Picture story
At look at my work from behind the curtain
FEBRUARY 16, 2024
4,122 books sold... but what's it mean?
I received an email the other day from Farcountry Press, the publisher of my book, “Wisconsin Barns,' saying that 4,122 copies of the book had been sold over its lifetime.
For those of you who don't remember, the book was a more-than-two-year project with author and barn historian Nancy Schumm Burgess in which we visited every county in Wisconsin. I photographed the state's iconic wooden barns and Nancy interviewed farmers about their love of the land, ingenuity and hard work.
The publisher's email left me excited, and a bit surprised.
Honestly, I've been so deeply involved in my current work that I hadn't paid much attention to the monthly notices documenting sales since the book came out in 2009.
So when I noticed the last line of the most recent email that said “lifetime units sold”/ 4,122, I was like, Whoa! That's a lot of eyeballs!
Then I heard a podcast by Brooks Jensen, the publisher LensWork magazine, a respected, quarterly photography publication. The podcast was entitled, “Yesterday's News, Lifespan of a Book, Part 2.”
As you might guess from the title, Brooks' basic thesis is that photographs, even in books, don't have much of a lifespan.
“The only way those images are seen is that when that book is published and has its day in the sun for a few months or a few years and then it disappears into the collectible market where its hidden from the vast majority of people.
Ouch!
“A book has a lifespan that is mind mindbogglingly short, but yet how many of us photographers are desperate to do a book of our work because somehow we think it will build longevity and make our work more visible.”
Ok, well, I have a slightly different opinion.
While I've found it to be true that a book's popularity might be shorter than we'd like in terms of public acclaim, books tend to be actually seen by many, many sets of eyes once they are in buyers homes, in libraries, on the internet. So, my barn images will be seen by lots more than the 4,122 people who bought the book.
And that's a very good thing because I intended my images to be a historical record of a vanishing American icon, the family farm and the barn that stood at its center.
But there's more to Brooks's idea of a “time in the sun.” Thanks to social media and the web, a photographs today are “out there” for who knows how long.
A website I started of my barn photography, but don't maintain because my work has moved away from the subject matter, is still drawing visitors, 15 years after it was launched. And since I have no plans to take it down, those pictures will be “out there” for as long as I want.
Jensen makes another point with which I do agree; the artist's inner satisfaction. I've said it before—and many artist friends talk about it as if its second were nature—I make photographs to satisfy myself first.
Of course, I love using the camera to communicate my vision of the natural world. And I love the feeling that my work is connecting with an audience.
But the real bottom line is that, in my soul, and in the soul of every artist, I suspect, should, and probably is, what the often-quoted-here Grammy award winning producer and author Rick Rubin has said about his work.
“The audience comes last. I'm not making it for them. I'm making it for me. And it turns out that when you are making something truly for yourself, you are doing the best thing for the audience.”
That's true for followers of Rick Rubin and for the 4,122 people who bought my book.
Copies of "Wisconsin Barns" are available at https://www.farcountrypress.com/details.php?id=432
Ernest J. Schweit is a photographic artist and blogger working in the midwest, southwest and California. His writings are entirely his own and don't rely on artificial intelligence.