the road: mark olwick

Sometimes success can be completely different from what you thought it would be.  I grew up wanting to be the next great National Geographic photographer.  It turns out that there was something else that made me happier.

In my blog post about Intimacy and Photography, I talked about turning your lens inward – connecting with what truly makes you happy, and then following that bliss.  In the world of megapixels, Internet forums and Flickr “critiques”, it’s easy to get distracted by what everyone else thinks success is. I found that the images that I enjoyed making weren’t ones that I had to do a hundred calculations on, or needed to fiddle with menus, etc.  I needed to stay creatively in the moment and have the camera get out of the way.  That’s why I settled on shooting with a Holga for most of my creative work.

So I got out there and started shooting with it.  A lot.  Then I shot some more.  I didn’t really look at other examples of this type of photography, I just looked at my own shots and then tried to figure out how to do it better.  Simple as that. Once I had a set of images that I was happy with, I decided to submit them to galleries, since this was where my market was.  It’s tough to do – I don’t really handle rejection well. 

I’m currently part of the Plastic Fantastic show at the LightBox Photographic Gallery in Oregon.  They had more than 350 entries from multiple countries and I was fortunate enough to have three of mine chosen for that show.  I found out about that opportunity by reading the forums at toycamera.com.  They have a section for exhibition opportunities.  Each gallery publishes the guidelines for submissions (also called a prospectus).  Be sure to adhere to them – conduct yourself as a professional artist, not a snapshooter.

Choosing which images to submit was difficult.  I ended up using the following criteria: 

• Which photographs reflected my style the best?
• Which photographs were unique?
• Which photographs were the types that I wanted to be “known” for?

What I found by submitting was that everyone has different tastes.  Sometimes they wouldn’t accept any of my images, sometimes I was blown away by the acceptance and comments I received.  The key is to try.  If you can get specific feedback that’s a bonus, but sometimes it’s just a matter of fitting the style of show that the gallery has in mind.

By turning the camera inward though, I became honest with myself.  It wasn’t until then that I started to stand out from the crowd and find that my work was unique.  As a result, I’ve started to achieve success with a type of photography that truly makes me happy.  And that’s what it’s all about.

Mark Olwick
www.olwickphotography.com