THIS NEWS FOUND AT: PDNPulse
Early this year a group of young photographers came into the PDN offices to introduce themselves and their year-old collective, Luceo Images. As six photographers operating in different parts of the world, David Walter Banks, Kendrick Brinson, Matt Eich, Kevin German, Tim Lytvinenko and Matt Slaby formed Luceo in an effort to find new ways of supporting themselves in a difficult market. Photographers forming cooperative organizations is nothing new, but given the current economic and technological landscape, we decided to ask Luceo’s members to write a few guest blogs about their experiences working together. What follows is the first of four entries that will appear on PDN Pulse over the next two weeks.
Getting Organized
We’ve been extremely conscious of the pitfalls faced by any group of creatives. We think groups of photographers have a tendency to be like a boat without a keel. To help focus our organization and create accountability, we established an executive structure to run our meetings, including naming members as chairpeople for specific tasks. Committee chairs delegate responsibilities and manage deadlines. Some chairs’ roles are more traditional, like marketing and finance. Delegating like this also allows us to manage smaller tasks. For example, we are in the middle of revamping our Web site. We have a chairperson who keeps tabs on the person coding the site, the committee working on the site's look and feel, the person who is organizing our archive, the people working on our new blog, etc. The chairs give weekly reports to our executives and works closely with them to coordinate their tasks with other aspects of the collective.
We feel this structure is unique among agency models because the people managing the tasks are not third-party outsiders; they are working photographers with vested creative interest in the quality and outcome of a project. It fosters individual ownership in the tasks we take on as a group, something that we think is a little extraordinary.
We’ve found that this structure helps keep the channels of communication open even though we’re based in locations across the globe. It’s good to be sure that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals, and we’ve embraced technology to help us bridge this gap. We have an internal email list-serve that we use to keep each other informed of minor daily developments. We hold weekly teleconferences via Skype, which gives us time to express things that email can’t, and to work through the details of our more ambitious goals. Our meetings are moderated, vote-driven, and stick to an agenda set by our membership each week.
Luceo also holds in-person meetings every six months to discuss long-term goals and help shape our direction. These in-person meetings are as important for business discussion as they are for us to bond as a group. Being in the same place, working together, cooking meals together, and having the chance to get to know each other on a personal level has proven invaluable in the sense that we believe we are not just creating a collective, but also a team.
The second of Luceo’s guest blog entries, “Collective Marketing,” will appear on PDN Pulse this Thursday.
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