Artist As An Entrepreneur Photographer: Tom Mangelsen’s Images of Nature (Part 7)

SM: Essentially you are saying the market has now experienced an explosion of images, not all of which convey a unique essence?

TM: Yes. A lot of photographers who are above average are giving away their images in order to get a credit line. One of the difficult things with wildlife photography is the proliferation of people who are willing to go to game farms to photograph. They put trained animals in situations that look like natural settings and photograph them. Often times they do not credit as such.

SM: It is fake nature photography.

TM: Exactly, and I have probably been the most outspoken about that.

SM: It sounds as though the Internet and digital photography have not been good for your business.

TM: The Internet is good. The stock part is not. We have a stock agency, and we sell some stock to advertisers, in general magazine sales, book sales, large coffee table books that have a lot of illustrations, or calendars. People look at their iPhones for their calendar. They do not need to hang calendars now. We have a website, and it continues to grow every year.

SM: What percentage of your business do you do on your website?

TM: About 5% to 10%. It is equal to one of our galleries. It is one of our growth areas and is something we can do better at. We need to redesign it and keep adding things to it.

SM: It is clear that business has not been the driving factor in your art career. What drives you?

TM: Part of why I do what I do is to give back to nature. I try to bring out a conservation message with my photography. I am not driven by travel or the desire to produce a better-than-average picture. I have always wanted to elevate wildlife and nature photography to the point where it is accepted as an art form. I don’t know if I have done that or not.

Early on when I traveled the country trying to sell my pictures through galleries, the message I received was that wildlife photography was not art. The only people they considered as great were Ansel Adams and others who were all dead. It was not that I wanted to prove something, but I felt that people loved nature and beautiful landscapes as well as the behavior of animals. I figured they would put significant dollars out for pictures of a photograph as opposed to an oil painting, sculpture, or watercolor.

I like the idea that my photography has made some difference preserving landscapes, ecosystems, or species. That drives me. I started the Cougar Fund to help protect mountain lions. It takes a tremendous amount of time, but I spent 42 days photographing a cougar mother and her kittens. I felt a connection and that I had to do something about the fact that they were getting a bad rap. They were seen as mean predators, and they were also being hunted for sport. I think sport hunting is criminal. I had do to something to educate people to help them see cougars in a new light.

SM: What is your point of view on hunting in the context of conservation?

TM: I think that hunters who have bought waterfowl stamps have done a lot of establish natural wildlife refuges. All wildlife benefits from that. I don’t hunt anymore because I do it with my camera. I have a different intimacy with the same birds I used to hunt. I think that when people do it sportingly, give fare chase, provide dollars to refuges, and do it right then it is fine. I expect it to be sporting.

SM: It is part of the balance of the ecosystem. There are places where some species can go out of balance.

TM: There are times when animals do get out of balance. Humans are probably the reason they are out of balance, but legitimate measures must be taken and that is fine. I tend to think that predators do a lot better at managing a species than humans hunting predators and then turning around and hunting the predator’s prey that has gotten too large.

SM: Tom, this has been a fantastic interview. I hope this interview inspires others in your line of work. Congratulations on your success.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Artist As An Entrepreneur Photographer: Tom Mangelsen's Images of Nature
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