note: this post is directly pulled from my 7/16/21 email newsletter without edits. if you would like to receive my weekly note in your inbox along with additional sections and features not included here, you can join my email community.
in my view, shame is most often— if not always— a manipulation tool we’ve inherited from our oppressors. as a tactic, it functions to defer our own weight onto others when we see no other option, when we know no other way; so out of desperation, we adopt a way that is reckless, impulsive, and uncompassionate. a reflection on the various ways we employ and experience shame is a note for another day, though. in the meantime, holler at brené brown, whose research also happens to indicate that shame is an ineffective tool for long term change.
today, i want to continue the conversation from last time on honoring our contributions and being unabashed in naming our price. this time from the perspective of when people try to shame you for stating your price or outlining your terms because they think it’s too much or that you don’t deserve it.
for those of you who may be experimenting with asking for more at work or asserting any variety of your needs and wants in life, your journey may well include people who inadvertently project their limitations onto you in interest of “teaching” or “protecting” you. these people may include friends, family members, clients, colleagues, acquaintances, public figures, teachers. they may want to instruct you on:
the extent of your personal worth
the ceiling of your work’s value
what you should or should not ask for
what you are and are not ready for
where you should be more “humble”
where you should expect less
where you should put your head down and be grateful
where you should be silent
where you should limit your needs and wants
while often well intentioned and perhaps even holding grains of truth, these are not assessments others get to make for us. and to be real, a lot of workplace and industry norms are toxic as fuck. so bye.
yes, be actual humble. yes, don’t be an entitled ass. yes, some things take time and experience.
but also, i’ll take my standards without shame, thank you. and— don’t prescribe your reality onto mine.
then! then there are the people who are somehow threatened by you standing in your worth— often subconsciously. and they will knowingly or unknowingly be very mean as a result.
what follows are four vignettes from across my ten years as a photographer when people tried to shame me for asserting my price or terms.
2009. the party promoter friend.
within the first year of me shooting, i became a regular photographer for a friend’s party. after successfully shooting their first two or three parties for free or no more than $50 (my memory isn’t the best), i had a meeting with him to discuss making me the party’s resident photographer and to negotiate a new fee.
when i stated my price, which i felt was reasonable— probably something like $200-300 for four or five hours of shooting— my friend scoffed. he said they could get a photographer from the fader magazine to shoot the party for free or very little.
i honestly can’t remember if i agreed to his shit price and if i kept shooting the party or not. but i do remember that i smelled the manipulation from a mile away; if he loved the fader photographer so much, why wasn’t he talking to them instead? i also knew that he was name dropping a photographer from a popular magazine in attempts to shame a newbie photographer like me who he thought shouldn’t have dared to ask for more than a few more pennies.
i remember leaving that meeting thinking less of that friend instead of myself.
2012. the musician.
i was elated when someone whose music i loved happened to catch wind of my photography and said he wanted to work together one day. a couple years later, he came to my town to shoot with me. because he didn’t have a financial budget, we agreed on a barter situation with somewhat of an open-ended timeline for his part.
when something like a year passed and we hadn’t had as much as a follow-up meeting to discuss his end of the barter (after a few attempts on my end), i reached out to ask about his planned timeline to publish the photos as the project he initially wanted to use them for kept getting delayed. since we hadn’t made traction on completing our exchange, i was hoping to at least be able to use the images in my portfolio sooner than later and emailed to ask what he thought about that.
after radio silence from him for several months and assuming i’d been brushed off, i emailed him again to let him know that i’d be publishing a few of the photos to my website. while understandable that he was upset about me making a unilateral decision about the photos, he took his frustration as an opportunity to tell me how long he’d been in business and that i didn’t have the resume to dictate the terms of an agreement. more than anything, this felt like a hollow, cheap blow.
he also made a point to offer character assessments about me and tell me that he ‘didn’t like me anyway.’ kind of like when a child gets mad and then tells the other person, “well, you’re ugly!”
regardless of any merits his side of the story may have held, i remember being so put off by the idea that one has to have a certain kind of resume or seniority in order to have a right to assert their standards, terms, or needs. it’s antiquated bullshit that i’ll never get with.
my work was good enough to take his photo but my resume wasn’t good enough to assert what i wanted? does not compute.
2017. the girl boss startup founder.
i met this brilliant lady founder at a women’s community space; she looked at my work on her phone on the spot and was immediately impressed; making a point to emphasize how picky she was, her history in advertising, and how exceptional my work was. i appreciated being seen in that way and felt we had really established a mutual sense of respect and good will. so when she later suggested we shoot her new campaign together, i was all about it.
early in our meeting, it became quite clear that she didn’t have much of a budget. and because i was such a fan of her, her brand, and her creative direction, i was down to do the shoot as a portfolio project and to help build a relationship with her.
i told her to not worry about budget and to just walk me through the parameters of the project. throughout, she kept trying to press me about price and i kept telling her that even if we did the shoot for free or at cost, i’d be down— i just wanted to build and collaborate.
finally, when she kept pushing, i relented. i told her that my actual fee would be in the tens of thousands of dollars, but that i could give her some sort of stipend rate if she was insisting on paying me something. i probably gave her a figure anywhere from $1000-5000.
just like my friend in 2009, she scoffed and said something like, “i have a photographer who’s shot for vogue do my campaigns for $500.” never mind that vogue is known to rarely pay their photographers or often pays shit when they do. also, when i researched later, i came to find that said photographer shot for teen vogue (which is an incredible publication, but that’s besides the point here).
this woman went out of her way to try and make me feel ashamed for naming a heavily discounted rate that she repeatedly insisted i offer. after i’d already said i’d shoot for free. what are people— really? don’t take the bait, bb’s! sometimes people who you think should know better, people you think are comrades, people you look up to— are also supremely basic.
2019. the artist.
this one was avoidable and definitely a lesson for me. a client wanted some portraits for an upcoming project. simple enough. but their usage needs for the photos were new for me and required that i research the appropriate licensing fees. because the client had limited information available on some usage parameters i’d requested, it became harder to come up with my fee and delayed my pricing process.
in the meantime, because i was really excited about this person and was really rooting for their work, i began planning conversations about the shoot with them in good faith— before finalizing the price. i also gave them much more of my time than i normally would have because i felt a certain kinship with this person and really wanted to support them.
where i really messed up is when i agreed to schedule the shoot without having finalized the price. i made clear over the phone and also in writing that i’d take a deposit to cover the shoot time and then be in touch about the per image licensing fee asap. they agreed.
because i wanted to— i took my time with the shoot (more than they’d paid for), offered them food, and even chatted with them in my home for a couple hours after the shoot.
when i ultimately sent over my per image licensing rates, they were appalled and told me they’d already paid in full. they informed me they’d spoken with a lawyer friend and seemed to be threatening legal action. somewhere in there was also a phone conversation where they basically yelled at me and insulted me. and, naturally, the legal information they obtained about copyright was false— photography copyright law is much more nuanced than people, including lawyers, realize.
nonetheless, they decided to use their working understanding of copyright to slight my work—insinuating that a photo was just a photo and not actually art. and that therefore i didn’t have an artist’s rights over my own work. cute.
the way this person went from 0-100 felt like a trauma response related to something much deeper. something that had nothing to do with me. so i decided that de-escalation and removing myself from the situation as swiftly as possible was the wisest course of action. so that’s what i did. i think i might have even refunded them their money because i wanted a clean break from their energy.
my lesson: never start on a project before fully confirming the rate and terms. even if you think you’re friendly.
the takeaway.
interesting to note is that each of these people held at least one, if not several marginalized identities— some of which we shared— and yet still felt compelled to try and knock me down a couple notches. our internalized oppression and trauma responses are really something, y’all.
even though these folks tried their best to pull me down, i never let their manipulations convince me that my work was worth less. despite being someone who often questions myself, i tend to hold the line when i’m in business mode. i don’t fully know why, but it is what it is. maybe it’s an exercise in trying to remind myself that i am worthy, even if i don’t always believe it— an attempt to work from the outside in.
these instances, instead of being about me, are about the limited imaginations and/or insecurities of others. they illustrate how people will sometimes resort to consciously or unconsciously causing harm to others in order to preserve their own egos and maintain a certain sense of security.
people can have a hard time seeing others win in ways they deep down question they ever could; the audacity to stand in your worth can feel like an affront, so they project their shame and unresolved sense of inadequacy onto you.
some people can only feel up when others are down, as they say.
“how dare this rookie make demands when i never did? when my idols and mentors never did?”
that’s on them— not you.
their shame is not yours. cancel that noise.