One of the things an artist/photographer has to deal with is the rejection of his/her work. In fact that will be the case much more often then not when submitting work to galleries, publishers, etc. If you haven’t guessed by now, my submission to the local coop gallery was not accepted. The thing you have to remember is that the reasons for rejections can be many.
- Your work doesn’t match the galleries client base.
- Your price range doesn’t match their market.
- The style of your work is too different from anything else they carry.
- They already have too much similar work.
- The rejection is not a reflection on you personally, the validity of your work, the time you invested, etc.
When submitting to galleries it always pays to visit them multiple times and get a feel for their work, get to know the owner, understand their customers, check out their price range, etc. Note however that doing all of this will not guarantee success, but it will improve your chances. In my case here, I did these things and it still didn’t work out.
I am meeting with the coops jury foreman in the next few days to see it I can glean any constructive feedback from this particular submission. I may comment on that in a future blog.
If you click on the blog image you should go to a small gallery of the images I submitted. Let me know your thoughts – what do you like or dislike.
As one photographer put it, “.. the point is not the rejection, it’s how you handle it.”
But I will say, you don’t have to like it!
2 Comments
nice post, rejection sucks but learning to accept it and learning from it can be great. You can't please everyone and as long as you like it who cares. I think your images are great, I would hang them in my home.
That being said they do look a bit like paintings which I like but maybe it bothers someone at a gallery. Galleries are people too, that have good and bad days. You never know what mood they are in.
Matthew, thanks for the complement on my images. After talking to the jury chairman and viewing a couple of the selected images, I realized that there were warning signs that I should have heeded. I'll say more in a future blog entry.