My company I have yet to LLC

Written as a Senior in Ithaca College (BFA 2023)

Regarding LinkedIn, I feel more confident than ever that I look good on paper. My connection base has grown and I recently added a professional-looking artsy headshot to both my page and my website. The cover letter lesson helped me get a couple of jobs here on campus so I’m sure it would not be too different from the real world. I despise that term a little. This is already the real world. I’ve been an adult for almost four years for God’s sake. Business questions I’d like to ask I made sure to address in my networking interviews. The business leadership skills I learned are not so applicable to my career, but it’s valuable for settling down and becoming a Photo professor. The Last Lecture taught me about not objectifying my partner and not expecting her to put up with my BS the way the author’s wife did. 

The headshot, by Michael Salvino

I would like to get contracted to work for any of the companies I listed. The thing about my profession is that I’m going to make better choices early on if I’m not particularly picky about the companies I contract for my services. It would be unreasonable to think that I could work only for the companies that I agree with completely, visually and emotionally. For example, even though I would not be thrilled to do architecture pictures, the architecture photography market is particularly exciting and lucrative right now because it’s a reliable opportunity that is always buzzing with new and exciting projects in terms of architectural breakthroughs and, for better or for worse, gentrification plans.

I would preferably like to work for Vanity Fair and celebrity-related magazines, particularly those that are in the film and music business. It would be an amazing thing to go on an assignment for iD magazine, which is part of the VICE Media Group. Shooting rappers, hip-hop producers, actors, and even Broadway stars would be an early dream of mine come true. I am not naive enough to think that this will be my starting point though. Every other portrait photographer wants to do what I aspire to do, and a lot of them have more experience and connections than I do. I would like to keep my sanity and sense of artistic integrity first and foremost, so the rise will be very slow and deliberate. I plan to make stable choices that complement a working portfolio that would not pigeonhole me to the wedding or event photography circuits. Even though these are reliable opportunities, as I found out in my networking meetings, these can be a massive time trap and sink for my creativity and sense of staying true to my vision. I would like to stay artistically focused on editorial and commercial work, but I would not be opposed to doing other kinds of portrait work, or even advertising, because there’s still a creative direction there. 

My creative collaborator Masaki Mitsuhashi, a visionary in the making

The photographer Petar’s rise to the top would ideally look something like this. I would obviously not be able to be the main photographer for any professional set in the first couple of years. The ladder usually starts out assisting other photographers, being a digital imaging technician for other photographers, or even a PA carrying a humble tray of coffees. Additionally, I would not be opposed to working in a photography-related part-time job while slowly putting myself in the loop. By this, I mean working at a rental facility, photo gallery, art museum, photography stores such as B&H photo, or a photo processing and printing lab and darkroom. All of these side hustles are extremely relevant to the labor that I would eventually like to graduate to do professionally, so it would be nonsensical to think that the main objective is something that I’ll be able to jump into both feet first confidently and without reluctance. After all, I want stability and a stable sense of self while I break the door open in such a competitive field. 

I have a certain confidence in my work that I’m sure I’ll be able to push toward successful networking and the ability to find more and more work as time progresses, it’s just about being in the right place at the right time with the right attitude. That is why I plan to move to the New York City metropolitan area and continue to look for employment when I’m there. I realized that every college grad who wants to do my job is looking at Manhattan, Queens, or Brooklyn for the move, so I’m going to play it a little bit smarter. I’m thinking of moving to Jersey City or Jersey City Heights in order to save on rent and take advantage of the lower sales tax and generally higher quality of life with a lower price tag attached to it. After all, Trader Joe’s in Manhattan is not priced the same as Trader Joe’s in Jersey City. 

I have a fair amount of confidence that this will be a smart move because a lot of people commute from Jersey to Manhattan. I certainly won’t be the first to think about it, but I think I have the upper hand against many other college grads who have never lived in the city because I have lived in the city for two years while in high school. I am not looking for exciting nightlife or a restaurant and bar scene, a neighborhood full of tattoo parlors, or the dating fantasy from Sex and the City. I instead want something stable, quiet, spacious, and, most importantly, dirt cheap, that would let me lay my head to rest at the end of the day without hearing gunshots or police sirens after having spent all of the day blinded by strobe lights and talking to people that are so full of themselves they can barely see past their own noses. 

It seems there is a lot more sense in living in a place such as New Jersey where there are not as many people my age and there are more serious people who are not looking for the spoils of the city, but instead something calmer and more akin to a normal person’s routine that I can slowly settle into as I progress into an adult. Jersey City also seems hospitable to having a larger apartment where I can potentially have my partner move in with me after she graduates. It would make sense for us to do this because she is also from the city, and is looking for something different and away from home. I’m trying to think about my job opportunities long-term, so it’s not far-fetched for me to think that it would be safer to raise my kids in Jersey City Heights. It would be unwise to think that Brooklyn is the ideal place for a young couple. This is the idea that TV shows and movies have been selling for decades, and I know better than to trust that. After all, I’m a film and photography major. They taught us to be literate when watching these perfectly packaged pipe dreams veiling some cocaine-addled actors who go six feet under a few years after their big break in their 20s and 30s. To conclude, I’m trying to be wise about my decisions in order to find a stable lifestyle that supports my passions all the way through, and will eventually support a family of at least eight. I’m joking. Kind of.

The guest meeting I considered the most relevant to me was Sherrel Mike’s. I learned from her that whenever I’m writing networking emails, titles should be clear and concise. Additionally, she told us to connect to the person by figuring out what we have in common, increasing our chances of getting a response. By starting with polite salutations and getting to the point of the email quickly we wouldn’t be wasting the busy professional person’s time. Being firm, and direct, but gentle in our approach to seeking advice or a meeting is key to being taken seriously. Being attentive and reliable about scheduling times and following up is also essential for the same reason. Mike taught us that it’s okay to reach out for a casual chat as well. Staying silent during a negotiation is important because it shows respect as well as confidence. Also, it might show weakness and impatience to speak out of line.

The Sitruk guest meeting taught me about the importance of authenticity in presenting oneself online to future potential employers. It was especially important as a primary point of his lecture to keep in mind that our online presence will determine how we get seen by these large employers. Distinguishing ourselves from the rest of the applicant pool will be increasingly crucial in the coming years because the job market in the digital world is going to get ever so saturated (with the advent of the (ugh…) metaverse and other advanced digital breakthroughs and groundbreaking methods of corrupting society). In today’s world, working from home is something acceptable and normal. Remote work has some potential drawbacks as well as being a potential source of happiness for a lot of introverted people. This meeting taught me that there is a lot more diversity and a lot more complications and issues to be considered when applying for something that I would write off dismissively and naively as an office job. The office has changed considerably and it is no longer what we saw in Fight Club.

The greatest artist of my time

The meeting with Jaskaran Heir seemed the least relevant to my future prospective employment options and considerations, though I appreciated his enthusiasm for the finance sector. It was still very important for me to consider how the office might play a part in my life if I have to go that way, but specific strategies in corporate finance are very much out of the range that I’m looking for. I would say that I learned how to analyze charts and distinguish important data points from a set. Though I would say this wasn’t very relevant to my future plans, I’m sure that some of my teammates would find it helpful.

The meeting with CC was not especially relevant to what I would like to do in the future, but it did teach me some valuable lessons about how to stay organized and how to keep track of my day-to-day life without losing my mind. I am most likely going to have a very hectic and unpredictable schedule once I get out of school, so using the online tools that CC enlightened us about would certainly be important in the future. Her path from how she got her foot in the door at TED and how she switched from journalism to marketing reminded me of how I switched my major freshman year of college and how good of a decision this was for me looking back.

 This meeting was very helpful because Allison seems like a true professional in her field and she was critical enough of us that I felt pushed in a professional writing direction that I had never even explored as a possibility. I appreciated her patience while she dealt with such newcomers to the craft as ourselves. Having said that, the kind of writing that Allison was talking about is something that I would most likely do as a last resort (even if I went into writing in the first place, which is very unlikely). I find that advertising products online, even though necessary, is a virus symptomatic of advanced capitalism which only dirties the internet space and makes people more unwilling to just buy one thing and move on, instead of searching for hours for the right thing. Instead of reading the articles that Allison taught us how to write, I most often just put “Reddit” next to my search query and I get to the democratic answer that way.

The meeting with Alexis King opened my perspective to how important LinkedIn is much more than I had thought before. Learning about how crucial it is to present yourself online in an effective way made me more aware of the pitfalls of my own online presence. The persona that I show professionally is something that I want to be closely tied to who I am in real life, without acting up the maturity or the professionalism more than needed. It was also insightful to learn about how the Meta sub-company functions and treats its employees. Any Meta-owned corporation which I see as evil and practically only serves to disconnect us from the people around us and conditions our developing and impressionable minds to have more and more ADHD as well as internet and phone addictions is generally not something that I take a long time to consider in terms of employment opportunity. Due to the fact that it was mandatory to attend the class that day and hear about the environment, I actually found it extremely intriguing to learn how this company makes sure that their employees are comfortable at the office so they can work longer hours and fill the pockets of the 1%. By the way, I’m glad the Meta stock dropped to hell and I hope the executives are next.

My meeting with alum Jesse Brooks (‘22), a recent IC grad from my program who is a multifaceted artist with a lot of promise and talent taught me a lot of technical photography stuff that I’ll be ecstatic to apply in the future for my projects. We first discussed the gear I’m trying to get from my dad and his shady income over Christmas, which is an 85mm Sigma Art lens for the Sony E mount, which is the camera I have, as well as a 24-70mm zoom Sigma Art Lens. Jesse told me that for outdoor shoots, for him it’s important to use the sun as a backlight and one strobe light as a key light. The second light, if necessary, would be for lighting the environment where the sitter is situated. Another massively important takeaway was that I found out about Jersey City and how much of a swinger I could be if I was able to get an apartment there instead of in the boroughs. Not literally– Financially. Jersey City is a convenient half-hour commute to the city, so it’s a no-brainer for me. He is presently situated in Jersey City Heights, and he recommended the neighborhood. The kind of work he is doing now, or is looking for, includes Retouching work, studio assistant and manager positions, rental photo/video rental house-related stuff, and staff photographer in real estate companies. He told me to avoid the school photographer plague for elementary-aged children– apparently, the hours are long, the work is dull, and the pay is terrible. Jesse told me to contact our professor Michael Lewis for a list of agencies that he has which would be potentially looking for assistants in NYC. Apparently, the list is long. We briefly talked about graduate school and he told me he is considering the Berlin Institute, Pratt, Yale, RISD, and CalArts. Sounds like a fair bid to me. I would do the same after a couple of years of working in the field. Essentially, I want to follow in this guy’s footsteps. He does have some pretty big shoes though. 

The Thesis “exhibit.” My face says it all.

My meeting with Robindeep Singh whom I connected with over Instagram a couple of years back went fantastic. He is a working cinematographer and assistant cameraman, as well as an extremely talented exhibiting photographer also based in the NYC metro area, taught me how nice the people in my sector are and how welcoming to newcomers the photography industry really can be. I showed him my Scezwan Chutney jar as part of my array of hot sauces, and he told me that he could whip me up a tube of that stuff, but even hotter, once I arrive in the city! Hot sauce aside, Robin is on the fine-art gallery side of things, and he makes his bread working on film sets in the city. Photography is his butter, as he described it. Later in the meeting, we discussed gear and he proposed his as a solution for film and digital in one. The equipment he showed me is a Hasselblad H2 with a digital back, prism viewfinder, an 80mm lens, a film back, and a chimney, which comes to about two thousand dollars. I considered spending my savings which is around that sum on the gear, but then my senses came to me and I decided to put the medium-format camera on the back burner. After all, it’s not what camera one shoots with that matters in this game. It’s the laptop one edits with. I’m joking. We concluded our meeting when his laptop died and I had to go to one of my final exam sessions that I was supposed to TA, but I got a chance to hear about his pilgrimage to India with his mother before we hit the “end meeting.” He told me he had never been outside of Punjab before, and there he only visited occasionally, so traveling southeast toward the Taj Mahal area was a massive shock to him. He saw the poverty and difference in lifestyle from his family’s mostly Sikh village (with the exception of a few Hindus) and he told me about how difficult it was to relate to the people out East. They were unreceptive to his photographs, to say the least, and he had only so much film to spend documenting people he did not feel he belonged with at all. Once he returned to his Punjabi area, he photographed the people in his village, telling me how it was likely the first time anybody had brought a camera there with the intent to capture life and emotion, rather than anything commercial. The village congregated and followed him around in a massive group! Though he doesn’t speak Panjabi, he was able to communicate with the members of the community through the lens and gesture, “speaking” to the villagers intimately. That part tore my heart and reminded me I need to do the same for my grandfather’s village in Bulgaria.