In a recent blog post titled “Breaking Out of Being Broke”, Randy Gage reminded me of an anecdote about one of my favorite authors.

In 1964, Ayn Rand published a book titled The Virtue of Selfishness. When asked why she chose a word that would offend so many people, her reply was “For the reason that makes you afraid of it.”

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” - William Hutchinson Murray (oft mis-attributed to J. W. v. Goethe)

Check out the boldness of this boy (and his parents!). A boy, wearing a pink sundress to school, risking ridicule and hazing from his peers, because he feels it’s important to announce to the world that he likes pink? That’s bold.

I think that far too often we as businesspeople (and particularly those of us in the arts) underestimate the value of being so bold. We’ve been practicing a “play it safe” mentality for so long, that it’s become a habit.

We’ve forgotten that great things are not accomplished by people who play it safe.

The United States wasn’t founded by people who were playing it safe. The light bulb, the microchip, the automobile, the refrigerator, franchising, cell phones, the Sistine Chapel, the great dome of the cathedral in Florence, the Eiffel Tower — none of these things were created by people who were playing it safe. They all risked, they all went where noone had gone before, they all ventured where there was no road and left a trail for the rest to follow. For all of these things to come into being, boldness was required.

I know firsthand how difficult and frightening it is to be so bold. We pour a lot of our heart and soul into our work, and when we show it to the world, it feels like we’re exposing our deepest thoughts and fears on an easel for all to see, shouting all of our secret anxieties from the rooftops. It makes us vulnerable. It’s painful when people make vitriolic comments. It’s depressing when we get a lukewarm response. Even constructively critical pointers from people who sincerely want to help us improve our craft can be painful.

As a schoolchild I experienced the torture of being the teased one: the recipient of jeers like “Dumbo” because my ears stuck out, the bookworm in a classroom full of jocks, the one who was easy to beat up on because I was smaller and less physically strong than many of my peers, the one who would rather visit the library than than go to the keger.

To this day, memories of the sting from those emotional and physical bruises remain with me. Sometimes it makes it difficult for me to talk about what my photography really means to me. Sometimes it causes me to not make a photograph that I really want to make, that I believe would be beautiful and uplifting and maybe even inspiring, because some aspect of it might be unpopular and I don’t want to experience the discomfort of ridicule and persecution that I may have to face if I were to show it publicly.

I’ve allowed my fear of ridicule to undermine my willingness to be fully self-expressed in my business, to inhibit my boldness. I know I’m not the only one.

The simple truth is that without boldness, we as small business people simply cannot succeed. Take a look at the boldness you’ve already shown: You’ve decided to start a business. You’ve “hung out your shingle”. You’ve started a website or a blog about your business. You’ve posted on Twitter or FaceBook about your business. You’ve approached your friends and neighbors about becoming clients. You’ve approached total strangers about becoming clients. You’ve joined a Chamber of Commerce, or BNI, or other business networking organization.

If you’re anything like me, most (if not all) of these things required you to be bold, to step outside of your comfort zone, to do something that you were, at first, afraid to do.

In order to make our businesses as successful as they can be, we have to be willing to take that boldness even further, and make what we offer to our clients truly unique and full expressions of our true selves, as Michael Port and Napoleon Hill encourage us to do, in their respective books, Book Yourself Solid and Think and Grow Rich.

Particularly inspiring to me in this regard was a passage from the article about the boy and the pink sundress, where the mother writes:

I warned Sam carefully that if he wore it, he would probably get teased. He was undeterred, adamant about wearing the dress; clearly, avoiding teasing was a lower priority for Sam than simply being himself. I could see that standing up for his choices in a relatively safe and supportive environment was a useful life lesson. And it occurred to me that having confidence—being proud of who he is, even if he’s different from other kids—is the best defense against the inevitable ridicule.

What a powerful lesson! What if we could all learn to make the avoidance of teasing a lower priority than simply being ourselves? What if being proud of who we, even if we’re different from other kids, really is the best defense against the inevitable ridicule? How powerful would that make us as businesspeople, as creatives, as human beings?

“If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.” - Seth Godin, The Dip

Well, I’m gonna steal a page out of that little boy’s book, and wear my pink frilly dress to school. This scares the living daylights out of me, because in the following statements I risk alienating a lot of potential clients. Many of you won’t like what I have to say, but I have to say it, because it’s a fundamental part of who I am and how I do what I do. So … here goes nuthin’:

I got my first camera when I was six years old. The little Kodak Pocket-Instamatic with “normal” and “telephoto” settings was a Christmas gift from my mother, and I’ve been addicted to photo gadgetry ever since. It became a hobby/distraction/side-line thing for me while I pursued other interests in aviation and computer science.

In 1991, I first encountered the photographs of a man named Jock Sturges. I was fascinated by his imagery, not just because he had the boldness to publish books (over half a dozen now) filled with stunningly beautiful photographs of naked people including children and teenagers, but far more importantly because I, as a complete stranger to these people, could look at their photographs and feel like I knew them personally. He, and the people in his photographs, had the boldness to be who they really are, and to show it to the whole world.

I’ve since had the honor of studying with Jock, and am coming to understand how and why he makes these images, and I am all the more inspired for it. His dedication to craftsmanship, and his deep and undying respect for the people with whom he works is nothing short of magnificent to me.

My photographs want to be like his when they grow up.

Yup. That’s right. I want to photograph you nude. And your family. Yes, even your kids.

Now don’t take that the wrong way. Just because I want to photograph you with no clothes on, doesn’t mean I will, if you don’t want to. I want my photographs to be like Jock’s, and that means having the utmost respect for the people that I photograph. If you don’t want to be photographed nude, that’s perfectly fine. Most of my clients choose not to be nude for their photographs, and that’s OK with me. More important to me is that I’m photographing the real you — the beautiful and interesting person that you are inside … which is precisely why, even if you choose not to be photographed nude, I’ll still want you to have it as an option to consider (and I mean really, seriously consider, not just dismiss out of hand because the idea rejects the commonly advertized “reality”).

“So,” I hear you asking, “If photographing the real me is most important, why does he want me to be naked? I don’t have to be naked to be myself!”

Very true. You don’t have to be naked to be yourself, but it helps. Here’s why I think so:

“What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?” - Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

I want to photograph people nude because to me the human body, displayed with dignity and respect, is among the most magnificent and beautiful things in the universe. I hate the idea we’ve been indoctrinated with that says “clothes make the man”. It’s not our clothes that makes us pretty, or hip, or smart, or worthwhile human beings. It’s precisely the other way around. That, and the ubiquitous corporate logos that are stamped all over clothing these days do nothing but distract from the beauty and interestingness of the person wearing them, making photographs of people look more like photographs of fashion, or fashion rejects. When you make the clothes generic, or remove them entirely, you can allow the person’s character to emerge into the photograph.

I want to photograph people nude because I want them to feel beautiful, just the way they are.

I was fortunate to grow up in an environment where I was exposed to nudity in many different forms: As a kid, I was allowed to run around the house and yard naked whenever I wanted. I was never chastised or scolded if I saw my mother naked. She would “drag” me to art galleries filled with paintings and sculptures of naked Greek gods and Christian saints and Venetian women. When visiting my grandparents over summer vacation people of all shapes and sizes and ages would be naked at the beach.

Exposure, at a young age, to the wide variety shapes that humans come in taught me respect for, and acceptance of, my own body and those of others. I never had to “play doctor” to find out what girls looked like “down there”. I never felt uncomfortable or embarrassed about being seen naked (e.g. while changing in the locker room after gym class), nor, to my knowledge, did any of my friends (of either gender) from my grandparents’ village.

I want to offer people the opportunity to feel what it’s like to break free of the stifling body image stereotypes that pervade our media; to give them the opportunity to feel what it’s like to be photographed nude with respect and dignity.

I want them to know that there’s at least one person in the world that thinks they’re interesting and beautiful and worthwhile enough to invest the time and effort in, that is required to produce a finely crafted photograph of them.

I want to photograph families like Bernard Landon does, whose clients uninhibitedly celebrate their beauty and togetherness.

I want to work with people who think like this woman, and these women (featured in Glamour magazine!), who have discovered that they don’t have to look just like Barbie, or fit into a size-zero dress to be beautiful — that their outer beauty is a reflection caused by their inner beauty, and that many of the things which our culture calls their “flaws” are the things that make them individually and uniquely beautiful. (Which raises an interesting question: Can you feel good enough about yourself to want to be photographed nude? If not, why not? Think about it!)

I want to photograph people nude because I feel that there are few things that reproduce as beautifully on film as human skin.

And I want to photograph people nude just because I want to.

How’s that for bold?

“If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Göthe

A few days ago, I read the story of Billy Miller, an American soldier who, while deployed in Afghanistan, was arrested on charges of possessing child pornography for having pictures of his niece in a one-piece swimsuit!!!

I am outraged. I am incensed. I am furious.

I despise pornography, in all it’s forms, and especially child porn. I think it’s disgusting, debasing, and disrespectful. If consenting adults want to participate in the making of such filth, that’s fine by me, but I want no part of it. I won’t make it, and I won’t watch it.

This hysteria and paranoia over pictures of kids, however, has gone too effing far!!! Pull your heads out, people! Nudity is not the same thing as pornography!!!!! The demonization of nudity is both irrational and counterproductive. Such an attitude teaches our young people to feel fear and embarrassment about their bodies, at a time in their lives when they desperately need to learn to respect themselves. It’s stupid.

Think about this for a minute:

How do we judge other cultures? How do we decide how “advanced” they are or were? How do we know what we know about how they lived and what their societies were like? Take the Greeks and the Romans as examples. How do we know what we know about them, their culture, their way of life? What did they leave behind for us to know them by?

Art. The artifacts created by their artists, artisans and craftsmen. Paintings, mosaics, carvings, statues, poems, plays, literature, music.

What does it say about our culture, when the creation of such things is forcibly stifled? Aren’t we supposed to be a society that values freedom?

Over the last two weeks, several people I know have experienced the trauma of having their Flickr or FaceBook accounts terminated, or individual images removed, because their photographs included something that is perfectly acceptable in their local culture: naked people, some of whom are children.

In defense of Flickr and FaceBook, their terms of service include prohibitions and controls on images depicting nudity. They do this partly because they want to attract as many people as possible to their services, so they want to be sensitive about offending people. Thus, they put policies in place about keeping some things out of the open-to-the-public areas, but allowing them in private, invite-only areas. I’m perfectly fine with that. As a libertarian, I respect their right to run their business the way they want to. Those servers are theirs, that software was created by them, and they have the right to control how and to whom they give access to it.

For more examples of this kind of prosecutorial zeal, involving many different facets of everyday life, see Harvey Silverglate’s book Three Felonies a Day.

Images involving naked children, however, are a different story. In a society where parents can be imprisoned or have their children forcibly removed from them simply because the person at the 1-hour photo lab doesn’t like that they have snapshots of the toddler in the tub (as in the case of Lisa and A.J. Demaree), or running through the garden sprinkler in their undies, or for an art class assignment (as in the case of Toni Marie Angeli), it’s no longer an issue of what the service providers want. It’s an issue of over-zealous prosecutors using laws with rubber-band meanings as a cudgel to punish people for behaving, not in ways that are legitimately harmful to others, but merely in ways that they don’t approve of.

The service providers, in an effort to avoid being accused of harboring “kiddie porn”, delete anything that might even remotely resemble such filth, and end up banning totally innocent and benign images, “just in case”. Understandably, they don’t want to face having to defend themselves in court. Even if the images are found to be legal, the cost in time and money to defend them in court is so astronomically high, that they’d go bankrupt.

This is how a small but vocal minority abuse the authority of government to force their prudish views about nudity on everybody, including those in their own country who don’t share those views, and even people in foreign lands where their laws have no jurisdiction.

The internet is a world-wide phenomenon. People from all different lands and cultures can use it to communicate with each other.

People from Europe find it difficult to understand why Americans seem to think that the female breast is something obscene. People from southeast Asia and South America and Africa wonder why they have to flag photographs of their kids frolicking in the river as “Not Safe For Work”.

What does it say about our society, when we allow our judicial system to be used as a threat to prevent people from freely sharing their culture with the world; when we allow a small minority of zealots to wield the police and the courts as weapons against others who would say something they don’t like?

How many photographers, painters, poets, songwriters, playwrights, sculptors, authors and musicians never expressed what was truly in their hearts, because they were afraid of going to jail for it? How many beautiful, inspiring, uplifting, informative, challenging ideas were never made into photographs, sculptures, paintings, books, poems and songs, because the artists didn’t have the financial wherewithal to defend themselves against the tax-funded court system?

Art is supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to make us uncomfortable. It’s supposed to challenge our ideas. It’s supposed to make us think. It’s supposed to hold a mirror up to our culture and show us the silly, nonsensical things we do by sheer force of habit.

Do we really want to limit the pool of ideas in art to those that will not offend anyone, just because some people are narrow-minded and squeamish?

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” - Thomas Jefferson

Ten generations from now, when people look back on us the way we look back on ancient Rome and make judgements about the morality and ethics of our society, what conclusions must they draw from the art we’ve left behind? Will they be able to see that we were a people who actually believed in and lived by the tenets of freedom and liberty set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, or will they only see the hypocrisy that our modern courts’ interpretations of those ideas have become?

It’s time to end the hysteria, and do what the founders of our nation did: Use our rational minds.

I saw this posted on Twitter, and thought to myself “That can’t be right”. Then a quick Google search confirmed it from multiple sources. I’m about to lose one of my biggest competitors. Kiddie Kandids is no more. It seems that even the biggest of photography chains can underprice itself out of existence.

Truthfully, what I do and what Kiddie Kandids (and so many of the other chain-store photography studios) do is very, very different. Their target market is very different from mine. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the “viewing public” will see us as competitors, however indirect, because both they and I specialize in making portraits of children.

What can you, as a consumer, take away from the demise of this business? One simple rule: Beware the lowest price.

Many, if not most, chain-store photo studios do not set their prices based on a job-costing model. They aim to offer the lowest price to the customer, and cover their overhead operating expenses with volume, leading to a get-them-in-and-get-them-out cookie-cutter approach. Those affiliated with department stores will often go even further, using a loss-leader model where they’ll charge you less than it costs them to make the pictures, to get you into the store, where you’ll buy things from other departments - things that are highly profitable for them. I remember reading about a study done some years ago (sorry, I can’t find the reference to it offhand - if you have a link, or a counterexample, please email me) that claimed that customers who bought the least expensive portrait package from Sears Portrait Studio, ended up leaving the store with something like $400- worth of goods from other departments.

Please remember, when you’re shopping around for a portrait photographer, that you really do get what you pay for.

Who would you rather have making photographs of your kids:

The guy (or gal) making minimum wage at the department store, whose primary purpose is to get you back out on the sales floor as quickly as possible, or the dedicated artist whose sole purpose for being in business is to focus their time and energy exclusively on you for the duration of your stay with them?

The one plops your kids down on the “X”, says “say cheese”, and lets you choose from several notebook-size or smaller pictures that look like every other portrait of every other person you’ve ever seen, or the one who goes out of his (or her) way to photograph the unique individual that each of your kids is, and produces a beautifully crafted photograph worthy of a place of honor over the mantlepiece or the sofa, that you’ll want to hand down to future generations of your family?

One will cost you significantly more money than the other, and there is a time and a place for both (and everything in between). As a wise consumer, it is up to you to decide where on that trade-off continuum you want to buy, and that requires knowing what you’re getting for your money, not just in pieces of paper with pictures on them, but also in the level of dedication to craftsmanship and service that your photographer invests in their making.

Many people think that they can’t run a business, or do sales, or network, because they’re introverted.

Not true. If I can do it, so can you! No really! You can!

How do I know? I know because it would probably violate several laws of physics to be more introverted than I am.

Have you ever heard of Dr. Ivan Misner? The one who’s written almost a dozen books, writes columns for entrepreneur.com, founded the business networking organization BNI, heads the Referral Institute, goes on TV and talks about networking, blogs about networking, stands up in front of crowds of hundreds of people and teaches about networking? Yeah, that Dr. Ivan Misner. He’s an introvert, too!

He talks about it in this blog post on successnet.com.

If we can do it. So can you.

This week, I found out about the Help-Portrait movement, and decided to put together an event for the Seacoast area.

I’m looking for as much help as I can get with this project - location, volunteers, publicity, etc. - for all the latest, visit the SeacoastNH page:

http://community.help-portrait.com/group/seacoastNH/

The myth of the overnight success is deeply embedded in American culture. Unfortunately, it’s just that. A myth.

This is borne out in the research that Napoleon Hill did for his book Think and Grow Rich; George Leonard makes the same point in a different way in his book Mastery; Malcom Gladwell gives several examples of classic “success stories” - and the backstories behind them - in this talk to AIGA.

So, if “overnight success” is a myth, where does success come from?

In short, it comes from that silly little saying we all heard as children: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” It comes from trial and error. It comes from failing over and over and over again, from finding all the ways that don’t work (e.g. Thomas Edison’s 10,000 ways to not make a working light bulb) until the way that works is found. It comes from practice, practice, practice.

It comes from being so dedicated to your craft that you’re willing to spend 4 hours a day for ten years practicing and honing and perfecting it.

Success comes from perseverance. It comes from being willing to wait, and let the creative process work. It comes from being willing to defer gratification.

Perhaps that’s why it is so rare in today’s right-now, microwave-is-too-slow, instant-everything world.

The holiday season is approaching quickly. Halloween is a little over a week away, followed quickly by Thanksgiving, and then (GASP!) Christmas. My how time flies. Seems like only a year ago that we were doing all this … ;P

Just a quick reminder and heads-up for those interested in having me make portraits to give as Christmas gifts, the photographic session needs to be scheduled before Thanksgiving so that I can deliver finished photographs in time. That’s a whole whopping 38 days. (YIKES!)

Follow me on Twitter to watch for special offers!

A lot, I think - just like they can teach us a lot about life, if we’ll just pay attention.

Melissa Cassera makes some interesting observations about some of the things we used to know as kids, and have forgotten as we “grew up”:

Why You Should Act Like a Kid When Running Your Business

Reading Melissa’s remarks made me realize something I hadn’t thought of before — that one of the reasons I love what I do, is that I treat it as play, as much as I treat it as work.

I recently had the pleasure of working with a wonderful family that fully embodies the zest for life that draws me to my work.

These two girls are full of energy

curiosity

and a playful joie de vivre that brings a smile to my face and contentment to my heart

People like this are why I so love what I do.

Thank you so much for being who you are, and for sharing it with my camera and me.

(Thanks also to Adam Flaherty, who filmed and produced this cool video of our time together.)