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21 - Different Audiences

There are two main audiences for your work.

There's the audience of fellow photographers and other visually-oriented people.

Then, there's the lay audience.

Each audience is valuable, but each will respond differently to your work.

The visually-oriented audience will see more in the photograph besides the subject, such as how it was made, how it's being used, and so forth.

The lay audience will likely only respond to the subject of a photograph.

And, those subjects not within the genre of family photography may only engender polite comments.

Maarten van Nieriop, in an article, Aspects of Ugliness, compares two areas in Tuscany.1

The first is what we see in our mind's eye when we think of Tuscany.

It's beautiful.

The second is an ugly industrial zone.

Nieriop suggests that both are beautiful: the sublime landscape as well as the ugly landscape.

Photographers do take pictures of beautiful ugly things.

1 Maarten van Nieriop, Aspects of Ugliness,

Jaarboek voor esthetica 2001, Frans van Peperstraten (red.), Nederlands Genootschap voor Esthetica, http://www.nge.nl/Jaarboek2001/Nierop.pdf (Link no longer active).