All photographs by Bruce Wolf.
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If you’ve ever owned a cat that had outdoor privileges, you know that they occasionally like to bring home presents. Presents that once were alive. Little beasts that they’ve gone and valiantly slain for you and brought to your doorstep. That’s fine when you have only a cat or two. But when you have almost 40 felines, as Bruce Wolf and his family did when they lived in rural Westchester County, New York, you wind up with heaps and piles of blood-stained presents. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Inspired by the book Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America, Bruce decided to start photographing his pets’ prizes. Shot on a black background, the tender, partially eviscerated bodies of birds, mice, and even insects have the elevated beauty and rich tones of an Old Masters still life. After he’d amassed a collection of these images, he showed them to Gold Bug Gallery Pasadena, which has a next-door shop that reminded him of the store Evolution. “They have a lot of artists who contribute things that are dark,” he told me last week on the phone from Portland, Oregon, where he is now based.
Starting Thursday, Gold Bug will be exhibiting “Death by Cat,” a show of Bruce’s photographs. In a story published Saturday, the Los Angeles Chronicle called it “a scandalous collection,” which is high praise indeed.
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Bruce sent me a short essay he wrote about “Death by Cat.” Here it is:
“About 10 years ago, my wife and son decided that our house should be a sanctuary for any cat that needed a home. As we lived in a rural section of Westchester County, N.Y. the cats we took in were able to roam on more than 70 acres of woodlands. They had access to the outdoors and our house 24 hours a day. Some only lived outside, some never ventured out, some only visited the house every few months, some disappeared. At it’s height the cat population hovered around 40 grown cats. A by-product of this “herd” was that almost daily, we found various animals and birds that they killed during the night. Although this was a problem for us, we knew that this is what cats do for a living, it was part of Nature. We kept the cats well fed and saved any animal that was alive, but we wound up disposing of many, many more dead critters.
Over the course of my career as a Commercial Photographer, I became familiar with a book of Victorian era photographs, called, Sleeping Beauties. Photography was still in it’s infancy in Victorian times and it was extremely rare for the average person to be photographed. As this new technology of photography spread, people soon started having recently deceased relatives photographed as a way of preserving their image and memory. Whether this was promoted by certain early professional photographers is not known, but knowing photographers as I do, it probably was. The photographs in this book are of people posed to be as lifelike as possible and restored, when they died through a violent act or accident. Of course the success of this restoration varied considerably. The images are very powerful.
As I continually disposed of these dead animals, I remembered this book and decided to photograph these animals, in the condition I found them. It was sort of a memorial to the animal. To connect to the Victorian photographs I chose to have all the images on a black background. I did little to “pose” the bodies and hence some are like animal studies, some are comic, some are gruesome, and some reveal the fear and the violence of the death. No matter what the animal, I tried to maintain a certain elegance and dignity in the images. After more than six years of preparing these photographs, this is the first time I am showing them in public.”
For directions and gallery hours, please visit Gold Bug’s website.
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Out of the mouths of reps
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On Tuesday, I went to a panel discussion led by creative consultant Louisa Curtis that centered on the photo industry from the reps’ perspective. The event was geared toward photographers, so the questions were mostly about how the reps market their agencies and their photographers; what they expect from someone they rep; and the importance of relationships and networking.
The panelists were Neil Binkley of Wonderful Machine, David Laidler of Aurora Select, Frank Meo of Meo Represents, Laura Reid of Redux, Tricia Scott of MergeLeft, Robert Bacall of Robert Bacall Representatives, and Gary Hurewitz of Greenhouse Reps.
For me, these were some of the most interesting points made at the event, which was held at Adorama:
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Product photography is going the way of CGI. Robert Bacall noted that still life used to be his bread and butter. Then he gestured to a water bottle at his side and remarked that you might see that bottle in an ad, but it never actually existed—it was all created on the computer.
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It’s not enough to shoot great photos. Many of the reps are encouraging their photographers to expand into video. At Stockland Martel, we’ve been referring to our talent as image makers, an intentionally broad term. Bacall uses the term “media solution providers.”
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E-blasts are out, and direct mail is back in. Well, that’s how the panelists first explained their take on the efficacy of email marketing. They eventually acknowledged that they all still send out e-blasts, but they weren’t very enthusiastic about them as a marketing tool. Everyone talked about how art buyers and creatives spend half their day just deleting emails from their inbox without reading them because they are overwhelmed. A print piece that shows up in their stack of snail mail, on the other hand, at least guarantees that the recipient will see the image and the name. Gary Hurewitz said he’d all but abandoned e-blasts a couple of years ago, when he noticed that everyone else was doing it. He figured if there were fewer direct-mail pieces going out, then his had a better chance of being seen. Makes sense.
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Photographers need to market themselves and not rely on Mommy and Daddy (I mean, their reps) to do it all for them. No further explanation needed on that one…
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This is a relationship business, and you have to network. Get out there and make a physical appearance in the photo community, urged Tricia Scott. Facebooking and emailing are not enough; the old-fashioned in-person conversation is still king when it comes to making a solid connection with someone.
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Because this is a relationship business, people want to work with photographers they get along with. The reps have a brand they’re trying to protect too (for the benefit of their talent as well as themselves), and it’s just not an option to send out a photographer who’s going to ego-trip his way through a project and irritates the client. That’s why, the panelists explained, when a rep looks at a potential new photographer, they assess not just the work but also the personality behind it.
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You have to spend money to make money. A major cliché, I know. But it came up several times. Bacall once ponied up $22,000 to promote a photographer’s baby images. The promo, which was as clever as it was costly, consisted of Fisher Price View Masters for which he had created custom reels of the photographer’s work. A cute way to get potential clients to look at the work while providing a tangible indication of the photographer’s affinity with kids.
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Louisa tells me that she lists upcoming events in her monthly Chatterbulletin, which she archives at her blog.
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