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Recreating her start as a street performer, with a wedding dress and a crate, she became the eight-foot bride, offering a flower as a bridge across the loneliness.

โ€œI actually made a predictable income, which was shocking to me since I did not have any regular customers. $60 on a Tuesday and $90 on a Friday.โ€

From there to the Dresden Dolls and then a solo career that got quite a kick when she had the most successful Kickstarter raise for a musical act.

โ€œPeople have been asking the wrong question: โ€œHow do we make people pay for music?โ€ What if instead we ask, โ€œHow do we let people pay for music?โ€

โ€œOur music is a mix of punk and cabaret. Itโ€™s not for everybody. [laugh] Well, maybe itโ€™s for youโ€ she said, singling me out for some reason. Must have been the eye contact.

โ€œWhen we really see each other, we want to help each other.โ€

Here is her TED Video and photos of her musical performances below. More than most speakers, she connected with the audience and ignored the cameras.

17 responses to “The Amanda Palmer Story”

  1. "People would sometimes roll down their window and yell ‘Get a Job!’"
    IMG_8412
    …with the barbed wire eyebrows.

    And the toss of the flower to the audience…
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    Back for the wonky Ukulele Anthem… โ€œStop pretending art is hard.โ€
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    Performing The Bed Song, which I really liked… great video too…
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  2. She was quite amazing.

    P.S. someone on fB noticed that I made a cameo appearance in the standing ovation at 13:30 (hit refresh on your browser if that link does not jump immediately to minute 13:30)

  3. Ha! I was wondering if that was you.

  4. @Steve Jurvetson That was me on fB who noticed you in the audience. The camera was centered and focused on you; you were hard to miss ๐Ÿ™‚

  5. Great series of shots. I think she’s amazing. A really brave person.

  6. …an emotional white board trusting the collective pen…

    @arthur78 โ€” thanks!

    P.S. TED curator Chris Anderson tweeted about the video uptake:
    "near fastest liftoff in TED’s history. >270k views in <24 hours"

  7. @Steve Jurvetson I tried very hard to like this woman all through the video, but somehow I failed.

  8. @Andy Ihnatko

    I took one of the photos she used in her talk!

    Imagine my surprise a few years ago when I was listening to a Dresden Dolls track on my MacBook, did an "I wonder what they’re up to now?" Google search, and learned she was the same person I photographed in 1999…

  9. oh, that’s awesome… and you posted just before this talk… what a cool coincidence

  10. @Steve Jurvetson Actually, a web-scaled version of it has been on my Flickr for years. When AFP said she wanted to use it in her talk, I dug out the 1999 original file (all 2 megapixels!) and "remastered" it in Aperture and Photoshop. I emailed a copy to her assistant and posted it to Flickr as a backup.

    I’m writing a column about it soon. I shot the photo with one of Nikon’s very first CoolPix cameras. The JPEG written to the card was pretty awful (even given that it’s severely backlit) but modern photo apps were able to turn it into something quite nice. Turns out that Civil War-era digital camera managed to capture a lot of information!

    It makes me wonder what will be possible in another 14 years. Just think about all of the "bad" photos we’ve trashed because they were out of focus, badly composed, or had "unrecoverable" blowouts!

  11. Great pictures! I’m going to her house party here in Oslo (We pooled for $5000 for her kickstarter). Very much looking forward to that. And she is married to one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman.

  12. Hey Steve, it looks like Amanda used a copy of your photo in her latest blog post talking about the making of her TED talk (it’s quite a read, I went through it all!)… Ironically she credited every single photo in that post except yours.

    amandapalmer.net/blog/20130307/

    I left her a comment on the blog post and mentioned you ๐Ÿ™‚

    Edit: they have since added the attribution and linked it to here.

  13. @arthur78 โ€” thanks for the pointer. They fixed it now. it was an oversight:

    AFP blog

    This was one of my favorite photos of the ones she found for her talk:
    Amanda Palmer stage dive by Lindsey Byrnes

    @Andy Ihnatko โ€” Yeah, I had a sinking feeling when iPhoto came out with the simple "straighten" slider and I thought back to all of the old photos I purged simply because they were a bit off angle.

  14. @Steve Jurvetson โ€” That crowd surfing photo is one of my favorites too. Her pose with the angle and composition give a majestic look. The colors she typically adds on her costumes and body add a nice flair too.

    PS. Liked your use of the Em dash in replies!

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