Heartbreaks & Shattered Egos

Tuesday August 16th, 2011

Recently, our photographer Alex Weltlinger came to me with a question, What do you when a client kills your campaign? After you’ve shot it no less? Alex had recently shot what he hoped to be a massive break. He considered it to be his most prestigious job to date. It was, of course, heartbreaking for him to hear that the entire campaign had been canceled,

The job was signed off and then very suddenly killed by someone at the very top at that client’s end. While, as far as I know, and what we’ve been told, I did nothing wrong, my crew all delivered on brief, and the delivered images are actually quite striking. I’m proud of them; the fact is that something went very wrong somewhere along the communication line within the client. Out of my control. Out of my sphere of blame as it were. How do you deal with this?

The easy answer is to chalk it up to experience, collect your paycheck and move on. But it’s not so easy. As photographers, our ego is often irretrievably tied up within our images, and it’s not easy to untangle your sense of self from what you’ve shot. And I have to admit, my ego’s taken a battering from this experience.

Although this is obviously a hard experience to handle, there is one thing you can fall back on as a photographer, and that is that you are not alone. The same situation you’re facing, or something very similar, has happened over and over again. Everyone has their ups and downs, and unfortunately, this is a major downer that a lot of you may face during your career. I can’t really tell you what to do, although if I was going to give any advice it would be to yes, collect your paycheck, but also keep in touch with the agency. Express the enthusiasm and excitement you had working with them and let them know that, even though this happened, you’d still love to work with them in the future. Remember, the art buyers and art directors are usually feeling the same thing you are. They’ve worked hard putting this together and their egos are shot too. And as for your bruised ego, all I can say is it will heal, and heal stronger.

To help ease Alex’s pain, I thought I’d share the stories of a few other photographer’s who’ve gone through similar experiences.

Jared Leeds recently experienced something similar to Alex, when a client drastically changed the direction, and subsequently, his images for their campaign. The shoot was for a Boston Crime Stoppers campaign by Hill Holliday. The campaign was centered around getting people to anonymously send in texts about crimes. The idea for the artwork was to have Jared photograph people in environments around Boston and then pixelate their faces, making them annoymous.

Before

Jared shared what happened,

The shoot went great and everyone seemed really pleased with the photos. It wasn’t until later that the decision was made to dramatically change the concept. It went from showing people in environments around the city to cropping the images down to headshots with no environment. The notion, as was told to me, was that the ads would be more easily readable. I can’t say that I wasn’t disappointed, but at least they are still my photos. I know that it wasn’t the quality of the photos that caused the concept change. These kinds of things happen all the time. And even with the change, I’m still proud of the work.

After

Photographer Douglas Sonders also weighed in on his past experiences,

It’s heartbreaking when a campaign gets killed after a shoot. Every photographer is somewhat emotionally attached to a campaign. Although, it happens to all of us at some point in our careers.

Ive shot some awesome stuff that was later killed off for political/client reasons (not my fault) that can never see the light of day (not even in my portfolios in some cases due to contracts with the big ad clients). There are some big celebrity portraits I have done that I would love to show off, but will never leave my desktop. All you can do is move forward and maybe make a nice print for your office wall.

In the end, you just have to keep your head up and move on to the next project. Like photographer Jessyel Ty Gonzalez replied when asked about this issue, “You win some, you lose some.”

- Maria Luci