Beachwood Photographer's Business Bounces Back

Marc Golub had been his own boss for over 20 years, traveling, running photo shoots, having his work published in trade magazines and supporting his family with his own business.

Days before Golub’s interview with Beachwood Patch, he was on a National Geographic expedition cruise, a photographer-in-residence of sorts, teaching naturalists to use their expensive equipment to photograph whales. He rode free on the ship in exchange for his expertise.

But October 2010, he was wearing a blue windbreaker to work, standing in the rain outside a local hospital.

A car pulled up. There was no space left under the hospital’s canopy near the entrance, so Golub grabbed a wheelchair and wheeled it to the car’s door.

He opened it and a woman screamed at him.

“It’s raining. The wheelchair is wet ­—wipe it,” she told Golub.

“She was just nasty,” said Golub. “Those kinds of things happen a lot over there. People just treated you nastily.”

He was working as a valet — a necessary part-time gig while business at Golub Photography followed the buckling economy in 2009, plummeting to 40 percent of the previous year’s revenue as cash-strapped businesses moved marketing and advertising down their priority lists.

Those patients didn’t know him, said Golub, but that did not matter. “It doesn’t matter what I was. You shouldn’t treat anyone like that.”

Golub worked as a valet for over a year, quitting in 2010 when work at Golub Photography started to pick up again. 2011 was his best year ever, he said, and he expects 2012 to be even busier.

It’s as if the valet job never happened.

“I was never embarrassed,” he said. “I was always the type of person who in my professional or my personal life, I do what I have to do, whether its to take care of my family, or whether it’s going to the ends of the earth to create an image that pleases the client.”

Golub was smart about those 18 months when his firm struggled.

He worked second shift at the hospital to keep his days open for assignments, he said.

And though he did not get a lot of revenue that year, he kept his equipment and training up to date with photography technology – and he let his clients know.

Quarterly newsletters sent to his regular clients touted new techniques and equipment available through his company, and he said he was able to keep himself fresh in his clients’ minds while their own companies suffered.

His work is not limited to corporate photography.

His favorite work is a collection of photographs entitled “Cancer Speaks” he took for a cancer survivor support center with offices in Beachwood and Westlake.

The moving series of black-and-white portraits – printed with quotes from each survivor that Golub took during interviews – traveled regionally for 18 months and now hang permanently at the Seidman Cancer Hospital, part of University Hospitals.

“It was a very challenging project,” he said. “It was a very emotional project. I got emotionally attached to a number of my clients.”

At least 12 of those clients have died since he photographed them in 2007.

Most important in keeping his business afloat, he said, was the network he’d been building since his childhood in the Eastern suburbs.

Golub lived in South Euclid and Pepper Pike during his childhood. His father was also a professional photographer.

“He handed me a camera when I was two, and the story is that I never put it down,” said Golub. Golub shares his father’s passion for photography — for “seeing.”

“I think people hire me for the way I see, and I think I see things differently than many other photographers,” said Golub.

He took photos his whole life – for yearbook, the school paper. He studied graphic design in college and worked in his father’s camera equipment store and an advertising firm before striking out on his own at age 38.

By this point, friends and associates had been offering him photography gigs for years. “So many people were asking me to do this, I thought, I have to give it a try,” said Golub.

Everyone who walks into the Caribou coffee shop at Beachwood’s La Place shopping center during our interview seems to know Golub, and his list of Beachwood clients is a who’s-who of the affluent suburb’s chamber of commerce: the Cleveland Clinic, Beachwood Place Mall, the city itself, its monthly magazine The Beachwood Buzz, Montefiore, the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Cleveland Jewish News.

Not to mention the bigger clients he’s worked for: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, USA Today, Newsweek , the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Associated Press, Smart Business.

“Over the years I think I’ve worked for about everyone there is to work for,” said Golub.

Perhaps the most telling part of Golub’s business is the page on his website that lists every client he works with.

He’s not afraid of anyone poaching them. “If one of my clients leave me and go to a different photographer, I deserve to be left,” said Golub.