Quick recap of a very weird weekend. Bayfront Park in Duluth, MN is a great setting right on Lake Superior. New management of this show seems to have fixed lots of things that were being handled poorly in past years. Load in and out are easy...for an extra 50 bucks you can park your trailer right behind your booth! They did a superb job of keeping the artists flush with water and snacks. Booth sitters were readily available as well.
Attendance was maybe 12,000, maybe. Might have been under 10K. Buyers were out in full force Saturday morning. There seemed to be less activity later and crowds thinned way, way down by 4:00. The show runs until 7 p.m. Saturday but the last two hours it was a ghost town. And this even though the weather was perfect!
I'm from Minneapolis and have photographed Minnesota and the area all my life. I have some killer work that stops people in their tracks. The only thing I lacked at this show was a large selection of wall-ready pieces under $50. My sales here were terrible and it may have been one of those weird, no-explanation deals. For some artists, there's no such thing as a finished piece under $50. I don't know if I'll do this one again. Gotta ponder that. I certainly wouldn't try it again unless I have more offerings at the low end, ready to hang.
Sorry for the very vague nature of this post but this show for me was a head-scratcher. Buyers everywhere except my booth. I did talk to other artists and it was not great for all. Some did just fine, but I know others didn't. It's not obvious to me what the formula here is to have a solid show. Not for every medium anyway. I think the take-away, if there is one, is that your art must be unique, fun, appealing to a young, outdoorsy crowd, and affordable.
Comments
No question, I am re-thinking how to be present different images in my "collections." Small subjects are fine printed smaller. Not tiny, but smaller. They can be jewel-like, but the subject has to match the scale. The trick with landscapes though is to not go too small, because you lose all kinds of detail. In the same vein, you don't want a 6-foot print of a bumblebee on a flower. It would be overpowering.
I do completely recognize that there are shows where the crowd is a $40-$80 group, and if you don't have a good selection in that size you'll fail to see much. So I need to match subject matter to size in order to fill that part of my inventory. Likewise, I'm find there are shows where the crowd is fine with larger works, so I need to choose which images will be appropriate in larger sizes. It's a challenge for sure, not only to match subject to scale to show, but then to create that inventory and have a few variants of bodies of work to match to the show clientele. That's a financial challenge right there.
That does sound like a good plan, though, and I've heard it said right here on this site that we have to keep changing our game and become more flexible, so maybe it's worth a try? Keep us posted...
Not unless I can find out first how many other photographers are doing it. I know that's not normally how it works, but I'm not kidding when I tell you that photography was saturated at this show. Actually I have a strategy in mind were I to try it again...I have a completely unique print presentation. Print surface, mounting and framing-- the whole look I do now is unique, and at Duluth I only had a few pieces sporting this new approach. So I guess if I had everything on the walls done the new way, AND I had a pile of small pieces price really aggressively, then it might work. MIGHT.
But I'm not totally confident that I'd do well because there could still be a half dozen other photographers selling Minnesota/Wisconsin landscapes. And that right there is the rub. I can be as unique as I want, but the customer still has to choose between my regional landscape photography and someone else's regional landscape photography, with many similar scenes. It's just not an ideal situation.
Thanks, Lawrence, I wonder if any other AFI members were there and what their take-away was...were there other events happening concurrently? Well, like you say, a "head scratcher"...do you think you'll try again next year?