Photos by Amanda Hoffman and Jessica Arroyo
Creative consultant and personal coach Amy V. Cooper on using our strengths to bring our work vision and our inner voice into alignment
Some of the most beautiful and rewarding hikes in nature are those that move the hiker along a trail with varied difficulty and through a series of changing landscapes. The new and unknown arise at every turn, motivating the hiker forward or down a new, unexplored path. As the saying goes, it’s the journey, not the destination. Photographer and business consultant Amy V. Cooper understands the beauty of a winding path. She has masterfully navigated a diverse and changing creative career, adapting her focus along the way to enrich both her personal and professional life. The result is a thriving business that includes a unique combination of photography business consultation services, and personal coaching incorporating modalities such as tapping and hypnosis.
Amy has long been interested in how women are represented in the fields she has been a part of, but it was a historical moment in politics that proved transcendent, motivating Amy to step up her personal efforts to amplify the voices of women in the photography field. She has devoted much of herself to not only elevating voices, but helping many find or use their voice through her coaching and mindfulness guidance.
In addition to running her business, Amy is a Masterclass educator and the Events chair for Focus on Women. We caught up with Amy as the world slowly began to reopen, and she shared her plans for an in-person return to networking events after a long COVID break, along with wisdom gained along her winding path.
Your LinkedIn, website, and Instagram show the diversity of your experience. Tell us about your career path.
After studying fashion design and taking photography as an undergraduate elective, I moved to New York City to study photography at Parsons School of Design. I interned at Elle Décor magazine, and later worked for MTV, where I had the opportunity to build a portfolio and gain experience in production. I eventually moved to Austin, Texas, to be near family. I started working in advertising, where my photo editing experience translated really well into art-buying and digital asset management.
I was ready to get out of advertising around the time of the big Wendy Davis filibuster in 2013. The filibuster was meant to stop legislation limiting reproductive freedom in Texas. That night was like the Super Bowl for feminists. Davis was filibustering for 11 hours, and in Texas, filibustering is very serious business. You have to stay on topic for the entire time—you can’t take a break, you can’t go to the bathroom, you can’t eat. You have to stand there and talk until the clock runs out. It felt like I was watching something historic happening. The Texas capital was filling with people and protesters, and you could really sense their energy. President Obama was tweeting about it, and Davis did end up running out the clock. Unfortunately, a special session was called later, and they ended up passing the bill.
It had a huge influence on me. It made me question what I was doing to help people, specifically women. I could count on one hand the number of women that I had been able to hire for a really big campaign in the last 20 years of working in advertising and entertainment, and I wanted to change that. I decided to open my own photo agency representing only women photographers—Trove Artist Management. While I was in the process of building that agency, I was also mentoring younger photographers on the side, offering portfolio reviews and consultations, and that’s the part of my work that I really fell in love with. I closed the agency right before COVID and chose to focus on photography consulting.
How did COVID influence that transition?
It actually worked out very well for me, because so many photographers’ work had been halted that they finally had time to update their websites, work on their portfolios, and think about their marketing strategy. They really needed someone to talk to, to kind of help them through what was happening. My business did very well, and it really helped me grow.
During that time I also created a commercial photography marketing Masterclass, for people or photographers who couldn’t afford my services. The Masterclass is everything inside of my brain that I’ve learned in the photo industry over two decades.
You have capitalized on your experience and diversified your offerings in visionary ways. We saw this in Jen Warren’s work, too. You both are so creative with your branding. Was it through this diversification that you became connected with Focus on Women?
Focus on Women founder Traci Terrick found me through a message board that was a part of a photo directory, and she discovered my campaign called Diversify the Lens, which was a campaign that I created as a part of my agency. The Diversify the Lens campaign aimed to expand awareness of the underrepresentation of women in commercial photography. I wanted to shed light on how few women were shooting ad campaigns and editorial features.
I was hosting meet ups for women in the industry as part of Diversify the Lens, and I was excited for the opportunity to co-host one with Traci. The mission of Diversify the Lens seemed like a natural fit. That event was in February 2020, literally 3 weeks before everything was put on hold due to COVID.
Focus on Women scrambled its resources to continue having community events through Zoom, such as a happy hour, right?
Yes, we still wanted to offer community, maintain networking, and be there to support each other. It was really important for us to stay in touch. So, I suggested to Traci that we continue our happy hours on Zoom. The first one had about 40 or 50 attendees, and it grows every time we do it, which is now bi-monthly.
How do you get the word out?
A lot of it is by way of the board members sharing in our own networks on LinkedIn and Instagram. We also promote it in the newsletters that we each have for our own businesses, and Focus on Women now has its own robust newsletter.
How do you envision events for Focus on Women as we move through the end of the pandemic and begin resuming business as usual?
We are anxious to get back to in-person networking events. We recently hosted an event in New York and hope to have more this year in California, Texas, and beyond. We plan to gain visibility for Focus on Women by representing the organization at regional photography events such as conferences and portfolio reviews. We have been hosting a regular Clubhouse chat every Tuesday at 12PM ET with different topics and guests.
What are your plans for your own business and your personal goals for the coming year?
So much of what I’ve learned over the past few years of working with photographers and creatives, and working in the photo industry, is that so much of it is arbitrary. There’s no real standard for pricing or marketing. Everyone works differently, and mindset is a big part of running a freelance business. I have been doing more studying in the area of mindset, and offering new services to my clients that are focused on mindset, clarity, and authenticity. Instead of teaching my clients to follow a formula, I work with them to create an individual strategy based on what works for them. The photography and advertising industries have changed so much, especially now that influencers and Instagram and social media set the pace. The old ways of having reps and using directories are not working. I try to help photographers and other creatives figure out what their passion is, and instead of looking outside of themselves, we build their business strategy from their authentic desires.
That’s a great way of framing the alignment of our vision with our need for inner harmony.
Yes. I invite people to get into their bodies and to notice what’s happening in their bodies as they are working, because that’s giving them so much information. A lot of my clients feel very stressed out about trying to keep up with social media algorithms, and I ask them very plainly, “How do you feel when you’re scrolling through Instagram? How do you feel when you’re posting on Instagram?” If it doesn’t feel good, don’t make that your top marketing priority because you’re not expending energy that’s going to have a positive return for you. If you hate in-person networking, don’t do it. Don’t go out to a bar and try to shake people’s hands. Figure out a different way of networking that feels more comfortable, that feels more aligned with your energy. If you prefer to write rather than to speak, maybe focus on marketing strategies that involve more writing. I have a Marketing Habits Masterclass to help people create realistic habits that will stick. If your goals are too big or too daunting, you’ll never even get started.
Do you find that creatives in the photography field tend toward introversion or extraversion in one direction or the other?
I feel like a lot of people would say that photographers are artists, and artists tend to be introverted, that they tend to go inside. But that’s not always the case. There are definitely a lot of very extroverted, outgoing photographers out there. It’s just that you see them more, or you hear them, or they’re louder. I’m probably attracting more introverted clients, or introverted humans in general, because I am very calm and quiet. I’m not screaming, I’m not dancing on Instagram reels. I’m not working big parties, but I do love to host events.
It’s almost dangerous to self-identify as one or the other, because I really do believe that introversion just means that you fuel up at the pump where no one else is, whereas extraversion might engender fueling up at the Costco pump where there’s a lot of people. Being introverted doesn’t mean that you don’t like to talk to people. I love to talk to people. I want to talk to people all day long. But I’m not interested in having to shout over people to be heard.
Identifying as introverted can also play into limiting beliefs, such as “Oh, I’m introverted so I can’t network. I’m introverted, so I can’t talk to people.” This isn’t true. I had to find my own way of doing those things. I don’t want people to use it as an excuse or to allow themselves to continue believing that it will hold them back from doing anything.
I encourage my clients to prioritize those tasks that feel good to them in their marketing strategy. I also encourage them to take baby steps toward taking risks in other areas that don’t feel good to them. That might be something that they could become better at, because I really do feel like extraversion is a muscle, and it can be built.
It seems the standard advice is to get your business card made and hand it out to as many people as possible, which is not intuitive or comfortable for everyone. And if you aren’t doing it, you can easily feel that you are somehow failing at selling yourself, because you are not meeting the arbitrary goal posts that someone else created.
Yes, and that is a product of patriarchal/capitalistic culture, the idea that anyone must adopt a masculine hustle mode in order to have a successful business. But it actually works against us and it’s something that I’m just now starting to really think about. It gives a whole new meaning to toxic masculinity when we feel pressured to take on those ideas and actions and ways of being.
There is a wisdom that comes with age and experience, a wisdom that forces you to really look at how you’ve been conducting yourself in the world, and consider whether your approach is working. Has it served you, or have you largely served others? We don’t encourage women to ask themselves that question often enough or early enough.
Right. Where do the ideas come from? And are they coming from systems that are functional? I would love for people to be more aware of who they’re hiring, who they’re working with, and to feel empowered to speak up when they feel like their clients could be doing more. To better represent. And I hope that more photographers will be empowered to speak up about things like casting and crew, too.
About the Author: Megan Reilley is an editor and writer living in Western Maryland. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction from Goucher College, where she teaches undergraduate writing.
