little bit more for each client than they asked for. We tried to learn a little bit more about lighting so that we never got flummoxed. In the old days it was knocking on doors and taking your portfolio around. I got substantial return on that, but if you were sending out mailers it was shot gunning.

(Lou) Now, you can’t even get in to see anyone anymore. The drop off policy killed those statistics because the drop off policy is again shot gunning. It’s one step above sending a mailer. I call this business - chasing dragons.
If you want to go completely digital you have to realize that you have to buy the cameras, the software, the computers, and all the new stuff every 3 years. Now it’s down to 2 ½. That’s chasing the dragon. If you are twenty-eight years old you are Sir Galahad. You are young and energetic and you are out there chasing the dragon. As your business becomes more sophisticated, with a studio, an office and staff, chasing that dragon becomes a capital investment. Chasing the advertising business means you put several very sophisticated portfolios together, follow up on the day of drop off, and do emails. You may reach a point where you say I don’t want to chase THAT dragon anymore. My Holy Grail or quest is no longer putting a computer on my staff’s desk every 2½ years. I can work with this computer now till it falls apart! I can do just fine. I don’t have to crank out hi res files, Tiff, RGB, etc.

(Pat) Well what dragon are you chasing?

(Lou) In a way I am trying to re-brand Lou Jones - so that I don’t get hired because I am the cheapest estimate in the stack. I can’t be the cheapest anymore. I have two on staff and a big studio. You can do with less people because the computer has enhanced that. I am being hired often because they want Lou Jones! It took thirty years to get to that point
We do the treks in American Photo Magazine, which is owned by Popular Photography. They started five years ago doing travel treks where you take a group of people half way around the world. The number of people who want to shoot and the number of people who travel is enormous. I have led maybe a dozen treks. The ad says (double page spread) - Go to Egypt with Lou Jones. They will pay to go to Egypt. I am paid to lead the trek. I do it two to three times a year. They are a lot more fun than you can possibly imagine because the people are extraordinary. I met a chief justice of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and we became friends. Nice guy! You get to shoot a lot of things that are hard to find. You go to difficult places to access and you sell books.

(Pat) Where do you market your stock?

(Lou) I send most of my stock to Lonely Planet, which is specialized in travel. My editorial work goes to Zuma in California and Index Stock Imagery in New York. Zuma is very aggressive and my Olympic stuff goes there. I shoot the Olympics every two years. In the old days what I did for business went into stock so I could submit a lot. This era is a lot more selective but I am very aggressive about building the travel and editorial imagery, such as the Death Row and Olympics material. One of my big clients in New York wants to build up a stock library so I may go that direction. Business in today’s world is changed by the way we market and exchange information. You can’t get in to show portfolios now and it’s hard to market online. But, the Internet gives you an amazing opportunity because it expands the number of people you can talk to, so my life now is a laptop computer and an International cell phone. I answer the phone 24 hours a day. I’m floating down the Nile and someone calls from Philadelphia. I get clients laughing at me! It vibrates and I pick it up and say: “Studio”, as if I’m in my studio. Wherever I am, I am in my studio.

(Pat) What is your favorite place in the world to be?

(Lou) The next place! It’s always exciting to travel. I’m always learning. I’m interested in absolutely everything.

(Pat) What about equipment?

(Lou) Sixty-seven percent of pro photographers are Mac based because they are dealing with postproduction. We don’t do post production. I am shooting all film - Kodak - the E series for 2 1/4 and the Fuji Ready Loads for 4x5. We shoot a lot of 4x5. We have shot only three jobs in the last year in digital. I will supply film and I have made a deal with my Color Lab, and they will do the hassle and they bill me. The manager there is a saint! He handles all the problems without me being in the middle.

(Lou) I see the industry becoming like the rest of the corporate world, forcing photographers into work-for-hire and offering fewer places to publish images. There are entities like On Request Images that competes in the stock space with assignment photographers, where photographers do custom spec shoots for clients and give them to their stock agents. Photographers are now a commodity. There are very few places that will take stories and images. So you have to find more creative ways to represent your work, like MacTribe, for instance. If it were easy, everybody would do it. We don’t want easy.

(Pat) Are you saying that the business has changed enough to no longer be viable?

(Lou) I read a thing the other day: “The industry is not hostile to photographers, just indifferent. It doesn’t owe you a living, even if you have a good idea!

Posted by Pat at August 2, 2005 08:34 PM

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