Description: 'Seeing the Light' is a photo agency in Birmingham (UK). Its owner, a photographer, talks about how and why she started her company, about past and current projects, marketing strategies and plans for the future.

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Our location

Rhonda: I'd like to welcome you to Birmingham. I'm here with Sabine in the custard factory. It used to be a factory that made custard, which is a milked-based pudding. The place was emptied in about 1978, and it was a furniture warehouse for about ten years, and then it was bought by a guy called Bennie Gray, who is an entrepreneur, but has actually turned this into a world class building for the media. And basically we get visits every so often from people who come to look at what he has actually done with the factory and how he's used European moneys and his own investments to create a centre that has a reputation for architectural innovation. And also, I suppose, without compromising his own beliefs. He's quite an extraordinary character. I give you an example: outside the front is actually the country's only 'living' statue, which is 'The Green Man'. It's a fertility rights statue and actually has its own self-watering system so that it actually is growing all the time. And when that was opened there was a sort of ... almost a pagan festival around fertility, which was really brilliant. And all the councillors came and different people came from business and didn't quite know what to make of it. But he never compromises his own self and I think that's a really important part of being a business person in that basically you have beliefs and throughout everything that you do your beliefs underlie and he's never really let go of that and, see, that's one of the reasons that he's quite successful.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 267 Duration: 1m50

How we got started

Rhonda: Anyway, I'll talk to you a little bit now about the agency, which at the moment is called 'Seeing the Light'. We're ten years old and the agency grew because I used to be a photographer. That was my job. I was self-employed and about ten years ago I actually wrote a book about how you survive as a photographer. So it was about all the things that you don't learn at art school. It was about promoting yourself when you work, how you found funding, how you got into galleries, how you got your work published. And people told me that it was a crazy idea to write a book, a business book, for artists, because artists only wanted to make work. My response to that was that unless artists did become all business-minded they wouldn't be able to continue making their own work. So it was quite strategic. I self-published the book. I had about 2000 copies made and over the course of the next two years sold them out. The next thing that I did was I got some of the people who had written articles for the book to come to Birmingham and actually look at the work of some photographers. And it took me a long time to get the photographers to actually agree to come and show their work. They couldn't see what was going to happen. But quite a few people got commissioned as a result of that weekend. They got exhibited, they got published. And word started to get round that 'Seeing the Light' in Birmingham and myself were creating a new way of networking producers and potential buyers. The agency's since grown from - the first year I think we turned over 15,000 pounds and last year we turned over a quarter of a million pounds. It's very much the mixed-economy approach and it's also a mixture of different sorts of projects that go from commercial, through education, through things that are state-funded.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 332 Duration: 2m03

Preparing an exhibition

Rhonda: So at any one time we might be working on a huge project like 'The People and the City' exhibition, which basically is in this book, which profiles some of the people who actually live and work in the city and also profiles what the city actually looks like from the air, but in an extraordinarily creative way. This was commissioned to support the Capital of Culture bid for 2008. We were one of the six cities in the running. And that was an extraordinarily well-paid commission, which I 'stole' from an agency in London because when I saw what they were actually going to do with the city of Birmingham through a series of photographs, we just knew that we could do it better. And luckily - it's a very long story and it's a lovely story but I haven't got time now - we actually got the commission. We had six weeks to produce the show. We commissioned two people, Brian Griffin and Tom Merilion, both who have their roots here in Birmingham. And Brian made portraits of people and Tom took the pictures from the air. And then we opened the show in London in the architect Richard Roger's new building, on the sixth floor of his building in Soho. And we invited the world and the world came. And it was a very successful opening, it made the local and national news and Sunday magazines. And gave Birmingham a really brilliant profile. And although we didn't actually win the Capital of Culture 2008 award, I think that opportunity allowed us to both profile ourselves, our photographers and the city - nationally and also internationally.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 278 Duration: 1m50

Management training

Rhonda: At the same time we were actually running a management course for photographers, which has been an ongoing thing that we've done ever since we started. So, every year we have some sort of programme, where we work with photographers to develop their skills for promoting themselves, finding new markets, networking. And we're linked into different schemes. We have a contact, very good contact, with UK trade investment. And we work with them every year to do some sort of scheme whereby photographers learn more about how to export their work. So, for instance, at the moment we're having ten books made. One from each of ten photographers who live in this region. So that in five weeks time, I can take the books to FotoFest in Houston in Texas to try and interest other people in taking the work and also to take it to review in New York - obviously in New York - in April.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 158 Duration: 1m00

Running a festival

Rhonda: At the same time we run what's now known as the world's most technologically advanced photography festival, in terms of a portfolio review, where last year we had 160 photographers from fifteen countries come to show their work to 50 reviewers from seventeen countries, who we fly in annually every July. So we have this huge festival. And unlike other portfolio reviews, photographers who want to show their work to potential buyers can actually visit our website, see who the buyers are, and they can book times in advance over the weekend of the festival, so that they can specifically target their work to those particular people at particular times. And they know in advance who they're going to see. And the reviewers also know in advance who they're going to be seeing. And we've got a sort of joke about it; we sort of call it the dating agency for photographers. And it's actually working out very well because that online matching means that photographers have time to prepare the materials exactly for that reviewer. And so this year we had about 60% result of photographers having work published, being represented by international agents, having exhibitions or being commissioned. But the greatest thing about 'Rhubarb' and I suppose the greatest thing about what we do here is that we try and network together partners, potential buyers, photographers with interested others. So we have a whole series of exhibitions that go on in the public domain around the festival itself.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 250 Duration: 1m52

Promoting the business

Rhonda: We're at quite a strange place in our history at the moment. To be honest, our reputation nationally and internationally is better than our reputation regionally. We consider that probably Birmingham is one of the hardest cities to work in for an agency that represents image makers because Birmingham doesn't really have a very good handle on its own image. So, it tends to use very out-of-date marketing pictures, it doesn't invest very well in photographs that, I suppose, make visible the contemporary life of the city. And a large part of our job is advocacy in going and talking to people and saying 'Look, actually we could do this better'. And, actually, because we did the 'People and the City' show and it had such fantastic results, we do have evidence that we can actually take with us. So everything that we do, we actually get documented and we take that around. This is actually the brochure that is from the festival last year. So, we had the 'People and the City' show at the festival. This actually is a diary of events of the three days of the festival. This is the online gallery where all the photographers get one image with their contact details. The rest of it just tells you actually what goes on, who the international reviewers are, what they think about the event. So that afterwards we can take this to sponsors and say 'Look what we've done'. And I think as a business person I would say that documenting and keeping evidence of all your achievements is actually really important because otherwise it's very hard to evidence to potential funders, bankers, supporters, clients and people who actually buy your services, you know, your success really. So we've got this sort of crazy little phrase, which is 'Visibility is all'. And we try where we can to collect together things that have actually been written about us.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 323 Duration: 2m08

Restructuring the business

Rhonda: Why are we in a strange time in our life? - well, 'Seeing the Light', which is actually the host organisation for the festival, which is called Rhubarb-Rhubarb, doesn't have such a high profile as Rhubarb-Rhubarb, so we are going to ... so we just re-branded all of our promotional materials and we're going to turn the company into Rhubarb-Rhubarb, and 'Seeing the Light' will revert to me, which is its rightful place to be. And we're going to probably turn the company into something else ... sorry, we're going to turn the company into a different structure, so that it has a broader board of directors and I don't have to maintain complete financial responsibility. Because as it's growing that's getting more and more scary. And we're also hoping to make a very large bid to our regional development agency for three years' money and probably for about half a million pounds. So that instead of having to keep stopping and raising money, which really detracts from the things that you want to do, we'll have three years' money and then we can programme in all of the things that we want to do and really build on the work that we've done particularly over the last four years with the festival.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 211 Duration: 1m18

Making the business work

Rhonda: In a way, there are only, I think, a few people in Birmingham who do realize the true impact of what we've done. Photography is not one of the creative industries, as defined by the Department of Media, Culture and Sports. All of those creative industries, which include things like advertising, publishing, high-end design, multi media, broadcast on screen, they do get funds made available to them for development. Unfortunately, photography falls under things like publishing. It also, of course, comes into new media. So we're constantly having to juggle it around and actually trying to put it into other people's agendas. And I suppose we find it surprising that something like photography that does have the power to profile businesses, people and cities, doesn't get a very good press and doesn't get very good support in terms of government funding. So, we decided to be very strategic and we would revamp the company, restructure it, revise the internal systems and the physical way that we're actually organising ourselves. What I did about a year ago was I applied for some lottery money to appoint a business development manager, so that we could actually see how that person would have a strategic impact on our capacity building. I don't like using all these words, but these are words that we're having to use now. And so basically, we can actually take the core services and we can actually build on them. And we can show a sort of public-private partnership mix. And we can show more ways of generating income. It actually took about a year to get that money through and to get that person in post. And she's just started and ... / . It's taken a year to get that person in place and she's just started.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 297 Duration: 2m15

Challenges for the future

Rhonda: So what we're actually doing now is we're actually mapping how we're going to spend the next six months. We're writing a new business plan, we're looking at the impact of her post and basically we are having to work towards long term sustainability, which, I have to say, for any organisation that is concerned with the media at the moment is becoming extraordinarily difficult because we're open to a lot of commercial competition. So, what we have to do is we have to develop our unique selling points, which are high-quality training for image makers and the incredible success that we've had with our festival, particularly the success we've had using our online approach to booking between image makers and end users. And also thinking about how we can spin out the technologies that we've had developed specifically for us over the last two or three years and actually use those to better deliver services.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 156 Duration: 1m04

List of speakers

Acknowledgements, availability and copyright

Acknowledgements: The project has been supported by the University of Tuebingen. The video interviews have been carried out and recorded by Sabine Braun, Stefanie Hahn, Petra Hoffstaedter and Kurt Kohn. The speakers have agreed to the use of the materials for non-commercial research and education purposes.

Availability of the ELISA corpus: The ELISA corpus is made available by the Department of Applied English Linguistics at the University of Tuebingen. It is freely available at this website for study, teaching and research purposes, and copies of the transcripts may be distributed, as long as this statement of availability appears in the text. However, if any portion of this material is to be used in educational presentations and publications, permission must be obtained in advance. Commercial use of any form is excluded. For further information about permissions, please contact Dr. Sabine Braun at s.braun(at)surrey.ac.uk.

Copyright of the ELISA corpus: Department of Applied English Linguistics, University of Tuebingen.