Planted on well-traveled routes, two pieces of art in town are only temporary residents as part of Laramie Public Art Coalition’s rotating sculpture program.
One Year Left on Laramie’s Wooden Head & Flight Sculptures
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County library’s Amateur Photography Show now accepting entries
All amateur photographers in Hunterdon County are eligible to send entries to the annual Hunterdon County Library System‘s 2023 Amateur Photography Show on display from Wednesday, Oct. 4, through Saturday, Oct. 28, at the Library Headquarters at 314 Route 12 in Raritan Township.
Entries are being accepted until Saturday, Sept. 23. Students aged 12-18 and adults can enter in either the black & white or color categories. Ribbons will be awarded for first, second, and Honorable Mention, with a cash prize for first place. In addition, The Public’s Choice Award will be judged by library patrons.
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Olean hospitality sculpture unveiling set for Oct. 28
OLEAN — A new monument honoring the area’s hospitality industry will be unveiled at the end of October.
Sculpture stolen from Beacon Hill yard founds at flea market
The top half of the Danville Chadbourne sculpture ‘Desire at the Risk of Mimicry’ was…
The Key to Finding Your Ideal Wedding Photography Clients
Want to know the key to finding your ideal wedding photography clients? Be true to yourself. I know, it doesn’t seem like it can be that simple but it really is.
In this article, I’m going to walk you through identifying your ideal client, marketing to them, and booking them. By the end, I’m sure you’ll see that the key is really to know yourself, listen to yourself, and make sure everything you build is in line with that.
Don’t worry, I’ll hide some practical and actionable tips in there for you to try but only if you can do so while being true to yourself.
At the beginning of your wedding photography career, you might be focused on simply booking as many weddings as you can in order to make ends meet and gain experience. But there will come a point — and it will come quickly — when you will value working with awesome clients. They can make or break your day, your wedding season, and your ability to combat professional burnout.
Let’s go figure out who those clients are!
Identifying Your Ideal Client
The first step in finding your ideal wedding photography clients is to identify who that is. Warning: if you get this step wrong then you’ll be confused why you can’t seem to find clients that are the right fit for your business. And perhaps it will provide you some relief that your ideal client might evolve as you do.
Marketers always talk about building a client avatar, picturing the perfect client, and describing everything about them. Sometimes we focus on it too much from a marketing perspective and not enough from a good fit perspective. Let me give an example, you might think you need to market to the brides with the biggest budgets but then realize that you don’t own a suit to wear to their black tie dress code enforced wedding, nor do you want to own that suit.
Conversely, you might think you need to market to the laid-back couple with no budget because you relate having no budget to being laid back. But that’s not ideal either, is it? What would be ideal is a couple who values your style of photography and is willing to pay you enough that you can run a profitable business.
So what does that look like? Analyze your style of photography including how you shoot, pose, edit, deal with money, structure your packages, and communicate. I bet there’s a client out there that would resonate with all of that, let’s find them.
Finding Your Ideal Wedding Photography Clients
The next step is to infuse your style and your values into everything you do. Yes, this includes branding but it means branding in a genuine way. If your brand matches your values and that directs everything you do then such congruence will help you attract the right types of clients.
Maybe instead of making sure you have consistent branding across all your marketing platforms, we should make sure your values are consistent across everything you do. For example, say you’re super laid back about the whole interviewing, shooting, and booking process and you make that clear on your website but then you hit your clients with a super overly aggressive contract. That’s going to turn off the laid-back couple you wanted to book, I’m not saying don’t have a contract I’m just saying think about what you put in your contract.
The more consistent and true to yourself you can be across your marketing but also across all aspects of your business, the more you will reliably attract the right clients. This includes valuing yourself. You don’t want to be so desperate to book the right client that you undervalue your work because the right client is one that values your work.
Marketing to Your Ideal Client
Okay, so we talked a lot about your values and how they determine who your ideal clients are. So guess what? We’re going to talk about your client’s values and use those to help decide how to market to them.
Here’s a hint, it’s very likely that your ideal client will share your same values. Another way to look at it is to ask yourself why someone would book you, that will show you what they value. It will also remind you what it is about you that is worth valuing.
Choose your marketing strategies based on your client’s values. One fail-proof method is to utilize and maximize referrals and references from your past ideal clients. Our best clients come from our best clients because they have shared values and they have a recommendation from someone they trust. Similarly, work with venues or other vendors that have similar values and you can pass referrals between each other.
Booking Your Ideal Client
You identified them, you marketed to them, and they came knocking on your door. Now what? The next step is to get that ideal client to choose you over the other photographers that they’re comparing you to.
Sometimes if you’ve done your job right, booking them is as easy as sending over a contract so make sure you’re ready for the times that happens. In fact, making the booking process easy is a good general tip, be sure to eliminate any barriers or friction that will give people second thoughts. We have a simple booking link where they can choose their package, sign the agreement, and pay the retainer quickly and easily.
But maybe the couple is on the fence or you’re not sure how many photographers they’re looking into. Here’s where it’s important to play to your strengths. We are laid-back and approachable, if we have an in-person meeting with a couple we almost always book that wedding and we’re almost as good on Zoom.
Maybe you’re good at high-pressure sales and creating immediacy or perhaps you kill it at befriending potential clients on social media. You want to walk people down a path where they get closer and closer to booking you, so figure out what the steps on that path are.
In Summary
In summary, the ultimate key to finding your ideal wedding photography clients is to be true to yourself. As creatives we believe that we’re unique and special artists, so be your unique self so that you attract the clients that will value that. Tapping into your shared values will help you build a business that reflects them from marketing to booking and beyond.
I know that this is all fine and good when you’re not desperate just to book a few weddings, desperation can make us do silly things. Yes, do what you have to do to make your budget pan out. But then return to your values.
All clients can’t be ideal, but let’s try to increase the odds by knowing how to identify them, find them, market to them, and book them. So what’s your value-based marketing plan? Why will your ideal clients hire you?!
About the author: Brenda Bergreen is a Colorado wedding photographer, videographer, yoga teacher, and writer who works alongside her husband at Bergreen Photography. With their mission and mantra “love. adventurously.” they are dedicated to telling adventurous stories in beautiful places.
Entangled | Exhibits
Canadian Mennonite University – Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery
Warped Sculptures Suspend Novels, Guidebooks, and Other Print Objects in Borax Crystals
“Highway 1 California: The dream along the Pacific” (2021). All images © Alexis Arnold, shared with permission
For more than a decade, Alexis Arnold has been intrigued by the evolving nature of print. Her ongoing collection, titled Crystallized Books, transforms novels, guides, and maps into gleaming sculptures that consider how we value and use objects. “While I started the series in 2011 partly as a reaction to the vulnerability of printed media, it’s been nice to see a return to the cultural value of printed media while working on the series over the past 12 years. It’s also been interesting (and at times technically frustrating) to see the quality of book printing and binding decline as I’ve been working on the series,” she says.
To create the works, the Oakland-based artist (previously) submerges found volumes into a hot bath of water and borax. “When water boils, its molecules expand, and as the saturated water cools again, the molecules shrink and any excess borax crystallizes,” Arnold tells Colossal. Out of the pools come books coated with dense, translucent clusters that stabilize the objects as warped, crinkled mounds.
Because the crystals make the text difficult—or impossible—to parse, the books in the series become notable for their materiality. Many of the titles Arnold works with have cultural or personal importance, like To Kill a Mockingbird or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, while others reference the waning relevance of print. Field guides and maps are often available online, for example, making a book less necessary but also more precious as a relic of times past.
Read more about Arnold’s practice and peruse an archive of her projects on her site and Instagram.
Detail of “Poems” (2023)
“Audubon rock and mineral field guide” (2019)
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (2020)
“Smithsonian rock and mineral guide” (2019)
“To Kill a Mockingbird” (2021)
“Islamic Maps” (2022)
“Tai Pan” (2020)
“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2021)
“To Kill a Mockingbird” (2021)
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Warped Sculptures Suspend Novels, Guidebooks, and Other Print Objects in Borax Crystals appeared first on Colossal.
Painting + Sculpture + Mixed Media Group Exhibition
The Mannix Project presents the second annual Painting + Sculpture + Mixed Media show. The exhibit includes an eclectic group of artists that will be on display at Ashawagh Hall in Springs on Saturday, September 23 and Sunday September 24. There will be works by artists A G Duggan, Bill Kiriazis, Chip Haggerty, Dan Welden, Edward Cortes, Edward Joseph, Elaine Grove, Gary Chiappa, James Koskinas, Jim…
A biennial in Oregon explores the role of art in political and social critique
The 2023 edition of the Converge 45 biennial in Portland, Oregon, Social Forms: Art as Global Citizenship, is its most comprehensive iteration to date. The show (which was launched as a triennial by founder and gallerist Elizabeth Leach in 2016 before expanding to its current form) is spearheaded by artistic director Derek Franklin and guest curator Christian Viveros-Fauné, who extracted this year’s theme from his book Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art (2018). The exhibition aims to boost Portland’s art landscape, as well as that of the greater Pacific Northwest, featuring around 50 presentations across 15 venues that explore the role of art in political and social critique from the 1960s to today.
The biennial has an overarching focus on Indigenous histories, specifically as these relate to land and water rights and the ecological impact of imperialism and colonisation. Marie Watt’s installation Chords to Other Chords (Relative) (2023) at the Center for Native Arts and Cultures (NACF) (until 13 October) comprises a large-scale sculpture with the words “Turtle Island And” spelled out in neon, with the letters mounted on a plywood structure that has been pasted with photographs and documents related to Indigenous communities, from treaties to theatrical imaginings and images of Indigenous people. “Turtle Island” is the Haudenosaunee name for North America, which comes from the Haudenosaunee creation story. The neon “and” denotes the existence of an abundance of other Indigenous place names and origin stories.
Watt’s work aims to spark and deepen conversations around Indigenous people’s reclamation of the land, and the venue where it is presented tells an interesting story about Portland’s progressive, grassroots efforts to advance the Land Back movement through the donation of infrastructure and funds to support Indigenous-led organisations. The NACF site previously housed Yale Union, a contemporary-art space that transferred the building to the NACF in 2020 to recognise “the value of Native ownership”, Lulani Arquette, president and chief executive of the NACF, said at the time. As Converge 45 opened, other successful Land Back transfers were made in the city, such as the ten acres that house the Native American Youth and Family Center.
Installation view of Richard Mosse’s Broken Spectre (2018-22) Photo: Mario Gallucci
Elsewhere at the biennial, the consequences of resource extraction are explored in two presentations by the Irish artist Richard Mosse. In the multi-channel film Broken Spectre (2018-22) at the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art at Lewis & Clark College (until 15 December), Mosse documents the state of the Brazilian Amazon under former president Jair Bolsanaro’s administration, which promoted ending the demarcation of Indigenous territories and overwhelmingly failed to respond to deforestation alerts. The second Mosse project, a photographic series titled Occidental at Blue Sky Gallery (until 22 October), explores other environmental catastrophes in Amazon, from oil spills to mining.
Powerful works at Converge 45 included the 26 August performance of the Chilean artist Seba Calfuqueo’s Flowing Like Waterfalls (2022-23) at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, where Calfuqueo evoked the flow of rivers through a choreographed presentation in conjunction with their video Alka domo (2017) (until 24 September)—reflecting on the sociopolitical and cultural status of the Mapuche people in present-day Chile. Meanwhile, the Portland-based artist Sam Tam Ham (Sam Hamilton) presents a visceral five-channel video opera, Te Moana Meridian (2022), at Oregon Contemporary (until 7 October), poetically considering the history of the British Empire and what it would mean to relocate the prime meridian, the “centre of the world”, from Greenwich to Polynesia.
Sam Tam Ham (Sam Hamilton), still from Te Moana Meridian (2022) Photo: Mario Gallucci
Several Converge 45 exhibitions are funded by Jordan D. Schnitzer, a philanthropist, real-estate magnate and collector whose name is ubiquitously emblazoned across cultural institutions in Oregon. His collection spans over 20,000 pieces, loaned to institutions worldwide or otherwise stored in his warehouse in Portland (where, last month, one of the latest pieces to come out of David Hockney’s studio was being prepared to be boxed for a forthcoming show).
Schnitzer makes a concerted effort to acquire complete series or career-spanning collections of particular artists’ work, and he has an eclectic range of post-war and contemporary art that is especially rich in prints. His collection includes a vast trove of works by the late Chinese American artist Hung Liu, some of which are displayed in the exhibition A Question of Hu: The Narrative Art of Hung Liu at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University (until 2 December).
The exhibition comes after Liu’s 2021 retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, DC—the first solo exhibition by an Asian American woman in the NPG’s history. Overlooked until recent years, Liu was a prolific painter, weaver and printmaker who spent her formative years living under the Maoist regime, where she developed a signature twist on the Social Realist traditions in which she was trained before emigrating to the US in the 1980s. Her work melds Chinese and Western artistic traditions to foreground stories related to immigration, exile, imprisonment and war.
Hung Liu, S-wan Quan Lake, Red Detachment of Women (1995) Courtesy Converge 45
Elsewhere in Portland, the Jordan Schnitzer Japanese Arts Learning Center at Portland Japanese Garden screened the fittingly meditative film Baku (2012) by the Mexican artist Bosco Sodi (closed 11 September). The film shows a Japanese temple gardener erasing and remaking a gravel garden, a metaphor for resilience and growth. And at the nonprofit Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, the exhibition We Are the Revolution (until 1 December), organised in collaboration with Viveros-Fauné, features works by more than 100 artists and is loosely themed around social critique. A maquette of Hank Willis Thomas’s The Embrace (2023)—an homage to Martin Luther King Jr. that was famously met with mixed reviews—serves as one of its centrepieces.
Another notable work from Schnitzer’s collection at We Are the Revolution is Robert Colescott’s satirical masterwork Homage to Delacroix: Liberty Leading the People (1976). It was acquired by Schnitzer’s mother, the art dealer Arlene Schnitzer, who founded Portland’s Fountain Gallery in 1961, when no comparable spaces existed in the region. She was one of the first to see the enormous talent of Colescott, who was then an unknown artist, as well as to believe in Portland’s potential as an arts hub—a vision that is just now gaining momentum with projects like Converge 45.
- Converge 45, various closing dates, multiple venues in Portland, Oregon
Novartis unveils mural, sculpture exhibition highlighting rare blood cancers
The exhibition aims to raise awareness and educate the public about myeloproliferative neoplasms, a group of rare blood cancers.
