Podcast #160 Who is your audience

This week's podcast focuses on understanding who your audience is as a photographer. In general, there are two main groups of consumers of photography. There is the mass audience and then the art-elite audience. Both of these audiences are critical to supporting photographers, but they approach their viewing of photography and what they value is different.  The mass audience is looking for artwork that we like and feel good at when we look at it. This is the type of work that you might find to hang on your wall because you love the place, color, composition. The standards are more along the lines of beautiful photographs that are well composed. This is a huge space to work in. Think of all the calendars, photo books, prints that you have seen.  The art-educated group is examining work not based on beauty, composition or approachability, but rather from an examination of critical trends in contemporary art, breakthroughs in new directions of art and how current work is balanced against the prior history of the photographic medium.  The challenge for the creator is to understand what group is looking at their work and giving them the feedback. If your feedback is coming from one group, but you are targeting another, you might find that your feedback is detrimental to your work. Neither group is more important than the other, but their approach is distinct enough that it can cause angst if you were looking for feedback of one group over another.  The key is to do work that matters to you first and then try to get the feedback from the group you need rather than randomly hoping for critical feedback.