Press and Promotion

I've spent this week taking newly-printed posters and postcards around town. It reminded me a lot of my music days. When I was a guitarist in bands we used to spend days putting our flyers for our gigs at record and music stores, clubs and shops. My sponsor payed for the posters which turned out quite nice.

The U.S. Embassy public affairs office sent out a press release to their contacts in the country as well. My relationship with a member of the embassy has been a slippery slope. Because of nepotism rules, I'm bot eligible for a lot of benefits. For instance where they might bring in and pay a photographer to speak, I cannot do it (at least I can't be paid). I am not eligible for funding and various programs. However they have asked me to do a number of things and have taken advantage of my being here. In this case, they're able to promote themselves and American journalism, etc. by helping promote my exhibit. Since the people there are new (the staff arrived when I was away on my sick leave) I am comfortable with their involvement since they expressed interest on their own.

A friend of mine, Carlos Litulo, a Mozambican photojournalist who works for AFP and is with Redux, took me around town yesterday to line up interviews and press coverage with the local newspapers, radio and television stations. I'm a bit nervous because they were all interested and I'll have to sit down for interviews in Portuguese which I can speak but not terribly well. I imagine I sound like a little kid to most native speakers. It should be interesting.

I've also made multiple trips to the printer who is working on the exhibition program. It's been a bit of a hassle because it's out of the way to drive to. They've had some trouble with the size of the pages and then, oddly, the amount of pages. It's 28 pages, but for automation purposes, they needed it to be 24 pages. They took the liberty of redesigning it which we firmly rejected. In the end, the agreed to print it the way we needed but will have to do a lot of manual work.

Finally with the actual show, I spent the beginning of the week changing my frames at the urging of my wife. Fortunately the framers hadn't started yet. I did measurements for a display which will have my show summary which will be in Portuguese and English. I'll have that printed and put on foam core. I also had two large prints matted on foam core which I will display in the gallery windows to increase visibility and, hopefully, draw foot traffic. They look great. I also hired a gallerista, gallery attendant, and lined up two people to hang my work, and have a bartender and two servers for my opening in three weeks.

I still have to line up a guard/bouncer for opening night which is important to me because there is a group of local artists who are notorious for crashing openings, drinking all the free booze they can and becoming obnoxious and rowdy. Essentially, I'm focused on keeping them out.

Exhibition Press

I've been working hard on my major project exhibition. I finally got all of my prints done. If anything, this has been an excellent experience. So often, I have been dealing electronically with photographs whether correcting and editing on my computer to sending to clients or agencies by FTP, posting on blogs or filing on to my hard drive. Stepping back a few weeks ago to my tutorial with John Easterby and his advice to print my photos to help with the edit, it was an exercise in simplicity. Physically seeing prints of my photographs made me recall what I used to do daily when I started in newspapers, that is, printing.

It's such an essential part of the photograph and one of our lecturers even made the point that a photography doesn't really exist until it's printed. I had a couple of very large prints made (A1) and it is really sort of breathtaking. If I had a few thousand dollars extra, I would have loved to have printed them all that size, talk about impact.

Now I am working on my text for the show and am busy translating the statement for the show into Portuguese with the help of friends. I have also started on publicizing the show which is less than a month away. Today, I got my first press. It's always a bit odd being the one written about when you're used to putting others in print.

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Living in Maputo