Agents is one of those topics that everyone into photography runs into sooner or later. At first everyone thinks having an agent is a reason for not caring anymore about marketing and self promotion, but it couldn't be farther from reality. I'm going to tell you my story and maybe it can help you at some point.
I, as I mentioned above, run into the agent thing quite a while ago. I did what probably everyone else does too. Try to contact a few agents, send them emails and hope to get represented and start shooting big jobs. After a while I realized no one called me back and I just kept doing my thing. Following as many blogs as I do, I read every now and then that you don't search for agents, they find you and those things we all have read at one point or another. I recall reading that in
A Photo Editor and in the blogs of
Chase Jarvis and
Nick Onken. I just thought:
"Yeah, that happened to you, you lucky bastard, but it would never happen to me", so I just forgot about the whole agent thing.
A couple months ago, out of the blue, I got called from an agent in Madrid. She wanted to meet in person, get to know each other and see if we were a good match. So we met, things clicked and we arranged another meeting with her partner to see if this was going somewhere. After a few meetings and talks we agreed to work together and started about a month ago. I couldn't believe that all the stuff I read was actually true! Now I was the lucky bastard and couldn't be happier.
Now we are getting to know each other, plan our approach to marketing, organizing meetings with creatives and all those fun but important things. I'm learning a lot and there is more work to do now than before I was represented but I'm confident it will be worthwhile. I'll do another post in six months to explain you how things are going.
One of the things I first asked my agent is how she got to see my work. This is what really left me thinking. For a few years I have been going to agencies arranging meetings to show my work to creatives. So among all those meetings I went to this agency to see a creative director and she liked my work. This was about two years ago. She never called for any job but she kept my card and remembered me. My agent had a good relationship with the CD so my agent asked her if she knew any interesting photographer to represent and my name came up. You never know what might come out of everything you do. Many things won't matter, or maybe they will but sure is that if you don't try and just sit at home doing nothing nobody is going to come to offer you an amazing opportunity.
Go out, do your thing at a 110% and share it with the world. Be true to what you believe and good things will happen. I assure you that.
