[Leica] Portfolios (disquisition alert)

[Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>]

> This is yet another naive question from an amateur.  What should a
> "personal portfolio" look like?


Ah, you have stepped into my web, Grasshopper. A topic near and dear to my
heart. Disquisition alert! (Windbag alert too, maybe. You have been warned.)

The form a personal portfolio would take would vary with the person, but its
function probably wouldn't. The idea is simply this--you're a photographer.
Can you show a representative sampling of your best work, in fully realized
form? Whatever that is?

And make it so that it actually exists?

This latter point is important. Many photographers have a vague idea in
their heads of some given subset of their pictures, some of which might
already exist in viewable form. This is their idea of "their work." But
that, I would argue, doth not a portfolio make.

The idea is to do the work to have on hand something that shows off what you
do, without apologies. The question I used to ask students is, if a museum
curator knocked on your door tomorrow morning and asked to "see your work,"
are you READY? Do you have something finished, right now, to show? It's not
enough to lead them to a huge pile of workprints, or lead them around the
house and show them the seventeen pictures you liked enough to have framed
over the past decade, or to open the slide cabinet to reveal 5,000 slides in
cascading piles and say pleadingly, "can you give me a while?" or (shudder)
to open your contact book and start flipping through it, every now and then
jabbing your finger at the page.

The "work" I'm talking about is what my friend Allen (A. D.) Coleman calls
"reification"--making it real. The idea is that other people cannot see your
visualizations about your finished work in its absence, or from incompletely
realized clues.

What the work consists of is going to depend upon what you visualize, but
generally speaking it can be divided into three main tasks: editing the
pictures, crafting prints (or whatever), and selecting and assembling and
method of presentation.

Re editing: most photographers are mediocre to execrable editors of their
own work. The problem is that they lack a.) objectivity and b.) the
requisite ruthlessness. What I mean by the first point is that they consider
all sort of thoughts, feelings, and factors extraneous to the picture in the
selection process--who they were with or what kind of day they were having,
how much the subject matter means to them, how hard they worked to get/make
the pictures (this happens frequently with amateurs--if they worked hard to
get it they somehow think it has to be good), some meaningless technical
feature (a very saturated blue, or you like the sharpness), or (heaven
forfend) their fetishistic slavering over whatever nifty piece of gear they
happened to make it with (that would never be pertinent to this
list--Luggers are all too intelligent to get caught in that trap).

Strategies to overcome these impediments to effective editing are numerous,
but I'll mention three: work at it; take your time; and, get help. I've said
many times and many places that the best editing tool is a large bulletin
board where you put your pictures up to look at (assuming you make prints).
Another good idea is to gather other peoples' opinions and watch for other
peoples' reactions as they look at your pictures.

Another problem of editing is a false or obsequious objectivity, wherein we
pick things we think other people will like rather than the things _we_ like
(I've been guilty of this my own self.)

Then, of course, there is the problem of indulgence, wherein photographers
who are sentimental over their own efforts, or egocentric, admit a lot of
filler into the final selection becase they don't have the heart to leave
the almost-good-enough stuff out (or they simply don't have enough work to
come up with the number of truly strong pictures they think they ought to
have).

Finally there's the problem of coherence--coming up with a group of pictures
that makes some sort of sense together. Variety isn't necessarily bad, but
it's got to hang together somehow.

So, most amateurs never make it through the editing process.

If you have enough gumption and verve to actually come up with a group of
pictures that make sense together, things can get fun. Because there's
nothing like having a clear goal in mind to give energy to the work of
crafting prints. And, really, the crafting of the presentation method can be
almost as much fun as making the pictures.

If you've never done this sort of thing before, I think you'll find:
    --That it's surprisingly difficult;
    --That it's even more satisfying than you imagine it will be when you're
done;
    --That you never need return to that work again, because you have
already done your level best by it;
    --And one more very fortunate and happy result, which is that it helps
direct your _future_ work. It helps you decide what kind of photography you
really like, and what you're best at; it helps you (even if only
half-consciously) focus your efforts on work that will more easily and
directly lend itself to reification later. All good.

So as to what form your portfolio should take, I don't really know. Depends
what you do and how you want it to look. Traditional box and mounted b&w
prints? Laminated color prints? Transparencies in mounts? A slide show? I
personally like print books. It doesn't greatly matter. What matters is
whether it's PERFECT, perfectly realized, a true representation of the best
you've done. No apologies or explanations necessary.

And, unfortunately, most photographers never do all this. Even most of those
who may read this very message and become temporarily enthused about the
idea of reifying a master portfolio of their work will never follow through.
Don't ask me why that is, but I know photographers, and I know it to be the
case. Sad but true.

- --Mike

P.S. If you want some practical tips as to how to actually go about doing
all this, ask me tomorrow and I'll type another disquisition, presuming
there is not too vociferous a chorus of complaints about my longwindedness
tonight.