Preparing A Portfolio - Are You Ready

Mike Johnston is a 1985 graduate of the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C. and has held many jobs in the photographic field, most recently Editor-in-Chief of PHOTO Techniques magazine (USA). He is currently at work on a book on the practice of 35mm photography. He has a pretty good article concerning portfolio preparation that is worth reading.

"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 work prints, 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."

The entire article can be found here.



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