The Referent Part 6 - Audience

1. Introduction

My previous essay, Style, ended with a short commentary about audience.  This new essay expands on this commentary by focusing on why deciding who our audience is, and proceeding to find that audience, is important.

2. What is an audience?

Your audience are the people who are willing to give you their time and attention by showing interest in your work, either looking at it, commenting on it, or buying it.   Your audience consists of people who like your work.  Your audience does not consist of people who dislike your work or are critical of your artistic approach.  People who for whatever reason find your work uninteresting or disapprove of your artistic approach are not your audience.

I divide the audience in two different categories: incidental and real audiences.  An incidental audience is an audience we met for reasons other than our artwork.  An incidental audience consist of friends, family, co-workers, professional connections, or any other individuals who we interact with for reasons other than our art.  When members of an incidental audience show an interest in our work, it is for incidental reasons. Members of that audience are interested first and foremost in something else than our work. Therefore, the primary reason we are meeting them is not because of our art.

A real audience on the other hand is an audience whose members we meet solely because of our work. This can happen at a physical art show, over email or on social media, through responses to a publication, or through any other way we show or promote our work.  A real audience is interested first and foremost in our work.   Therefore, the primary reason we are meeting them is because of our art.

We all have an incidental audience because we all have friends, family, co-workers, acquaintances, professional connections and so on.  For this reason, the first audience most artists have is an incidental audience. Nothing wrong with that. We all have to start somewhere.  However, in order to gain traction in the world of art, we need to expand our audience by seeking, reaching, and connecting with a real audience.

3. Finding our audience

Moving from an incidental to a real audience means finding an audience who likes our work and is appreciative of our artistic approach.  Doing this is a process that starts by deciding who our audience is.  I say ‘deciding’ because finding a specific audience is a decision.  If we do not make that decision, how do we know that we are showing our work to the right people?  How do we know that those who are seeing our work are interested in it? How do we know that they enjoy seeing our work? How do we know that they are members of our audience?  At best, we are guessing that they will like our work.  At worst, we have no idea whether they will or not.  In any case, we are making assumptions.

4. Whoever wants to look at my work.

Many beginning photographers believe that their audience is ‘anyone who wants to look at their work.’  Therefore, ‘whoever wants to look at my work’ is the response I get when I ask beginning students who their audience is.  

This is certainly the simplest and easiest audience-finding approach, the one that requires the least amount of effort.  Quite simply, all that is required is to put your work out there and wait for compliments, thumbs up, hearts and the like.  It is also an approach which is highly unreliable because it depends entirely on luck. Whoever follows this approach hopes that those who like their work will see it when and where they show it. However, luck is fickle and unreliable and this approach rarely works. 

Unfortunately, it is an approach favored by many artists, and not only when it comes to finding an audience.  Many artists hope that someone, somewhere, somehow will discover their work and make them rich and famous.  While not impossible, it is both unlikely and unreliable.  It is also naïve because luck is not a business plan. I used to follow this approach until, while still in graduate school working on my PhD, I took a course titled ‘The artist in business: taking care of your own destiny’ during which the instructor, Libby Platus, taught us to find our audience, price our work adequately, exhibit it in the correct locations in regards to audience and price, and get down to business making money instead of waiting for fame to come along.  If fame happens, fantastic. If it does not, we are taking care of the essential by guaranteeing a profitable future for ourselves.

The course could as well have been called: ‘finding your audience’ because an audience is not just ‘people willing to look at our work.’  An audience consists of specific people, with specific interests, income, lifestyles, buying power, taste, style and numerous other socio-economic characteristics that makes them part of a specific group.  Defining a specific audience and finding ways to reach this audience is how we find people who are likely to enjoy our work and buy it.  This is quite a step away from ‘whoever wants to look at my work’.  Of course, anyone can look at our work, but many who will look have no interest further than a quick glance because our work does not match their taste, interests, lifestyle, income bracket or any of the other characteristics that make them who they are.

5. Indebtedness, concern and respect for our audience

We are indebted to our audience.  They give us their time and attention, and in return we give them the finest work we are capable of creating together with the information necessary to understand this work. Accessorily, if we sell our work, we position it at a price point that is fair for all parties: the artist, the audience, and the art market.

This indebtedness is both important and misunderstood.  When I explain how it works, many beginning artists react by saying that doing so is akin to ‘selling their soul’ or ‘matching their art to the customer’s couch’.  Nothing can be further from the truth. There is no mention of selling out in my description of indebtedness.  Selling out is actually going against the concept of indebtedness which is fundamentally about honesty towards our audience.  This honesty means that the artist is faithful to his vision, and that the audience is willing to understand this artist’s vision with the information the artist provides them with.  To sell out would irrevocably damage this trust-based relationship.

So why are beginning artists saying that what I describe means selling out to an audience?  Simply because they have the wrong audience, or they do not have an audience at all, meaning they show their work to whoever wants to look at it, or again because they do not provide their audience with the information necessary to understand their work.  In such situations it is common for the audience to be distant and uninvolved, not because the artwork is bad (although it may be) but because the artwork is foreign to them.  To gain traction and to sell their work, artists unwilling to work at it, alter their original work to please their audience.  Often this is done by mimicking the style of an artist that their audience likes.

6. Explaining our work

This is clearly not the way to create a successful relationship with an audience, or to fulfill the debt we have with our audience.  The way to do this correctly is to first, decide who our audience is, second to show our work where that audience goes, and third to provide our audience with the information they need to understand our work.

The first two parts of this process, finding an audience and a location to show our work, is dependent on socio-economic research and describing this research is beyond the goals of this essay.  However, the third part, explaining our work, is within the range of this essay because it deals with how we communicate with our audience.  

Explaining our work is necessary and writing is the most effective way to do it.  Here too, beginning students react negatively to what they perceive to be an unnecessary task.  Why explain what they do or how to understand their work?  After all, they are photographers, not writers.  This is visual art, not a foreign language text. Their work does not need translating because its meaning should be obvious.  Unfortunately, it is not.  At least not to the majority of their audience.  It certainly is obvious to them, but not to others who are coming upon their work for the first time.  And yes, sometimes visual work needs to be translated, even though it is visual, because photographs and images do not mean the same thing to everyone.

So, what does our work mean and who needs help understanding it? Certainly, for starters, we are the ones best able to understand our work since we created it.  Or we should, because not all artists can explain their work.  However, for those who do, the answer lies in the style of work they create.  

If their style is commonplace, few explanations are necessary.  In photography, this is the case for traditional landscape photography, color and black and white, because there is such a vast genre to fall back on.  Most people are familiar with that genre, therefore little explanation is necessary.  

If their style is not commonplace, more explanations are necessary because there is a much smaller pre-existing genre to fall back on.  

Finally, if their style is unique, extensive information is needed because there is no existing genre to fall back on.  It is the information provided by the artist that will allow the audience to understand what they are looking at.

7. Conclusion

It is tempting to believe that showing our work, without spending time asking where and to whom, and without providing written information, will bring us an audience.  Unfortunately, this does not always work, especially if you have a unique style.  To be successful in finding an audience, you have to work at it. 

This work comes in addition to the work required to create artwork.  In many ways it is the difference between approaching artistic photography as a hobby or as a profession.  When approached as a hobby, the work I describe in this essay may be superfluous.  After all, hobbyists engage in activities to relax, enjoy themselves, not work as hard or harder than they do at their profession.

However as a business, art is your profession, and as such it requires that you work on it as hard as you can and that you do the things that hobbyists do not have to do.

8. About Alain Briot

I create fine art photographs, teach workshops with my wife Natalie and offer Mastery Tutorials on composition, image conversion, optimization, printing, business and marketing.  I am the author of Mastering Landscape Photography, Mastering Photographic Composition, Creativity and Personal Style, Marketing Fine Art Photography and How Photographs are Sold.  All 4 books are available in eBook format on our website at this link: http://beautiful-landscape.com/Ebooks-Books-1-2-3.html.  Free samplers are available.

You can find more information about our workshops, photographs, writings and tutorials as well as subscribe to our Free Monthly Newsletter on our website at http://www.beautiful-landscape.com.  You will receive 40 free eBooks when you subscribe.

9. Studying fine art photography with Alain and Natalie Briot

If you enjoyed this essay, you will enjoy attending a workshop with us.  I lead workshops with my wife Natalie to the most photogenic locations in the US Southwest. Our workshops focus on the artistic aspects of photography.  While we do teach technique, we do so for the purpose of creating artistic photographs.  Our goal is to help you create photographs that you will be proud of and that will be unique to you. The locations we photograph include Navajoland, Antelope Canyon, Monument Valley, Zion, the Grand Canyon and many others. Our workshops listing is available at this link: http://beautiful-landscape.com/Workshop-home.html

Alain Briot,
Arizona,
January 2026

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