The biggest creative and business opportunities for photographers is not the image, but everything around the image. In other words, the opportunity is in context, not content.

In October 2008, as part of my 5 Lessons series about how photographers can create new business models, I wrote about the opportunity to connect with context and content:

It’s always been about creating great content, but there’s now a larger opportunity than ever to deliver great context.

Artists have always understood the need for context; why do we create series? Why do we create artist statements to explain the themes and ideas we explore? Why do we obsess over the stories as much as the images? Why do we return to view certain images over and over? Why do we love the images we love?

We create series, themes, ideas and comprehensive bodies of work because we understand that they are more powerful than individual images. The true beauty is in the discussion, the linkages between images, the connection between the images and the stories, their connections to causes, communities, meaning and people.

We’ve always known this. Content is important, but context is critical.

Instead of just being an artist, be an “experience artist”.

Creating rich, immersive and scalable experiences is the biggest opportunity in marketing today, and “experience artists” are going to play a large, rich role in marketing going forward.

What’s different today; the economics of content and context have changed and shifted the balance of power and opportunity from creators of content to creators of context.

Thus, the biggest creative and business opportunities for photographers is not the image, but everything around the image.

Why?

• Content is far easier to copy than context.
• Content is cheap to create and distribute, but context is (still) expensive.
• The path taken to create content impacts the final product, but the path to create context is *part of the final product*. Remember, paths are more valuable than destinations.
• The economics of the web have increased the competition between content creators, flattened the experience advantage and upended supply and demand for content. But at the same time, it’s expanded the opportunity to create context, made context easier, cheaper and more accessible to create than ever before. People that recognize how context is created, what type of context they can create, and why context is important will create economically meaningful, valuable and sustainable products, services and experiences. And more than anything, that’s what we need.

How does this work for photographers?

• Instead of selling the image, sell experience, meaning, connections: sell context.
• Embed narrative into the content.
• Be a hub and lead a community.
• Create content moments and shareable experiences that take advantage of the technological and economic opportunities of the web (online and social).
• Create culturematics and do “meaningful stuff” that resonates and flourishes because it’s simply too great not to.

Examples include Jeremy Cowart’s Help-Portrait, Chase Jarvis’s live events, Dear New Orleans, and Flak Photo and liveBooks‘s crowd-sourced conversation about the future of photobooks.

But that’s just the start, the tip of the iceberg as smart content creators shift to leveraging the power of context.

That’s what I do; instead of focusing on just the image, I work with everything around the image. Want to work with me?

—

For a lot more about the subject, start with 34 posts about evolving business models in the photography industry.