I want to talk a little bit today about careers in fine art photography and I think of all the years that I've done this show this is probably one of the questions that just gets asked the most.

In fact I had two emails this week basically asking me about that and I think part of it has to do with the fact I used to work in the museum world and

also interestingly enough and I'm going to speak a little bit to this today about the fact that this year I have gotten to spend time interviewing

eight very successful photographers. And so I'm going to kind of talk a little bit about

that and bring that into the equation because I think this is something that people

it's very hard to get

your head around and particularly if you look at the contemporary art world and you look at some of the

big names in contemporary art and a lot of these people are rock stars. There is no rhyme or

reason or one way any of them became popular or their work became collectible. Sometimes

it's debatable whether the work is actually decent and has any merit to it or not.

When you come down to the gallery level, the quality goes way up,

but still, if you do a survey of people who are successful,

it doesn't seem to be any kind of one pattern or one way to go about it.

And I think that becomes very frustrating for photographers that want to pursue that is a direction.

So I want to talk about some thoughts on that a little bit today.

And as I mentioned of the photographers that I spoke to this year,

I didn't ask it the same way in every interview,

but that is a topic that I kind of tried to get around to with

everybody is what would their advice be for photographers who are trying to have a go

with this and it's interesting because there were two photographers that I think really gave the most logical answers to this.

One of them was Graciella Itavide, who I interviewed in Mexico City two weeks ago.

And she put it very simply, and we were towards the end of the interview and I

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