[Leica] Portfolio Rant Part 2a

[Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>]

> Great rant on portfolios.
> Ready for that next installment.


Okay, here we go. 

First thing to keep in mind is that, although I'm an "expert" on the
subject, there is no such thing as an expert on the subject. I'll base this
advice based on general principles and six years' experience as chief editor
of a photo magazine, seven as a working pro and published critic, and three
as a teacher; but there are no rules, and you should feel free to take,
leave, or modify anything that follows to suit yourself.

First off, remember that, if you're reading this, you're not dead. That is,
you're not constructing a posthumous retrospective on yourself, meant to
lovingly present everything you ever touched and every idea your brain ever
entertained. Put yet another way, please feel encouraged to leave things
out. If you mainly shoot Kodachrome slides but experimented with photograms
for six months in 1983, don't feel you have to make a portfolio based on 17
Kodachromes and one photogram. They don't go together. A portfolio needs to
be composed of things that do go together. Keep it appropriate; keep it
cohesive. If it means you need to leave out that one great photogram, do so.

The first step is to gather your work together insofar as that's possible,
and sift through it, aiming to answer one question--what kind of
photographer are you? You might be able to do this by yourself. It helps if
you try to imagine yourself looking at your own work through someone else's
eyes. Imagine you're a future historian coming across all these pictures,
someone who's asking the question, who was this person? What was he or she
up to? See where you end up. Or, you might enlist someone else to help.

The problem there is, the person you get to help you might not be any more
objective than you are. For example, if you mainly shoot buildings, and you
ask a people photographer to help you analyze your work, he or she might
pick out the few people pictures you've done. I've found that, rather than
ask people to help you choose actual pictures, it works better if you ask
them to help you analyze what *you* seem best at...in their judgement.

Don't think this is an admission of weakness. I know a professional with 30
years' experience who recently adopted a new specialty after a friend
convinced her it was what she had really been best at all along.

Limits are useful. If you can identify a main stream or thread in your work,
you're lucky. This can be anything you want it to be--pictures taken with
your Leica and a certain film; pictures taken of your family in all sorts of
techniques; pictures that have a certain feeling; a certain approach to
color. Don't feel constricted by "subject matter" exclusively when trying to
come up with an analysis of your artistic concerns and directions.

(A converse of this is that subject matter alone is not enough to make two
pictures go together. I can easily come up with examples of pairs of
pictures of the exact same subject matter that don't have the same feel at
all.)

If you're doing this for the first time, you're likely to run into one major
problem, which is that, in whatever thread or theme you've identified as
being your main concern, you haven't got enough really strong work that
hangs together. This may mean that you aren't ready to do a portfolio; more
likely, it means you should try to put together a more modest portfolio
that's more limited in scope and ambition.

But let's assume you've been a photographer for a while and you've got lots
of work. How do you proceed?


[CONTINUED....]