Pixiq

It was the end of the last century.  Yep, it was December 1999.  I was a programmer at an ad agency. My walk to work in the morning was filled with thoughts about "fires" that would have to be put out.  Servers that would crash.  People who would stop me as I got into the elevator to tell some horror story about their computer.

I was unhappy.  Scratch a programmer, I'll be you'll find a photographer.  My job took me to all sorts of techie conferences, and I was constantly rubbing shoulders with the suits that would reinvent the world.

Many of these workflow geniuses turned out to be charlatans but that's another story.  The point is that every single person I talked to about doing my own photography site told me that it would be a waste of time and money.

I wouldn't be able to sell my own photographs on the web.

I would be competing with the major stock agencies that had millions of images with tons of money to invest in publicizing and building their sites.  I would simply be lost.

My own problem was that I just never worked well in groups.  I wanted to be in a position where I could fix whatever didn't work; and take full responsibility for the venture.  As far as my photography goes, I had my own darkroom at 15, in the Bronx, and had been shooting all the time.  When I was working with medium format equipment, I brought it, with a tripod to my programming job.

My own site wasn't live yet, but there was something  impersonal about it.  I tried to imagine the typical person clicking through a bunch of pictures, and even if they liked it, they might write in the guestbook (which was popular at the time). But they'd probably never come back.

Around this time, I was reading The Daybooks of Edward Weston (yes, I will get to photography eventually).  And written in the way old journals were once written - sequentially.  Day by day.  Not backwards, like contemporary blogs.

And so, on December 24th, 1999, I launched my photo site (it was called DaveBeckerman.com) and also used Dreamweaver to write a series of entries, with one html page per month.  I'm not saying this was the first photo blog, but it was one of the first popular ones.  I was shocked to find on the first day the site went live, that a few hundred people had found it, and that they were reading what I called my Daybooks.

The first line went something like this:

Well, this may seem like a crazy thing to do, but I'm going to try and write about what this adventure is like - leaving the corporate world and going off to become a photographer.  I don't expect to always be writing about photography, I'm interested in a lot of different things, and I can't write much about people I know, because they'll get angry if I invade their privacy.  But let's see what happens.

That was 11 years ago.  I have made my living as a photographer, specializing in black and white photography of New York since that time.  Well, not exactly, I had saved up enough to keep me going through the first few lean years - but I've lived the dream I had; and I've talked about it, and gone through the ups and downs, and now Pixiq has approached me to continue doing what I've been doing in their domain.

And so I will.  I don't have it all figured out yet.  There will be times when a post only appears in Pixiq, and times when a post only appears in my own personal blog.  This is just another experiment, and we'll see how it goes.

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Another story from 1999:

The race to have the leading search engine was a free-for-all back then.  Google didn't exist.  The big search engine was Altavista.  I

Wordpress and Blogger were just gleams in their creators eyes.  There were online photo journals, and there were photo gallery sites but the software to make it easy for anyone to do a blog wasn't around yet.

Forums were around (they go back to the acoustic modem), and there were popular photography forums.

After being told by experts that I would be wasting time and money with a photography store on the web, I submitted my new site to the most popular photography forum of that day and my site was hit pretty hard.  The main complaint was that my "add-to-cart" button was in your face.  That I had a lot of nerve to try and commercialize art.  And it's true - almost all of the early photo sites were for "show-and-tell."  Not for selling.

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Now of all things, I should include a photo from those days, and here is one I took on the moving sidewalk in the airport, the first time I went to France.  I don't know why it came to mind, but... actually, I do. 

In my first year, I sold exactly one picture through the website.  And guess what - it was written with a rubber check.  And to top that off, it was a romantic picture that a soldier was giving to his girlfriend before going overseas. Yes, it was a shot I took in Paris. 

And to top that, his girlfriend wrote to me when she learned that the check her boyfriend had sent had bounced, and sent me another check to cover the first one. 

I took that check, and afraid to cash it, stuck it on a piece of matboard, framed it, and still have it to this day - dusty, not on the wall, but in my closet for me to look at whenever I'm feeling down.  And here's the photograph in question.

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