Original article appeared as cover story in  PDN.

by Mark Lapin

Copyright for text belongs to Mark Lapin; copyright for photos belongs to Valentine Atkinson, who is profiled in the piece.

Opposite: fly-fishing on Silver Creek, Idaho.

Val holding  Christmas Island bonefish in one hand while  focusing  wide-angle lens with the other.

Norway's Alta River, one of the most pristine and pricey fishing preserves on the planet.

Val (snapped by Susan) while hard at work in Yucatan, Mexico.

his is a fish story, a success story and, as you might suspect from the name of its central character —Valentine Atkinson— it is also a love story. It illustrates one of the oldest business axioms: find a niche and fill it. And it reaffirms a contemporary platitude we'd all  like to believe: follow your bliss and the money will come.

The story begins at an ad agency in Columbus, Ohio, where a young art director named Valentine is less than enamored with his career. He’s beginning to doubt his talents as an illustrator, and he’s already certain that he doesn’t like getting up every morning to go park his bottom in front of a a desk.

One day a travel photographer brings his portfolio into the agency. Valentine is blown away, not so much by the quality of the photos as by the quality of life he imagines a travel photographer to enjoy.

Inspired by dreams of roaming the world in search of beautiful scenery and getting well paid for the privilege, Valentine quits the agency, buys a camera and moves to San Francisco with plans of making a career in photography. The plans are short on detail (and just about everything else of a practical nature), but, hey, it’s the late 60s and Val is more focused than a lot of other folks wandering around the city in those psychedelic days.

He begins by working on landscape and portrait photography. He sets up a darkroom and does his own black and white printing. He lives on food stamps and goes hungry often as not. To relax (and supplement his diet with a little protein) he takes weekend fishing trips to Hat Creek and Fall River in the wilderness around Mt. Lassen. He brings his camera and shoots while waiting for the fish to rise.

He sends a couple of black and white prints to a friend, John Randolph, who happens to be the editor of FlyFisherman magazine. The editor bites and before long, Valentine has become his main black and white resource. Not finding much success in other markets, Val decides to concentrate on fishing photography.

He masters such arcane tricks of the trade as holding a live trout in one hand while focusing a wide-angle lens with the other. He becomes expert at coaxing fellow sportsmen into posing for his pictures, and learns to carry a supply of red shirts and bandanas to highlight his subjects against the green-brown background of nature.

He studies the market and discovers that there are close to one million fly fishermen in the country but only a handful of first-rate field and stream publications to serve them. By the late 70s, Valentine is supplying photos to all the first-rate pubs and a score of lesser ones as well. There are plenty of Sunday photographers who fish, and vice versa, but a talented shooter with an informed passion for the sport is a rarity. Valentine settles into his niche and gradually builds an unchallenged position in the field.

Unfortunately, the niche is too narrow for long-term comfort. Even as the photographer of choice for most field and stream magazines, Valentine finds that he’s barely making ends meet in the editorial market. But he sticks with it. Long after most professionals would have moved to a more lucrative specialty, he’s still out there casting his bread on (or rather his flies above) the water.

Finally, in the mid-80s, a different breed of fish starts biting. At a fly-fishing trade show, Valentine has the good fortune to hook up with a company called Frontiers, which specializes in guiding groups of sportsmen to upscale travel destinations around the world. If, for example, you want to cast for salmon in the glacier-fed waters of Norway’s Alta River where fishing rights cost $12,500 per person, per week, and are booked several years in advance, Frontiers can get you there in style.

To recruit  customers, Frontiers has been in the habit of mailing out brochures featuring travel photos by the wife of the owner, but this approach has become a little too homespun for the affluent adventurers it courts. The company offers Valentine a sweetheart deal. He gets well paid to accompany expeditions to some of the most beautiful and inaccessible wilderness regions in the world. In return, he gives Frontiers the first edit of everything he shoots on the trip. Perhaps the best part of the deal is that all the stock not chosen by Frontiers belongs to Valentine.

"I shoot the heck out of each location," he says, "not just fishing, but food, architecture, people, culture. It sounds ideal. But the pressure is incredible. You go on an all-expenses paid jaunt to Costa Rica, and no one wants to hear how it rained 24 out of your 36 hours in-country."

Now Valentine not only has more knowledge and experience than others in his specialty, he also has access to the world’s most exclusive fishing preserves, locations he could never afford to shoot on his own. His work has gone to the next level, and he senses that his business should grow accordingly. The big break comes in the unexpected form of Susan Rockrise.

Susan has had about 20 years of top-flight marketing experience at hip companies such as NeXT, Esprit and Foote, Cone & Belding. The corporate routine is just beginning to get old for her when a friend arranges a meeting with Valentine. It’s supposed to be a business lunch, exploring ways for Susan to expand the market for Valentine’s work. But they gaze in each other's eyes and discover possibilities that go a long way beyond marketing.  Before they know it, Susan and Valentine are in love..

Susan abandons her corporate job to market Val's work.  Accompanying him on assignment for Frontiers, she studies the habits of their affluent traveling companions. She notices that in addition to hunting and fishing pubs, these sportsmen with a taste for luxury also read the top lifestyle magazines, including Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Travel & Leisure. Her research reveals that such magazines run at least one fishing story per year, and soon Susan has arranged for Valentine to supply then with photography at rates that far exceed anything he ever imagined earning from field and stream books.

Susan also encourages Valentine to take a more emotional, people-oriented approach to his subject. He begins to develop new categories of stock images such as camaraderie between men in nature, older couples enjoying the outdoors together, women and fishing, and "graphic compositions" which portray nature in ways that are too general for outdoor mags but eye-catching enough for ad agencies to use with a wide variety of products and services.

And as if the market isn’t growing fast enough, a fine novel called A River Runs Through It is turned into a hit movie, and suddenly fly fishing is in fashion all over the world. In Japan, France and Germany, as well as the States, "the quiet sport" is coming into its own as an avocation for the elite.

Maybe it’s typical of Valentine that he measures his current success in terms of fishing rods and fishermen. "Before I met Susan," he says, "I owned maybe five fishing rods. Now I have 50, most shoved into my hands by reps who won't take no for an answer. In the old days, when I asked some guy standing hip-deep in a trout stream to let me take his portrait, he was likely as not to flip me off.  Now, chances are he knows my name and jumps at the opportunity."

Susan, too, is happy with life outside the executive suite. "Traveling with Frontiers, we meet accomplished and successful people from all over the world," she says, "And many of them kind of take me aside and whisper that they envy the way Val and I live. We have time to spend together doing what we love in beautiful places. Maybe that’s the ultimate luxury."

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