It Doesn’t Have to be a Dirty Word: Making Something Mainstream, But Good
In part one of this series, I talked about how I photographed two trailbuilders for nine months and then made large weatherproofed prints that we put along the trail itself so people could see how it was built as they were using it. I called it Evidence of Trail Fairies. In this part I’m going to talk about how my former career helped me get there.
I used to develop videogames for a living, and one of the things I learned from that time was how to create for a mainstream audience.
The idea of targeting a mainstream audience is often ridiculed. It’s considered synonymous with dumbing down your work to the lowest common denominator. I don’t think the work has to be dumb: I learned from making games that if you entertain first, then you have the opportunity to inform second. The entertainment is like a virus that causes your work to spread from person to person as they enjoy your creation and want to share that enjoyment with others. You can attach any extra message you want to the virus and make that spread too. That message doesn’t have to be dumb.
With Evidence of Trail Fairies, the subject matter was definitely not mainstream. Few people know or care about the work of trailbuilders. The problem of getting people to notice a new photography project is very similar to the problem of getting them to notice a new videogame: there’s so many out there that it’s difficult to rise above the noise. So in order to eventually reach the mainstrean I took a layered approach to my communication: simply blasting everyone at once wouldn’t achieve much because to almost everybody the subject is uninteresting and I am a nobody.
First I reached out to people who were interested in the subject matter itself. Those are people who use trails in the area: hikers, runners, and bikers. I tried to capture their attention away from their physical activity by placing placards at strategic locations which explained the project in a straightforward manner and invited them to change their route. In return I entertained them with an unexpected and whimsical experience.
My next layer of outreach was to the broader outdoor community in Vancouver and beyond. I wrote an article that I knew would be seen by many people and could easily be shared. It was succinct and was on a major website. It helped to legitimize me and to entice people to come and find the project by including lots of photos. I gave them a treasure hunt.
Once those layers of people were excited about the project, that excitement legitimized it enough that I could go beyond people who were interested in the outdoors. My next layer of outreach to the mainstream was to the local media. I could show them I had an audience for my work, and that their audience might also be interested. I appeared on TV 3 times and in 4 different newspapers. With that further legitimization I was able to finally reach out to websites that were more mainstream in their focus: photography, art, or viral content.
The end result of all of this was that most of the people reached were not able to see the project in person: only a few thousand at most lived close enough, were interested enough, and were physically capable of reaching it. Yet the fantasy of encountering an art gallery in the forest was enough to spark many more people’s imaginations and to entertain them enough that they wanted to share it.
All of this required clear communication: people generally aren’t entertained when they’re confused. I spent a lot of time while I was making games watching others play what I’d made. I became very familiar with the squeamish feeling I’d get watching them struggle when I wanted them to be having fun. All too often it was because they didn’t understand what I’d made: maybe an in-game character would run away from the player, but the player didn’t realize it was because they were holding a bomb. I knew I couldn’t coach the player because that person represented tens of thousands of people at home who I couldn’t talk to. So I had to go back and make things as clear as I could, usually more than I initially thought I had to.
So for this project too I spent a lot of time getting feedback from others. From the trailbuilders of course, because I was representing them publicly, but also from friends who I thought were representative of people who might encounter the project: mountain bikers, hikers, and non-outdoors people alike. I paid close attention to where they got confused or disengaged. My first session was impromptu, with me showing photos on my phone and saying roughly what I thought each caption would be. My friend hardly understood any of it, which made me quite worried. From this feedback I changed the edit several times, showing each edit in turn to someone new, and rewrote (and rewrote) the captions and supporting text until they were clear.
The end result is that I explained the work very carefully. Some people may feel that explaining their images ruins the magic and robs the audience of a chance to bring their own experiences into the work. But if you want a busy parent, or someone working two jobs, or someone who doesn’t consider themselves to be an “art person” to stop what they’re doing and pay attention, you need to explain what they can expect to get in exchange for their time. That may not mean explaining everything about your work, but it does mean explaining some of it. And that just means working even harder to make sure there’s still more in there to be discovered.
With the project as entertaining as I could make it, it was time to add in the message: the payload for my virus to deliver. While I was photographing the trailbuilders, I kept a close eye on what they were doing and how they felt and from this I built a list of themes that I then tried to photograph. I included as many of these in the final selection of photos as I could. I tried to show the experience I observed of the trailbuilders appreciating the beauty of nature, caring for it, and being dwarfed by it. I tried to show the feelings of friendship, of pride, of adventure, of teamwork, of mentorship, of exhaustion, and of loneliness that I saw. And then I highlighted these themes and others explicitly on the placards on the trail that explained the project and in the article I wrote.
This is all well and good, but I think it isn’t sufficient to just attract a mainstream audience and send out an intended message: I believe it’s important to take responsibility for the message that’s actually received. I was dealing with a subject bigger than me, and I could easily harm rather than help. In this case, that meant people thinking I was placing “billboards” in the backcountry, engaging in pro-mountain biking propaganda, cheerleading environmental damage, and challenging people’s right to use public lands. Each of these groups had the opportunity to take the public conversation away from the message I wanted to deliver, and to damage the reputation of trailbuilders.
I spent a lot of time thinking about these points of view and choosing my words carefully. For someone concerned about billboards, I made sure there was no advertising or organization names anywhere in the project, and made it clear that the installation was temporary. I emphasized that I am a hiker too, and that the trail is used extensively by hikers and trail runners — not just mountain bikers. I highlighted the care the builders took to prevent erosion and minimize environmental damage to the surrounding forest. I explained that the trail was kept secret only temporarily to prevent damage to the trail and surrounding forest as it was being built, and so no one was prevented from accessing public lands.
I was relieved that none of these points of view came to dominate the discussion around the project. I saw them mentioned in passing only a handful of times. Instead, the theme of how hard the trailbuilders worked was always mentioned by viewers. I heard over and over that the project made people appreciate details that went into other trails they use. And I took every opportunity to say that hikers and mountain bikers are not in conflict. I don’t think any of these messages are especially dumb or lowest common denominator, but they were received by a mainstream audience on the six o’clock news, in various newspapers, and on a variety of outdoor-, art-, and photography-related websites.
Although mainstream audiences get a bad rap, I think that creating for them is very satisfying. If you take the time to entertain, and explain yourself carefully, the reward may be that you get to begin a conversation with a huge number of people. You touch their lives, and they touch yours, and what gets reflected back may even be more precious to you than what you put out there.
This is part of a four part series. In the first part I talked about how I turned a trail into an art gallery. In the next parts, I’ll talk about how I recognized the tricks my brain was playing on me that were preventing me from finishing the project, and how math helped me overcome feeling like a failure despite having the outward appearance of success.
