Beginnings
Today is the day I start the Cauliflower Project. The idea found me about a year ago and I keep circling back to it. To be honest, I'm still struggling a bit with the point, which has caused me to put off starting it for so long. That is also the reason I have chosen today as a random start date. Beginning the journey without knowing the destination has often been my preferred method of travel.
On to the back story of this whole thing. In January of 2019, I traveled to Raleigh, NC to do a test shoot with photographer, Lauren Vied. For those outside the photo industry, a test shoot is sort of a cross between a personal project, a first date and a job application. They go a little differently for everyone, but for me, it usually involves me reaching out to a few photographers who I would like to work with in the future, or who's work I just really like, and asking them if they want to shoot together sometime and seeing who responds. Much like dating and job applications, most people never respond to your inquiry at all, but, Lauren did. We had a few back and forth ideas via email and then a phone call about concept and scheduling. I booked some locations, bought a ticket to North Carolina and we found ourselves spending the better part of a week together shooting and talking about life, culture, food and photography. It was over one of these conversations, that I decided to take on the Cauliflower Project.
Lauren was telling me about a client, who's business creates low carb, frozen food products made from cauliflower, who had reached out to her needing 100 unique images of cauliflower for their Instagram account. (by unique I mean they are all different from one another, not just different crops or angles, but their own unique little snowflakes) Lauren, being a professional, put together and estimate for the project and sent it back to the client. I believe they had a brief back and forth correspondence before it became clear to the client that creating 100 unique images of cauliflower is costly and time consuming.
This type of request in our industry is fairly new, becoming alarmingly common, and it is due, almost entirely, to the rise of Instagram as a marketing platform. Everyone wants content. Lots of content! Quickly! Post! Check likes! Post again! Profit? I get why clients feel this way. They want to be relevant, they want to be part of the conversation and they want to turn likes into sales. It's a "free" advertising platform but it is anything but free. The amount of manpower and resources that go into creating these posts is huge. Larger companies devote an entire job or department just to social media management because it makes a huge difference in sales and brand awareness. So, as I said, I get why people want content. However, as a professional commercial artist, it's my job to handle the logistics of creating good content AND manage a budget, my first reaction to hearing about this request was, "That is a huge waste of money. None of the customer base is going to care about pictures of cauliflower." I mean, would you follow that account? How much do you care about cauliflower? The average person cares very little about cauliflower. I know this because I travel a lot, and I'm a talker so I have had thousands of conversations with strangers about all kinds of topics and not one mother fucker has ever mentioned cauliflower to me. Ever. It's just not a very beloved item. And this is exactly what made me want to do the project. I absolutely love a challenge.
Every other photographer I've told about this project thinks it sounds like their worst nightmare. How could you possibly make 100 unique images of cauliflower and, furthermore, why would you even want to do it? My answer is simple. Because I don't know how. But! There has to be a way. This is a riddle, a really ridiculous, seemingly pointless one, but I cannot seem to get it out of my mind so I have to solve it. Or, at the very least take the journey and see where it goes. At first, I thought maybe the project would turn into a funny account where people could submit their craziest, failed project requests and I would try to create them. That seemed really amazing, but also really unrealistic. Remember what I said about I'm good at creating content AND managing a budget? Plus, that type of account is really only funny and interesting to the relatively small group of people who work in my industry and the appeal of this project, for me, is to find a way to make something seemingly unimportant resonate with a larger audience. How do you make people care about something they don't care about? I guess I'm either going to fail, or find out.
On to the back story of this whole thing. In January of 2019, I traveled to Raleigh, NC to do a test shoot with photographer, Lauren Vied. For those outside the photo industry, a test shoot is sort of a cross between a personal project, a first date and a job application. They go a little differently for everyone, but for me, it usually involves me reaching out to a few photographers who I would like to work with in the future, or who's work I just really like, and asking them if they want to shoot together sometime and seeing who responds. Much like dating and job applications, most people never respond to your inquiry at all, but, Lauren did. We had a few back and forth ideas via email and then a phone call about concept and scheduling. I booked some locations, bought a ticket to North Carolina and we found ourselves spending the better part of a week together shooting and talking about life, culture, food and photography. It was over one of these conversations, that I decided to take on the Cauliflower Project.
Lauren was telling me about a client, who's business creates low carb, frozen food products made from cauliflower, who had reached out to her needing 100 unique images of cauliflower for their Instagram account. (by unique I mean they are all different from one another, not just different crops or angles, but their own unique little snowflakes) Lauren, being a professional, put together and estimate for the project and sent it back to the client. I believe they had a brief back and forth correspondence before it became clear to the client that creating 100 unique images of cauliflower is costly and time consuming.
This type of request in our industry is fairly new, becoming alarmingly common, and it is due, almost entirely, to the rise of Instagram as a marketing platform. Everyone wants content. Lots of content! Quickly! Post! Check likes! Post again! Profit? I get why clients feel this way. They want to be relevant, they want to be part of the conversation and they want to turn likes into sales. It's a "free" advertising platform but it is anything but free. The amount of manpower and resources that go into creating these posts is huge. Larger companies devote an entire job or department just to social media management because it makes a huge difference in sales and brand awareness. So, as I said, I get why people want content. However, as a professional commercial artist, it's my job to handle the logistics of creating good content AND manage a budget, my first reaction to hearing about this request was, "That is a huge waste of money. None of the customer base is going to care about pictures of cauliflower." I mean, would you follow that account? How much do you care about cauliflower? The average person cares very little about cauliflower. I know this because I travel a lot, and I'm a talker so I have had thousands of conversations with strangers about all kinds of topics and not one mother fucker has ever mentioned cauliflower to me. Ever. It's just not a very beloved item. And this is exactly what made me want to do the project. I absolutely love a challenge.
Every other photographer I've told about this project thinks it sounds like their worst nightmare. How could you possibly make 100 unique images of cauliflower and, furthermore, why would you even want to do it? My answer is simple. Because I don't know how. But! There has to be a way. This is a riddle, a really ridiculous, seemingly pointless one, but I cannot seem to get it out of my mind so I have to solve it. Or, at the very least take the journey and see where it goes. At first, I thought maybe the project would turn into a funny account where people could submit their craziest, failed project requests and I would try to create them. That seemed really amazing, but also really unrealistic. Remember what I said about I'm good at creating content AND managing a budget? Plus, that type of account is really only funny and interesting to the relatively small group of people who work in my industry and the appeal of this project, for me, is to find a way to make something seemingly unimportant resonate with a larger audience. How do you make people care about something they don't care about? I guess I'm either going to fail, or find out.
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