Why I let people take photos of my paintings at shows

Why I let people take photos of my work at shows

If you walk around an art show you will see a LOT of clipart with a camera and a red slash through it which I suppose is universal for, don’t take photos of my work how about you buy one instead.  You will, however, never see a no photos sign in my booth and I’ll tell you why.  And also let me specify, if you were to roll up into my booth with a big ole’ DSLR camera on a tripod that costs more than my RV, I would  need to have a chat with you first, but for all of you teenagers taking selfies in front of my wave paintings pretending to get barreled with your Iphone. Go for it! What harm could possibly come from that? …. Like at all? Because the broke-ass college students snapping photos of themselves with a nice bright background weren’t going to buy anything anyways. That’s a fact and that’s fine, I was them, I get it, you don’t hang expensive artwork in a dorm room, someone will puke on it. And especially if you seem genuinely interested in a piece and need to think about it or need to go home and compare it to your walls, please, snap away.  But back to why I have such an “open lens” policy about photos in my booth, I’m thinking of what are the best and worst possible outcomes of someone having a photo of my painting in their iphone.  Best case scenario, they’re scrolling through their camera roll through all the cute pictures of their kid or dog trying to find that ONE cute photo of their kid or dog in particular that they took the other day to show their friend and happen to pass by my painting.  Friend says, “ oooh, go back, what’s that?” then they get to explain how they met this weird hippie chick from Maui who supposedly lives in an RV and drives around with her dog doing art shows (true story) and now another person has seen my art which if they happen to stumble on me again will connect the dots thus making them more likely to buy from me because we already have some sort of connection.  So now hopefully this reminds photo taker of my piece and they find the business card I handed them to accompany the painting and they order it online.  So now to worst case scenario, which is what I imagine most artists fear.  Someone’s going to copy you… oooooooooooo (Halloween sounds).   News flash, you’re probably not the first person to paint a turtle or a palm tree or whatever. I know I’m not.  I’m copying nature, I didn’t invent the turtle, and I am drawing influenced from every person who has ever painted a wave or a turtle whose work I’ve ever seen.  So maybe those who have extreme fear of people copying are really fearful because they think that their work is easy to copy.  I don’t think my work is easy to copy, because I’ve never seen another artists painting that looked like I could have been mine.  And it took me years of practice to be able to paint the way I want to paint. So if someone wants to take a photo of my most recent painting, go home, buy a canvas, paint it, realize that they’re going to need to practice on about 500 more like I and every other painter at an art show did, then when they have that skill set and finally sit down to replicate this piece over the course of the next 40-200 hours depending on size and detail,  then buy an rv, a tent, some panels apply to a bunch a shows you don’t know if you’ll get into (at $25-$55/each) then pay hundreds of dollars and a-whole-lotta hours to set all of that aforementioned stuff up and hope you sell something worth more than that booth fee and your gas to get there, I’m pretty sure they’ll draw the conclusion that we don’t charge enough!!!! So snap away,  I know I appreciate my gourmet restaurant gnudi (a fluffier cousin of gniocchi) with a fine mushroom cream sauce a whole lot more after I spent three days turning it 45° every 6 hours in semolina flour in the fridge (yes that’s actually what you have to do to make gnudi and now you know why you’ve never heard of it because it’s a freaking nightmare to make!)   And I bet that will happen with 99.99% of the people who take a photo of a painting intending to copy it.

As for the painters out there who are fantastic enough at photorealism to take a photo of mine or your work and paint it where you cannot distinguish between the original or the replica  I’m pretty sure they are off somewhere too busy being awesome to be walking around art shows trying to rip me off.  They’re probably online trying to rip me off, because the photos on there are way better.  Which brings me to another point that kinda makes no sense to me if you don’t want people to take photos of your work, yet you have photos on your website or if you have brochures that you hand out with photos of your work on them.  If you don’t have photos on your website or haven’t joined the 21^st century yet and  don’t have a website at all, well that doesn’t really apply to you so please disregard.  
So I guess what I’m saying is, that if you’re a painter and you don’t want someone to copy your work, either make work that’s more difficult to copy or give yourself the credit you deserve, no one can copy you.  You are the absolute BEST at being you. No one is better at being you or painting like you than you are.