Not long ago, the New York Times published an article about how the creative boom in New York and going west to LA. While that may be true, Adobe found that the heart of photography is very much still Brooklyn, NY. While NYC and LA are both known as hubs for creativity, Brooklyn and Long Beach are both bigger hubs of creativity than their respective cities. NYC in this case refers to Manhattan. Adobe revealed this information today in a post from their digital index showing that while Long Beach, CA is home to web design, industrial design and print design, Brooklyn is home of art direction, fine art and photography.
Adobe’s Digital Index also found that in the United States, other hot spots for creativity are popping up. For example:
– Philadelphia is trending for fashion design and photography
– Miami is great for models
– Atlanta is great for fashion illustration
– Detroit is a hot bed for apparel
In a phone call with Behance Senior Director Will Allen, we discussed that in the digital age, it’s very easy for someone to start a website or company all by themselves in a city or town that isn’t one of the most popular for creatives. However, the fact that the creative hubs stick to the old faithful locations is something to be said with the way that interpersonal connections work vs what people experience behind a screen. Indeed, it can sometimes feel like much of the industry is more about who you know than what you know.
But you’re on the Phoblographer, and we’re sure that you’re here to know more about how photography ranked in their findings.
In an email to us from an Adobe rep, we’ve got the following data from Behance–which is owned by Adobe. “Modern creatives (ages 18-28) in LA tend to focus on more stylistic photography, choosing to tag projects as nature, styling or beauty, while NY has a more classic feel to their photographic endeavors, favoring black and white as their most common tag.” states our Adobe Rep. “NYC has published more photography projects each month per capita…” That data is based on the Behance community size for LA and NY.
It’s when you get into the bigger specifics of that data that this gets really interesting!
· Photography tags of interest to each city (note: tags specific to city/state have been removed; i.e. ‘Los Angeles’ or ‘Brooklyn’); particularly stark contrasts have been called out in parenthesis below:
Unique tags to LA within their top 50 tags:
– digital
– ocean
– sexy
– style
– styling
– vintage
– water
– women
Adobe and Behance found that “ocean” was tagged twice as often in LA compared to NY and came to that conclusion through data produced by examining the percentage of projects tagged as ‘ocean’ between the two cities.
Unique to NY within their top 50 tags:
– flowers
– hair
– home
– house
– interior
– interior design
– residence
– street
In the case of NY, “home” and “interior” was tagged 17 times as often in NY in comparison to LA. Perhaps this has something to do with all of the high rises popping up in NY and developing Real Estate on top of gentrification.
As far as projects being posted:
– LA has posted 16211 photography projects
– NY has posted 31071 photography projects
– Brooklyn has posted 7677 photography projects
Photography projects published for 2015 through July
– NY: 5820 total projects or 55.5 per capita
– LA: 3171 total projects or 38.6 per capita
In January & October 2014, both cities published the same amount, but LA has never surpassed NY for photography. Additionally, NY has seen an uptick in photography based projects in 2015, while LA has not. Between January 2014 and June 2015, NY’s growth has increased 2.65% while LA has shrunk by 1.61%.
According to Behance, these are the most popular photo projects in LA, NY and Brooklyn. In Brooklyn, you’ll find photographers like Joey L while in NY you can find Home Adore and LA is home to heavyweights like Tim Tadder.
When you consider this data, you can also argue that Brooklyn may have some of the stiffest competition when it comes to photography and in that case, it’s all about how one markets their business on top of the quality of their portfolio. This could be a reason why so many folks are moving to LA–because the competition is too fierce combined with the rising cost of living in Brooklyn and NY. Then again, Vogue named Silver Lake as one of the coolest neighborhoods in the world–and that’s bound to impact prices eventually.