I had no money when I started out. I did my own bookkeeping, rarely hired an assistant for the small editorial jobs I was getting and designed my own promotional pieces with color Xerox, vellum and rubber stamps. Basically, I tried to be a one man band. I was so worried I’d run out of money or alienate my new clients by asking for too much that I kept things as lean as possible. The running out of money fear was ever-present. Twice I had to borrow $5,000 from my girlfriend (now my wife and agent) to keep myself afloat. And as if this wasn’t enough to worry about, I soon learned an unexpected curse of becoming busy; I was responsible for financing my shoots, essentially floating my client’s costs for months at a time. A classic, “It takes money to make money.” issue.
While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend my one man band approach, the lesson learned by doing my own bookkeeping was the importance of having a nuts and bolts sense of where you stand financially. I’ll warn you, there will be a lot of uncertainty as a freelancer and you’ll need to ‘get your nerd on’ - keeping an eye on the balance sheet with one part of your brain - while simultaneously being creatively bold and a little reckless with the other part.
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” - Flaubert
It requires a Janus-like frame of mind but eventually you’ll develop a sixth sense for how things are going.
One of the financial truths you’ll need to be prepared for as a photographer: It usually takes about three months to get paid for your photography work and yet you’ll often find yourself spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars up front to produce that very same job. The connection between the work you do and the money that comes in can get so out of sync it often seems like you’re paying to work and then, months later, you’re suddenly being paid for sitting around doing nothing. It takes some getting used to.
Imagine a janky pump that requires constant care and ingenuity to keep operational. This pump pulls essential water [money] out of a well (unless there’s a drought) and delivers it to your garden [career]. Now imagine the water takes anywhere from one to three months to arrive. This is how you’ll be tending your garden. The best you can hope for is enough steady work to keep the water flowing. [Regarding drought, see "The Lifestyle Trap" and "About That Nest Egg"]
In my 35 plus years in this business I’ve found that, for the most part, people pay when they’re supposed to pay. Sometimes you’ll get paid a little faster, sometimes a little slower and, unfortunately, sometimes never. This ‘never’ thing really sucks. I’ve had two magazines go out of business owing me money and the biggest hit was quite recently when the owner of a Parisian ad agency died owing me 50K. (This has left me with a strange mixture of sympathy and rage which will hopefully find its way into my pictures at some point. Stay tuned…)
It can be a major drag keeping track of all this by yourself when you’re starting out but ultimately it affords a deeper understanding of your business as, well… a business. However, one can only tolerate so much attention to accounting, especially we art school types, and after about a year of my attempt as a solo act I started adding regular assistants, a studio manager and finally an agent. This was a welcome relief but I’m glad to have had that first hand experience.
The real lesson learned was in seeing how an awareness of my bookkeeping helped me develop a deeper understanding of the connection between the pictures I was taking and the checks that, sooner or later, arrived. It’s tempting to ignore all this financial hassle and treat the money we make as an abstraction akin to winning the lottery (Picasso described his career this way later in life), but that only works if you’re consistently winning. Otherwise, I recommend keeping a close eye on your books, learn to spot financial trouble way before it hits and go check that pump.
Wise words!