I'd like to do a little self promoting here today, which is not something I'm overly good at. For whatever old-school reason (maybe it's a midwestern thing), it has always been my practice to just put my work out there and let it speak for itself. Probably not the best way to survive in this business today.

So, 2009 for me was a year of transition. I made about twice as much farming and ranching as I did making images for magazines this year. Which is a first. In fact, I did something else in 2009, that I have never done before, which is to turn down editorial work. No offense magazine editors, and I can say this because we both know it's true... at some point it became just too big of a hassle to wait three or four months to be paid, and then have the invoice returned because a bottle of water should be listed under "food", and a package of tissue should be listed under "supplies". 

Really, you want me to split up a receipt for $3.49 and itemize it under two categories?

Sorry, that's just not going to happen.

My biggest journalistic success came from a self-assigned project (no surprise there) on the Montana Fair which ran on the New York Times Lens blog. You can see it here, or the extended edit here on my site. I did the pictures and the words, which was a treat. I enjoyed every single second of the entire shoot. Also a treat, but something that was fairly common when magazines still did things right.

One of the nice things about the Lens, is the huge amount of views, and the high level of commentary that it produces. It is probably the only place that most photography people visit, and it also sends a huge amount of traffic to your own sites. Does this result in more income? I'm not sure, but the Montana images were republished in several oversea publications and I sold a few prints.

Print sales... yes, all of a sudden that has become a good source of income. I'm not really sure how it happened. I haven't figured out the recipe yet, but the emails come in and the prints go out. Another treat.

On a side note the editors, specially the great ones, have/had a huge affect on the success and the work produced by photographers. For the most part, they hold/held the power in the relationship, the bargain being that the photographers were creating a body of work that would support them, or at least keep them busy, later in life.

Of course, this wasn't suppose to happen until everyone was old and gray, but sadly that has not been the case. This past year we've seen relatively young photographers like myself, concentrating more on their archives, print sales, museum shows, things like that, while many of the great editors of our generation have been prematurely disposed of by the publishing industry.

This is professionally and personally very uncool, but gives publishers another problem as they try to right their respective ships. The loss of so many great editors has destroyed the institutional memory of what, at one time, made these magazines great.

How are you going to get that back? It's a complex system, you need all of the pieces in place to make the machine work. Think of all of the effort professional sports teams put into finding and cultivating new talent. The publishing industry has basically destroyed their farm programs and dismantled their coaching staffs.

Instead of having editors that understand how to build up ideas from scratch into award winning journalism, you now have "editors" that mainly excel at finding useable content, cheap and fast.

No, it's not going to come from programs like the Eddie Adams workshops. Adding movement and sound isn't enough, nor is having Pulitzer Prize winners telling young photographers that selling images for $50 a crack to MSNBC is a recipe for success.

It's not surprising that there's such a huge level of frustration among young photographers today. They're catching BS from all sides.

OK, back to museums.

Some of my work was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, Houston this year for a show slated for 2012, which you can read about here. I'm very excited about this. It's a big deal for me. The museum really has something going on in Houston with Anne Wilkes Tucker calling the shots.

The Sheldon Museum of Art did a show from their permanent collection featuring work by Larry Burrows, Dorothea Lange, and me, which is quite humbling.

The Annenberg Space for Photography did a slide show night featuring some of the Montana Fair work.

My relationship with the Toucan Gallery in Billings, Montana continues to grow. One of the highlights from this year for me has to be their sale of one of my prints to the lead singer of REO Speedwagon.

There are also a few shows still traveling around the world, so all in all I think things are moving in the right direction in the art(ish) world.

Books, there's been a few this year, I'll only mention one because it's so embarrassing.

Photo:Box is a collection of 250 photographs by "The Greatest Masters of International Photography",  is really a wonderful book. The only problem is there's no index.

So after paging through it at Barnes and Noble and not seeing myself represented in it's pages, I grabbed my laptop, did a little searching, fired off a not really angry, slightly amusing, yet not without a little chastising, email to the editor of the book (Yes, at this point I am the guy that does those kind of things). Immediately after pushing "send" my first born came over, picked up the book and said, "Daddy, your names right here on the cover." Whoops. To make matters worse, the text that goes along with my image is probably the nicest thing anyone's every written about me.

Dear Mr. Roberto Koch, please except my sincere apology.

Yes, I left the store with the book.

Probably the biggest professional success this year was what I think will be a growing market for photojournalists in the coming year. Just because magazines have (largely) abandoned classic photojournalism, doesn't mean advertisers still don't desire quality content to attract viewers.

For advertisers, time on site has a lot of value, but online advertising schemes have rewarded publishers for traffic volume instead of the quality of traffic and for page loads rather than how long a viewers spends looking at content on a single page. That's why you often have to make several clicks when you should only have to make one. It's all tied together of course. Advertising revenue via Google, modeling how magazine content is presented online, ultimately results in paparazzi images having more value than, well anything else actually.

Anyway, two of the advertising jobs I did this year (are they advertising or commercial? Not sure on that) are essays, on Nobu (sushi) and Narciso Rodriguez (fashion). They are basically DITLO's (day in the life of), so I do exactly what I'd do if it was for an editorial client, the only difference being the working conditions, the level of professionalism and the compensation (of course) are a whole lot better.

I actually had a lot of fun on both of these shoots, and I think the work is pretty good too.

Nobu

Narciso Rodriguez

The most disturbing trend from last year...

Young, and not so young photographers working for hire with big clients at $1,200 to $1,500 a day. Then the following week shooting a couple of days for a wire service under a similar copyright grab for even less money. So dumb and short-sighted.

Zero, the number of news magazines currently being published in the United States. Time, you could still save yourself, Newsweek... what's left to save?

One positive thing from last year...

New York Times managed to keep producing great photojournalism. Hey, at least they took care of their own. Just don't sign that contract freelancers!

(I swear I had more positives, but somehow I'm drawing a blank now.)

Now, the iSlate... yeah, it could be a real game changer. Apple and those capable of producing great content on their own might just reinvent this whole business next year.

I think there's a pretty good chance of this happening.

Regardless, it will be a sharp knife that cuts both ways. Magazines... it's not paper, it's not a website, if you treat it like either, you're dead.