Hello everyone, I hope you are well and safe in these special circumstances.
But while we are all at home,
maybe we can use our time differently.
And it could be a good time to look at our work,
to edit it,
to start to look at the sequence and maybe prepare for a portfolio review.
I feel like there's a few questions you have to ask yourself before
showing your work to others.
Try to think about
why you choose a specific topic?
What does it say about yourself?
Or why do you choose photography
to talk about this stuff?
Or maybe there's another layer you can add with another medium,
maybe with text.
Is text important for your subject?
When I photographed Agata, for example,
I never thought that this would be a 2-3 year long term project.
I thought I would photograph her once.
I also never thought that writing would become so
important in the work.
Both me and Agata are writing alongside the images.
How do you see the outcome off your work?
Do you see it more as an exhibition,
or do you see it more as a book?
I mean, making a book or making an exhibition
is a totally different thing.
We could talk about this for a long time,
but a book is a very intimate way of showing your work.
It's like this one on one relationship you create with the viewer and
people look at your images one by one.
So how do people look at your images?
Why do you sequence it in the way you sequenced it?
What's the beginning of your story,
the middle and the end.
Does it have a beginning, a middle and an end?
All those things are important to talk about.
For example, you make portraits,
but maybe a book full of portraits,
it's a bit too much.
Depending on the kind of work, of course,
but maybe you could use landscapes in between as a break
or sometimes you go closer to the people.
Sometimes you go further or zoom in on a little detail
or you take a still life and you show this in between the portraits.
I mean, there's many,
many ways of telling a story.
When I was in Russia,
I photographed Russian people in their homes.
I asked every night to spend another night in their homes.
I photographed every night's my sleeping place,
and actually,
when I was making the book, in the beginning,
I never thought that I could use those beds like those pictures of those empty
beds as little breaks inside the book.
Which I did.
I mean,
sometimes you do things and you don't know how you will use them or
you don't know yet entirely your direction where there's not a problem,
but it's good to be open, and a project is
gradually evolving.
Not necessarily, again,
like try to answer
all those questions immediately,
but you have to think about them.
By showing your work to someone else,
you are also able to, it's a chance to push yourself to
think about many of those questions.
Adding to that,
I think you should do some research on
who you're showing your work to.
I do think it's important to know
who you are showing it to,
because you can ask specific questions to them.
You'll ask other questions to an editor,
than you ask
probably to a photographer.
Me, as a photographer,
I probably share the same doubts
then you have. I have the same challenges that you come across
when making work.
So this is easy to talk about.
But know what you want to gain from the people
you show your work to.
I think this could really be very helpful.
I would suggest and encourage people, if they show their work
to a reviewer, to dare to share your doubts,
Dare to ask questions.
Maybe even show mistakes or talk about the
challenges you are facing.
And this might be a more interesting conversation than
you would think it could be.
I do think mostly a portfolio review is a 20 minutes talk you have,
or conversation you have.
So I do think,
don't show more than three bodies of work.
I would say, maybe one or two big ones.
I would, but, of course, it
depends on where you stand in your career.
If you wanna have advice on one specific body of work or on the editing of a book or an exhibition,
so this really depends.
But I would say like one or two projects and
bring, maybe a dummy could be very nice or
maybe bring 20 images for each project.
I like it very much
if I can see prints.
Can you put prints on the table and we can play with it.
This is very nice to do.
So printed work could be a good idea,
but also have a backup pile. In prints or on your computer - extra photos
For me, I like to see a lot of work.
Other reviewers like to see less, but for me,
I like to start with your selection,
let's say,
but I always ask to see more because I want to understand how you think.
I want to see your choices and I
want to talk about
why did you make this choice and not another choice?
Of course, I understand that you want to show your best photos,
but maybe showing single images
is not the best idea.
It's not about single images. You always show your work in a context.
Mostly, you show your work in a story.
It's so important
that an image can stand on itself.
I do think it's often very important,
but it's always part of something bigger. There's one photo before
and maybe one photo after, and this combination,
this sequencing is also really important.
I think it's important to tell stories that are close to yourself. To tell stories about
things that are really interesting for you and that are close to your heart.
I think those will be the best stories.
I often see students that are a bit confused and overwhelmed, and I
I think it's often because they're trying to tell this really big
interesting, but very complicated stories that are covering huge topics.
And often they get lost.
With a small, personal story,
you can also talk about bigger topics.
I think that's it for now.
I really hope this will a little bit helpful.
It's, of course, just an introduction.
I hope this could encourage you, while you're at home,
to maybe dive into your archive, retouch your work.
Maybe make an edit of a project
you haven't looked at for a while.
It could motivate you to go out as soon as it's possible again.
Or be creative inside your home.
Maybe there's many things to do as well there.
I think I'm looking forward to see other portfolios.
It's always nice to share work that could be very,
very helpful to share our work with each other.
Let's enjoy it.
Thank you very much, and be safe and healthy.