Stockland Martel

And now, if we could take a moment to appreciate all the art buyers out there—the people who daily put themselves in the line of fire, dodging bullets both from photographers and clients alike. Reading Heather Morton’s post this morning at HMAb, “Defending the Art Buyer,” I got a new perspective on what art buyers do. It can’t be easy to balance the needs of your client with the creative preferences of the photographer, not to mention your own desire to commission exciting work.

As Heather, who is a freelance art buyer in Toronto, explains in her post, “Normally, an Art Buyer’s participation in a project starts with this question: ‘Who can best execute this concept.’ Rarely does it start with this question: ‘How can Client X use innovative photography to improve their brand.’” Ouch. She goes on to add: “My job isn’t to ‘fight for the photographer’. My job is to fight for the best expression possible for the brand. Happily, sometimes these things coincide.”  Double ouch. That’s a lot of hard reality for a Tuesday morning.

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“My job isn’t to ‘fight for the photographer’. My job is to fight for the best expression possible for the brand.”

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Heather’s post also made me wonder about how doing this job long-term affects an art buyer’s love of photography, which is what presumably got them into the field to begin with. The closest corollary I can think of, personally speaking, is music journalism. I love music, so it was exciting when, some years ago, I started writing about it for Entertainment Weekly and commissioning album reviews. I’d get stacks of CDs in every day and would happily play them all at least in part to see what we should review in the magazine. It seemed like a dream job.

But it was still a job, and there were needs that had to be met. The readers’ needs: If it’s a major artist’s album, the people want it reviewed, period. (Even I might not have wanted to read another piece on Mariah Carey ever in my entire life, for example.) And the magazine’s needs: EW had positioned itself as a primary arbiter of all things entertainment, so we had to be able to identify interesting under-the-radar artists but to present them in an accessible way for our largely mainstream audience (if a writer was too cool for school he/she was also too cool for us); we also had to think about how our choices affected our relationships with the publicists and record labels.

I can tell you that while I still look back fondly on that job, I also remember feeling that some of my enthusiasm for music had been eroded because of the compromises I had to make, even though most of them were reasonable and I understood them. Is it the same for art buyers? Are they able to hang on to their pure, personal love of photography while making the necessary compromises to deliver the desired results to their clients? For her part, Heather is remaining optimistic:

“I love the idea of Art Buyer as Mentor…. An Art Buyer can and should (when appropriate) bring young photographers along, nudging their vision in the direction of her client, encouraging both parties to meet in the middle. Let’s do it.”

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