I’m sitting in a friend’s basement in Washington, DC, just back from LOOKBetween outside Charlottesville.  Someone upstairs is playing John Prine.  It’s a welcome, soothing sound to my ears after consecutive nights that have almost ended at daylight.  Guitar and the high-rasp of the songwriter’s voice skirt softly along the pitch of the stairwell, spilling onto the landing, sinking into the floor of the empty room.  Traffic huffs by, exhaling it’s long sigh through the red curtains dividing the quiet from the rest of the city.  Sunday is a dim kind of day here, overcast, muted, the kind of day that’s good for decompressing, good for thinking, and, most important, good for resting.  

The weekend was a productive balance of discussions and projections, the kind of event that keeps your mind bouncing back and forth between its right and left sides.  Probably not the kind of thing that everyone is into, but an exercise that, in my opinion, is important.  We’re all on an interesting boat right now.  Given the state of the industry and the inevitable changes in the way that our clients structure their own businesses, our lives as photographers must adapt in response.  I’m an optimist about that in as much as I believe in photography and in the nature of creative people to find avenues of sustainability. 

One of the more significant things that I was able to take away from the weekend discussion groups was a short list of business-related questions that came up in one of the break-out groups.  With little over an hour to work with, I’m sure that I’m not the only one who left the session feeling like the real footwork is something that has yet to be completed.  The topics that were floated around were interesting nonetheless and really helped me to frame out subjects for discussion on this blog column over the next few posts.

In order to best move some of the discussion that we had at LOOK into the bigger public sphere, I’d like to organize the next three or four posts around some of the overarching themes of the weekend.  In no particular order, these topics are as follows:

1. Cooperative and Collective Business Models

2. How to Make Good Business Practices Relevant to Young Photographers

3. The Importance of Building and Maintaining Partnerships

It was a real pleasure to meet so many people this weekend.  Hopefully others will help carry LOOKBetween’s egalitarian ideal into the blogosphere in the coming days and help move some of these conversations forward.  After an event like that, I think the real challenge lies in trying to bring more photographers into the fold and keeping in mind that the predicament of editorial photography isn’t something that happens in a vacuum; we all play a certain role in the solution and that’s a message that I’d like to carry forward.

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Matt Slaby is a Colorado-based attorney (and photographer). Matt attended the University of Denver College of Law on a full public interest scholarship. His experiences in law school include a PILG clerkship for ongoing civil work with El Centro Humanitario’s legal clinic as well as handling wage claims and contract issues for DU’s Civil Litigation Clinic. He is a founding member of Luceo and, in addition to his photography, brings his legal background to the organization. Questions, comments, and ideas for future posts are welcome. Please add them to the comments section or reach me here: mattslaby@luceoimages.com

**DISCLAIMER: Luceo Images LLC and Matt Slaby assume no liability for the information provided above. This information may not be correct when applied to your specific situation. Moreover, the information provided is not intended to create an attorney/client relationship and shall not be construed as legal advice.