My career is perhaps easier to explain. When I left grad school, my goal was to teach, work with galleries with my personal work and do commercial assignments. It took me awhile to figure out you can’t do all 3 or at least all 3 well. Within 6 weeks of arriving in Seattle, I had a gallery, apart time teaching gig at Seattle University and my first client who was a friend of q friend. For the first 3 years I pretty much lived off of work in DC with all old Hunter Millerites. I think you and I may have done a shoot or 2. I got to hate architectural work. It was really demanding, didn’t pay all that great and the gigs were most often all nighters at some law office. It was a bit of a grind. But after 3 years I met an artist’s rep who loved my people work and fine art works. She took me on but had no interest in finding me architectural work. Fine with me, I was ready to move on to day job. Teaching was my steady pay, fine art nurtured my soul. The photo fine art scene back then was pretty amazing. Today it is quite boring. Work wise I morphed into an annual report and corporate shooter. Did a bunch of work for this little start up called Microsoft. 10 years on, I realized teaching was a dead end for me, so I quit to concentrate on actually earning an income. But with my short attention span, even corporate work became to be a bit of a drag. I had been dabbling in stock photography, but only with my fine art work. The 90s was a very interesting time in commercial photography. The market place was moving away from slick, over produced looking imagery to more personal, artful imagery. The snap shot aesthetic as it was called. And a big interest in black and white as well. I fit right in. I signed on with several agencies including a little start up here in Seattle called PhotoDisc. https://www.melcurtis.com/expressions-gestures/ You can read about it on my website if you are interested. It was a pretty amazing period for me and sat me up for life. PhotoDisc got gobbled up by Getty Images and the corporate bean counters took over and kicked me to the curb like last week’s soup of the day. But not before I could take the money and run. Going digital was an interesting period for me. It was either get on board or go get a job at Starbucks making lattes. I got on board and took on a whole new learning curve. I have enjoyed digital photography, but I think my best works were done in analog and in the dark room. That said, I have no desire to ever return to that world. In 2007 I got drawn back into teaching. In Rome. A summer gig through the design dept at the University of Washington. What I thought would be a one off turned into 5 years. I could have gone on for another 5 years, but like most teaching gigs, it got a bit repetitive doing the same projects over and over. Plus summer is the worst time of year to be in Rome and the best time of year to be in Seattle. Again, another remarkable period in my life. Then the recession hit. It was lights out and I survived mostly on stock royalties and a few bits of assignment work. But for some reason my print sales went up. The lease on my over priced studio was up and I needed to move on after 24 years in that place. I didn’t really want to rent again, nor did I want to share a studio. So, I took a big leap and built a back yard cottage as they called it then . A DADU now. Detached Accessory Dwelling Unit. It was a life saver. Not just for my work, but in making my life so much simpler. Even turns out to be a good investment. But I never fully recovered from the recession. And as fluent as I had become in digital photography I never got the knack for the digital business world with social media and all. I just didn’t get it and one day when I was 60 I said enough and shut down the marketing department and semi-retired. I had 5 clients at the time and would let them carry me till they went away. One by one they did. When the pandemic hit, I thought I was really done. Didn’t work for 18 months. But then they called again, trailed off again and now I only do an occasional gig for Google. So it goes, eh? Time to be done with it all anyway.
