Jain Lemos » Photography and Publishing

Photographer Marcela Taboada is a finalist in this year’s Photolucida Critical Mass competition. Her work is among those pre-screened out of over six hundred entries. This image from her photo essay, “Women of Clay,” was included in her entry (see Portfolio 1 on her website).

As reviewers, our job is to look at all the finalists and rate each on this scale:

NO = “Someone may be interested in this work but it’s not me.”
YES = “I’m glad that I’ve seen this.”
WOW = “I can’t wait to show this to someone.”

For me, Marcela’s images for this story are so rare and authentic I want to give the photographer a prize. Moreover, once I read her essay and artist’s statement I became a bigger fan because she shot these in her own backyard in her state of Oaxaca. Many photographers feel they must travel great distances to find extraordinary subjects when they would have done better to look right around the corner.

Yesterday’s Magnum Blog post gives advice to those starting out in photography from several members. Many provide the same basic suggestions but I think what Mikhael Subotzky had to say works for those aspiring to be a Magnum-type shooter:

Q: What advice would you give young photographers?

A: Stick to one project for a long time. And keep working on it through many stages of learning, even if it might feel finished. It’s the only way to break through what I think are some vital lessons that need to be learned about story-telling and how to combine images.

What do you think is a long time? At what point do you quit a project if it isn’t panning out or something better comes along? Should you have more than one project going at a time in order to create portfolio diversity?

I’ve been on a great project with photographer Jamie Williams producing new stills for the California Travel and Tourism Commission and their agency Mering-Carson. We covered dozens of locations in three weeks including Saint Helena, San Francisco, Big Sur, Hollywood, Joshua Tree, Newport Coast, La Jolla and Coronado.

Along the way we had fun, a little rain, very long days, the pleasure of working with wonderful clients, talent and crew members… plus the chance to cover incredible places. Being busy is a good thing, except when it comes to keeping up a blog. Thanks for missing my posts just a little bit.

Jain Lemos

Consulting Services

Artists looking to build their businesses turn to the enthusiastic Jain Lemos, who has developed a variety of tools to uncover their next best steps. Jain brings more than twenty years of deep involvement in all aspects of licensing, publishing and promoting professional photography to the table. She has worked with top creative teams at Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Harper Collins, Chronicle Books, National Geographic and Lonely Planet.

Jain’s brand reinvention consultation package includes:

~ Personality test for creative types
~ Exercise in strategic business planning
~ “Walk-around” image review
~ New assignment challenge
~ Brand identity buster
~ Distribution channel finder
~ Client matching investigation

About Jain

Jain Lemos knows the worth of pictures. She is respected for her creative vision, her fierce professionalism and her enthusiasm for the collaborative process. Jain draws on her diverse and valuable experience when helping clients—from writer and senior editor to agent, photographer, producer, judge, portfolio reviewer, speaker, photo editor and book packager.

She produced New York Times No. 1 bestselling title James Cameron’s Titanic, and over the years, has edited and guided the production of dozens of other well-received documentary photograph books, including SeinOff: The Final Days of Seinfeld, and The Making of Evita. On the stock photography scene, she launched and managed for four years the web-based Lonely Planet Images agency as their American marketing director.

Her writing and editorial skills are uniquely informed about her subject of expertise. Jain’s articles and book reviews appear in numerous national newspapers, websites and trade journals, including PhotoMedia, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Picture Professional and About the Image.

Jain is the Photo Editor at NewsPlink, a fun and informative roll of stories designed for the web and hand-held devices. She serves on judging panels for various photo competitions such as Photolucida’s Critical Mass. She is also a frequent speaker and portfolio reviewer at industry conferences and consults with agencies and creatives on the artistic process and the art of the deal.

For more information, contact: jain @ jainlemos.com.