Special Achievement Award 2015
Our special achievement award, as in previous years, has been nominated by you, the members and Trade. How do you describe this person? This person has probably had an impact on nearly every photographic business including ours and always turns a negative always into a positive.
She started her career with Wella – international business development and training for the top flight hairdressers in the UK. She left an international corporate career and after seeing the parallels between the photography industry and her corporate career, seeing that there was a total absence of designated business training for photographers a new business was born. The business married together the talents of incredible photography and a very motivational and inspirational business trainer and was a pioneer in the world of photography training. Her company has won the best trainer FOUR years on the trot.
Going from strength to strength she was asked to orchestrate and head up the Fujifilm Envisage training initiative. The business has also developed strong bonds and close working relationships with many other suppliers and trade partners. It is part of the culture and a big part of the ethos, but mainly the training hinges on creating an industry to be proud, to elevate the perception of value of photography to its rightful place in the eyes of the consumer. In 2010 the business evolved into Aspire- always one to be ahead of the game she wanted to take the training company to another level, embracing the changes in photography style, training photographers both on location and online, the growth of social media and bloggers and always with the motive to inspire each and every photographer to be the best they can be.
Jon Cohen from Fujiflim says even though this industry has some great innovators this great lateral thinker is my go to person for bouncing ideas around, it’s someone I’ve known for many years, we’ve worked together on all sorts of projects from the sublime to the totally ridiculous but the defining memory for me on all of them is laughter – we always seem to be laughing, it’s a fantastic way to run meetings!
It’s not only me of course, countless people in all areas of business have benefited massively, it’s real business building combined with total creativity in great atmosphere working with an amazing team of people – what more could you want?
The person behind it all is of course – Catherine Connor.
Derek Poulston from One Vision says Catherine Connor is a constant and passionate trainer, driving this message home to hundreds of photographers every day. Her boundless energy and drive has given so much to promoting photography and photographers as an industry to be proud of. There are few people more dedicated to photography as Catherine and if we could clone her our industry would be in a far more prosperous position!
I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside her for many years and her recognition in receiving this great honour is truly deserved.
