Feature interview: Alex Proud

Alex Proud: “I was inspired to work for myself first, before I was inspired to go into the creative industries, which is probably quite a healthy thing. I think sometimes to be inspired by your passion can be a really good thing but sometimes it can obscure pure business. So in my instance, actually, I wanted to run my own business, I wanted to be my own boss. The step into photography was actually chance because a new secretary started working for me and her husband was Dennis Morris, who took the amazing Bob Marley, Sex Pistols photographs and she wouldn’t work for me unless I gave him an exhibition. So I did. And it got huge press coverage and even I’m not that stupid enough to realise there was something in that and no one else was doing it.

“The problem these days is of course we come out of school or university, and you have a 2-1 in Home Media, Economics, Music, Management Skills and you probably never actually understand what a cash flow was, or what a business plan is and sadly whatever business you’re in understanding those things is actually 90% of actually ever getting to year one, let alone year, what I’m on, 15. So yes, use mentors, use advice and use it again and again and again until you understand all of it inside out or, as I said, go and give all your money to the local tramp cause he’ll have more fun with it than you will wasting it.

“I’ve never met anyone from any course who’s worked for me that’s learnt anything significant or useful at university, directly applicable, other than the general development of your intellect.

“I would suggest as it’s the recession, I suspect, you’ll see an enormous amount of Arts Institutions going out of business in the next year to two years. It will be brutal. If you really desperately, desperately need to get into it then you’re going to have to work at night because you’re going to have to do unpaid work. Or go and do a useful degree or a useful training course for a year or two until the recession is over.

“The skills you need to run a gallery? Tenacity. A belief in yourself, enormous amounts of confidence and an ability to take the knocks and not lie down, because all of those things will happen. You will get told that you are wrong, you will fail. Unlike America, when you fail, people will tell you ‘you are a failure’. Basic business skills are really important. Then of course and it kind of always goes as an ‘unsaid’, and maybe I haven’t emphasised this enough but if you’re interested in running a gallery, one will hope you have it, you have to be the best in your field. So whatever it is you want to do you have to know more than everyone else.

“The beauty of recessions is there are lots and lots and lots of empty property out there. The biggest central cost for any business whether you are retail or whether it’s a music rehearsal studio or whatever, is you will need a space to operate in. You should be able to find that for free right now. But there’s lots of things you can get for free. There’s Government schemes, there’s Government loans. There’s lots of money around, there’s lots of people to assist you. You can take university interns.

“You write your business plan. Forget it. Halve all the revenue, double all the costs and that’s what your year one reality will be.  You’ve got to be clever and you’ve got to try and use resources that cost as little as possible.

“You take someone like Rankin, he runs Dazed and Confused, he runs another magazine, he has a studio, he’s a film director, he’s in photography, he raises enormous amounts of sponsorship. Almost all of the big photographers actually are very good businessmen. Doing fashion photography is going to pay you sweet FA for a couple of years so you might have to do wedding photography. Many fashion photographers have to do advertising photography which they’ll do on a different name or they won’t ever use their name underneath. So photography is a great example of where the business and creativity often have to compromise if you want to make it.

“The most important thing about an opening night is having new customers or wealthy people who you can sell the work to. And that’s what I concentrate on. So my day is full of stress and horror. By the time I get to the night kinda the last thing I want to do is talk to anyone and you have to and it’s horrible. An opening night is going to be attended by a maximum of a few hundred people. Half of whom are going to be your friends and family who know you anyway and will speak highly of you, or not, as the case may be, and the other half will get so drunk they won’t remember it. Or you can spend that money on PR and even the worst magazine has a readership of 50,000.

“Britain’s beauty is that we’re still a great nation of individuals and long may that continue. I think places like Camden and Shoreditch and Brixton are wonderful, and the regional cities Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, because they are full of such variety. I think we’re a little more homogenised, but I still think Britain has a great creative future and is probably still one of the great places in the world to be.”