To prepare 2016 and decide how I will proceed I
needed to feature the situation correctly. During my travel to Portugal
in January I had the opportunity to show my works to the only « big »
photo gallery of the country. During the appointment it appeared
clearly that I lost a lot of credibility for the owner of the shop when I
explained why I had no limited and numbered collection of photos. So it was
completely necessary to have a stock of photos devoted to this market.
Furthermore, the direct sales becoming scarce and requiring more investments I
needed to have a pricing for a group of photos that could allow to pay
the commission and fees of a partner.
When I entered the AAB association one objective was
to be able to find new distribution networks. After one year, it became clear
that this structure was not adapted to generate sales.
So, I contacted again Galerie no. 1 in Paris and
joined two small exhibitions in order to extend my connections.
The pearl of the Tage (River of Lisbon- View of the Bridge 25th April)
My first participation was for a collective booth in
the exhibition called « 4arts » that took place in the Marais in the
center of Paris. As it took place mid February, Galerie No. 1 decided to
collect works around a big subject that is « LOVE ». I presented two
photos in 30x40cm: Planet Love 2 (see previous post of November 2015) and a new
photo resulting from my Portuguese trip.
Last year the informations I had from this show where
good. That explains why I wanted to be present to have the feeling of the
show. The results where globally bad, only few exhibitors managed to sell.
Located in the Marais I expected to see a higher quality in the visitors, but
it did not happen. Last year the « Journées du Patrimoine »
took place on the same day and this event attracted a better public.
Nevertheless it appeared clearly that if I wanted to be noticed I needed to
have bigger photos to catch directly the visitor's eyes. So it will be more
profitable to exhibit a bigger size than two small.
The other small show I joined was called « Collage » (Pasting). I decided to present the panel realized for the COP 21 exhibition of the AAB (see the post in December 2015). The gallery partners found that the purpose of the work was interesting and that it could be worth to try to launch a petition with « change.org » web site. We did it! If you consider that there is an urgency to promote « green photography » you can join my petition, which presently written in French.
Today the 9th May the industrials have no need to be afraid, I have only 13 signatures.