Choosing images for folios.

Hello again… 

How is it with you?

Well here at NathanPhoto it’s been another slightly turbulent month but only slightly this time, still enough to be a little bumpy in focusing on stuff! The main direction this month has been an updating of the CV (and to some extents my folio) The purpose of this is to reflect my practice which has changed quite a lot from almost a single strand to three identifiable ones, possibly four!! But I digress…

Main thing I’d like to talk about here is the idea of the folio, and the idea of the images contained in that., this is specifically talking about the identity of NathanPhoto. Which is my more commercial and established work, my career as a photographer from the 90’s till around last year, when the freelance work took a turn.

I’ve always been at some stage in choosing images for a portfolio, reflecting on and identifying which ones would look good together, the usual folio practice, and to some extent the archive sorting as well. Th main exception for me is that I’ve a few added problems to incorporate with choosing of my work:

·      Right to publish: Several images have the rights to publish signed away and are limited so I’m not sure if they can be published online. These are not exclusively but mainly music ones Beyonce, Britney and Taylor Swift come to mind.

·      Ethics: Then there are a few ethical decisions to be made about the content mainly regarding the people in the images and how a few of the images were made, a viewpoint that older and wiser me does not share with the person commissioning and making images back then. 

·      Content: I’ve worked in pretty much every category of photography from architecture to beauty to cars to documentary to events to football to gigs to happiness to…well, you get the idea, I don’t need to go through the whole alphabet. (do l?)

So, what Images to put in? What images to leave out? What order to put them in?

Do you go with the ones that others have particularly liked as they always say that a photographer is their own worse editor (editor as in choosing the image not image manipulation btw) 

For example I have a couple from my documentary days that I’m sure anyone who knows my work has seen more than enough of, do I keep them in, or should they retire? Should I put something in for each year of the career (30!)? Should I stick to genres classification and only put those that fit into them in?

Ok should really follow the advice that I give to students when they ask about folio images Think you need to ask these questions:

1.    Who’s the audience?

2.    What sort of work would you like to get?

3.    What sort of work do you want to make?

4.    What medium are you showing in?

5.    What are you good at?

Hmm how is the ease in which I can take my own advice? 

This may take some time, so I’ll possibly come back to this in another blog!!!

As blogs need pictures and go together like kitsch and Christmas, and as we are talking portfolios then I think it’s probably best to include some of the images I’ve been discussing and as I’m generous then I’ve put in two. 

These are both from projects rather commissioned work and sit nicely bookended in my career. The first is one of the documentary images mentioned, this was from a project on people interaction with animals in zoo’s, it was produced sometime in the 90s at Twycross zoo. The second one is from a shoot as part of a lockdown project, EPUK had asked for images that formed your view of lockdown and this was one of the ones they used which I guess you could say was my last published piece. 

As you can see, I have some quite disparate styles in my stable which makes choosing images interesting.

Thank you for reading.