Turning Art into a Business Photographer to Business Entity

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
So as far as like, okay, you turning your skill set to a business, right? And really having structure as far as like, okay, this is how much I'm gonna charge for my services, this is how I'm gonna market myself, I'm gonna make content for myself, as opposed to just making content for other people, so people can actually know who I am, so I can build momentum. When did that kick in?

**Kam Kirt** (0:21)
So, my career, I started following artists. So as I mentioned, a lot of the artists, I worked with at the beginning, I was with them at the beginning of their career. So I saw what Future did to become a household name, and I saw what Young Scooter did, and then I saw what Mike Willmader did.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:37)
What did Future do?

**Kam Kirt** (0:38)
They did, just in terms of their run, just from interviews, taking photoshoots of themselves, like electronic press kits, making appearances, getting style, dressing a certain way, the presentation of who they are and who they were.
I saw that formula from the music industry. Like I was there, I was a part of it, I helped with it. I saw them invest in content, invest in these webisodes that we were doing, putting ads on the front of their webisodes. Like I started to see it. So how it really worked for me, I saw it with the music artist side first. And like I said, I work with Future, I work with Young Scooter for the longest, and I work with Gucci. When Scooter and Gucci got locked up at the exact same time, I had to reset what I was doing and I started then working more with producers. I came back and started working with Metro Boomin, did a lot of work with Mike Will Made It. I met Metro in the dorm room at Morehouse. So I'm working with Metro like at the beginning of his career, but I'm learning things that I saw with Future and Scooter and how they were able to do certain things earlier on in their career and blow up. So now, feeding those same things to Metro and saying, can it work from a producer standpoint, like somebody that's not traditionally in front of the lens, someone that's kind of behind the scenes. Hey bro, don't you know you own 50 percent of that record, just like Future? So why don't we go to the radio station and talk to him about the record? And you own it too. Why don't we shoot the music video for it? Why are we waiting on Future to tell you that that's going to be his next single? In this world, we could just get together and say, hey Future, Cam's here, we got the camera, turn the song on, we're going to shoot a video. And that was like a formula that me and Metro started, where it was like he produced the record, and I shoot the video. And we kind of came up that way, but it was propelling both of our careers, getting his songs from just being B-tracks, C-tracks on mixtapes and actually making the music videos, which pushed those records to be bigger.
My portfolio started to build, his awareness started to build, because we started putting them in the videos. Like you're going to be in it too. And then people started to see it. So I got to see down at work from an artist to a producer.
Like the same formula, we were going to radio stations, we was doing interviews with Fader, all these same stuff I saw Scooter and Future do.
So when I worked with Metro, he started blowing up, he ended up DJing, getting on tour, I was with him on the rodeo tour and all that.
When I came off the rodeo tour, you know, fast forward a little bit, when I came off of that, I was like, will it work for a photographer? Like, you know, that's 2015 I'm like, can I do that? I watch him do it, I watch these artists do it, can I do that? And if you've been following me from that time, that is the formula I'm on. I'm on a music industry's formula for how to blow an artist up. That is the Kam Kirt brand formula. And that's how I've been able to stay in the game as long as I have. And that's also how I've been able to turn what's just a typical photographer into a business because they look at me as an entity the same way they look at a metro or future, whoever. So that's really how it started for me and how it worked for me. I saw it and then I just started applying it to myself. So I do interviews. I've had a bunch of interviews with like XXL, The Source, like the same publications that's talking about the rappers, they talk about me. I've been in those same places. I treat my art galleries like concerts. They're like shows. I do it the same way. We have fun. We have DJs. It's not traditional.