To complement the post below as well as announce my intentions of personally redesigning my site, I had just wanted to add a few comments to the post below, to further refine my thoughts.
When I tuned in to "A Photo Editor" this morning I was getting a haircut. Knowing full well that the potential for hits and track-backs had been greatly heightened I promptly tore off the stylist's robe and rushed home to post below. The resulting "do" was less than symmetrical but Jennie got a kick out of it, and besides I quickly returned so she could resume and make it just so.
As I was saying the hardest part of survival as a photographer is accepting your work's failure to produce results. You keep repeating to yourself that some day, somehow, they will all come to their senses and finally understand what it is you think you are doing. Unfortunately, we cannot work in a vacuum, divorced from the times and the fashions which so often dictate how we must think and create to earn a living.
All is great under Heaven's banners but financial recognition* rides a very thin line, and the more there are of us, the sharper and razor thin it is.
A more perfect metaphor for this condition might be better explained by drawing upon a non too subtle parallel with the Amazon: As you may know, there are no "large" predators in the Amazon as the diversity and abundance of rain forest life can only survive and thrive if, and only if, it becomes, over eons, smaller and more specialized. The Amazon is a desert full of life and only those who can reduce their size survive: There are only a few large predators in the Amazon because the ecosystem cannot sustain them, as a result, random selection favored smaller, more nimble predators. These are well know facts to biologists and zoologists but little observed by artists and other such parasites.
So, until you somehow manage to become the creative primate's equivalent of "The Jaguar", you will have to learn how to stay small, nimble and specialized. Those skills will come in handy when self doubt, failure, life, death and the Santa Anas burned down you little piggy's house. Until you manage to reach the top of the food chain, you will need to feed on the canopy's lower terraces. The trick is to accept failure promptly and adjust to the never ebbing cultural tsunami that is "Sparta". May be some day you'll make waves of your own but in the meantime you will need to be able to run for the hills and distill your moonshine with no other company but your own.
As stated below, I have no intention of stopping the work I am presently doing but I need to find alternate ways to fund it. A new, more "visually acceptable" and "a propos", body of work is a good way to do so, as long as it let's others in, on the festivities. Car jacking will have to wait until I am good and ready.
I have put considerable amounts of thought into this in the past few months and have come up with a plan to rescue this faltering financial house. If I stick to it, I'll be fine, but that might be the hardest part of this upcoming trip. Staying happy in this business is learning to dance the very fine line between the ideal and the mundane, insults and promises.
* There are other forms as we know but without capital there is little chance of continuation, especially as a photographer. This ain't no cheap profession.