My ideas for personal shoots tend to get away from me. They always start out as ok, lets do something quick and fun and easy this time — instead of the full circus production my shoots tend to be. Then it snowballs and ends up this as complex elaborate thing. I can’t help myself. But that’s ok because I like the circus.
It used to be that magazines would fund big ambitious creative work, whether it was exploratory photojournalism or over-the-top fashion or whatever it is LaChapelle has been doing all these years. Then print entered its death spiral. But our ambitions for big passion projects never went away.
This decline in accessible financing is affecting all creative mediums: music labels have seen the collapse of their business model and are no longer putting the same money behind their artists. The more indie-oriented branches of film studios have mostly been shut down while the big movie studios have greatly reduced output and have almost abandoned original content creation. And grants for the arts are down with the government and corporations in fiscal hard times.
Amidst all this, perhaps because of all this, two new solutions are gaining momentum: crowdfunding and brand sponsorship. And while not easy to pull off, they each seem to offer benefits over the old regime when one does swing it.
