Alain Briot Fine Art Photography

Briot Speaks Announcement
Other essays in this series

A New Audio CD featuring 4 hours of conversations
between Natalie and I in mp3 format

Exciting news
This is one of the most exciting news I have had the pleasure of announcing in years: Natalie and I are releasing a new audio recording in mp3 format about photography. You can play the mp3 files on your computer (Mac or PC) or on any mp3 player, including the iPod.

Description
This CD focuses on our experience being Artists in Business. It features 4 hours of audio conversations during which Natalie and I describe how I started in photography, from my first trip to the Southwest in 1983 to my return as a student in 1986, to our move to Michigan in 1992, to living in Navajoland from 1995 to 2002, to our move to our current location in the Sonoran Desert.

The discussion starts with my first trip to the United States in 1983, which lasted 6 months, and continues by talking about how I moved from being a student to being a professional photographer, to how we started our business and how we encountered the success we have met with since 1997.

You can listen to 2 excerpts from the CD here:

Excerpt 1: From France to the American Southwest

Excerpt 2: The beginning of the Grand Canyon show

and

You can order Briot Speaks CDs and DVDs on this page

Why audio recordings?
You may ask “why do audio recordings” and why not limit myself to publishing written essays the way I have done so far? The answer is content and content quality.

First, typically, a 12 page essay, with illustrations, takes about 30 minutes to read aloud. While I do not know for sure how many pages it would take to transcribe a 4 hour discussion, I know that it would be novel size, probably 150 pages or more. I can say a whole lot more on an audio recording than I can write in an essay. That is the first motivation behind the new Briot Speaks audio CD.

Second, during a conversation I filter a lot less what I say than when I write an essay. Typically, when working on an essay, I will rewrite the text several times, either in whole or in part, sometimes over several months. What you read is a highly edited version of my thoughts. It is organized, easy to read, comprehensive, but it is not everything that I thought about or wanted to say. With our recorded conversations, we do one take and that’s it. Very little editing is done, if any. What you get is “raw data” so to speak, very much as if you were in the room with Natalie and I, or if you were attending a workshop with us, or listening to us speak casually about photography. This is as close as it gets to being there with us while not having to travel anywhere. Plus, you can play the recordings over and over again and carry them with you in your car, mp3 player, computer, etc.

Opportunities
At this time Briot Speaks CD-1 is a stand-alone CD. However, Natalie and I are considering making Briot Speaks into a regular series, just like Briot's View. If this sounds good to you, if you would like to hear us speak on various subjects related to photography regularly, let us know. We value your opinion.

Thank you.

Alain and Natalie