2025 10 03

Art For Sale! Chicago, Illinois. August, 2025. © Clayton Hauck

As someone who has avoiding marketing at all costs for the entirety of his commercial photography career, I can tell you with ease that I hate it. The only way I’ve done it in the past is by somehow tricking myself into enjoying it (doing blogs, doing affordable headshots, opening a studio, yada yada). These are not really solutions but, in practice, new jobs that don’t efficiently help with marketing my core offerings. I know all this, yet persist. I still have a long way to go, but at least I’m finally acknowledging the problem and starting to make an effort.

This year, my two biggest areas of focus, broadly speaking, have been:

1) Changing my tendency to want to do everything alone. I need people if I’m ever going to succeed at scale (scale being relative here; I’m not looking to sell a startup or IPO).
2) Communication. Nobody will ever know the cool things I’m doing if I don’t tell or show them (duh!?)

This video below popped into my feed and was a really thoughtful and clear summary of what’s been on my mind a lot lately (also, his vibe is like the opposite of most influencer types, which is incredibly refreshing in itself). If you’re like me and loathe selling yourself as an artist, as a business, as a human, I’d give it a watch and maybe you can find some worthwhile tidbits as I did myself.

-Clayton