Instead of travelling, doing assignments and workshops, lately I've been tied up in preparing my first 'independent' photographic art exhibition. I complained on my Facebook page as to how unexpectedly difficult it is turning out to be. Nick Gleitzman, a successful photographer in Hong Kong (and my former partner) responded to my wails with some great pieces of advice:
1. Make sure you have 3 months with NOTHING else to do
2. Buy Valium
3. Prepare to haemorrhage money at a rate four times more than you planned for
4. At lunch on the day of the exhibition, drink an entire bottle of champagne. French. (You did hang the show the day before, right?)
This is exactly what I'm discovering to be true also. (Well, maybe not the part about Valium.) But most of what Nick said was valid and I thought I would expand on them in this series of blog posts. To start with his first point:
1. Make sure you have 3 months with NOTHING else to do
Here's where I made my first mistake, not allowing a full three months of time to devote exclusively to the exhibition. The venue was booked for January 2013, a full nine months ahead. I decided three months was just the right amount of time so I made a note in my calendar to get started on October 17. Promptly on that date I downloaded a guide called "Exhibition-Planning" from the Australian Business Arts Foundation website and carefully scrutinised it. Woops, I had missed the opportunities for applying for arts grants. Many of them wanted applications a year or more ahead!
Then I realised I hadn't allowed enough time to get press releases to magazines, especially the art ones. Most of the monthlies have a lead time of three months.
Then something happened which was completely unplanned - I got sick. Even though it was just a flu, many days I was incapable of even being upright. So I had to let go of several projects, like the catalogue I wanted to publish.
Then in early November, someone pointed out the Christmas holidays would be a big interruption. Most businesses in Australia close down until early January. (How could I have forgotten?) I quickly got cracking on locating a fine art printer as well as a framer so those jobs could be finished by the end of November.
Now there were only six weeks left until the opening on January 16th. I still had a mountain of tasks: creating a dedicated website, designing and printing flyers, sending press releases to newspapers and other media, organising insurance, preparing CVs, bios and other publicity material. Even though I had carefully scheduled tasks in order of priority, they couldn't get done that way. Everyone I dealt with had their own deadlines and schedules. Many tasks couldn't be done until some prerequisite was done - which couldn't be done until something else happened first. You know the endless loop?
I can verify that Nick's #1 piece of advice is true: allow at least three months FULL TIME. I'm adding my own series of warnings:
• allow for the unexpected like illnesses, accidents and other surprises
• realise that suppliers have their own agendas, not yours
• triple the length of time you estimate a task will take. For example, designing a flyer took much longer because my chosen designer couldn't produce the goods. I ended up doing it myself in order to meet the printer's deadline.
In the photo above, I'm madly signing my prints while at the framers. After I had delivered the prints and told him how I wanted the mats to reveal my signature, he said "What signature?" I had forgotten to sign them! Just another example of how your mind turns to jelly when it's under time pressure.
In the next post, I'll discuss how Nick's #2 word of advice was so true also.
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