The Perfect Portfolio

F2 asks top photographers and agents why it's still so important for photographers to maintain physical portfolios, and how best to manage yours alongside your online presence.

The Agents: Guy Harrington of Soho Management & Olivia Gideon Thomson, Nadav Kander’s agent.

How important is it for a photographer to have a physical portfolio?

Guy Harrington: Essential - even though the digital age should have made it redundant.

Olivia Gideon Thomson: This is really interesting as I’ve just asked one of my oldest and most trusted colleagues the same questions very recently. This is because websites now dominate during the first and second round of the research undertaken by buyers. Portfolios are often called in when a lot of thinking has been done and when a shortlist has been made.

How should a physical portfolio and an online portfolio work together/complement each other?

GH: Online doesn't necessarily have to be as comprehensive as a physical portfolio, but should give a good overview of a photographers work - we would tailor physical portfolios to specific client brief. We do this with digital 'movies' as well.

OGT: It’s extremely important for the physical portfolio to endorse the opinions that have been formed by looking at the website. It should include the best examples of the work, using the strongest images to remind and endorse the viewer of the impressions that they formed by looking at the work online. It also has to stand alone and in competition with many others so it needs to form a very strong impression. The sensory experience should also be taken into account. The print quality should be exceptional, the pages clean and the book in good nick. If you have a good, functioning, fast loading website and a well maintained, informative and strong portfolio then you have the two marketing tools at your disposal that buyers use.  They work together.  Your website can afford to be more expansive, more pointed towards a genuine expression of what you do. Your portfolio can fine-tune those ideas for a specific market.  

What makes you notice someone's portfolio?

OGT: You don’t want to be noticed for all the wrong reasons so make sure that you’d done everything you can to form a positive impression. Image counts and that first impression is crucial to establishing yourself.  If you’re not ready, don’t rush it. I would say that a really good portfolio grows on you. You have to try and be with people when they are looking at it from time to time. Notice how they stay longer on some pictures, shorter on others. How they might hold a conversation with you or flick through a book, bored. A huge name can draw someone to look at a portfolio but the viewer will not necessarily learn something new about that person’s work. A complete unknown portfolio full of ideas on the other hand can have 10 people crowding around it.

GH: The work - don't get clever - pink is not good. Nothing should detract or apologise for the work.

At what stage would you ask to see a photographer's physical portfolio?

GH: If their online presence had impressed me.

OGT: It really depends, when I meet photographers who’s work is familiar but I haven’t been following it - I like to have a book to talk about. If I’m meeting a photographer who’s work I know well (or think I do) then I’m interested to see the book for different reasons. This is when I’m looking for clues on how they’ve been marketing themselves and whether these clues correspond with my own ideas of how we could work together.   

What are the most common mistakes/misconceptions about portfolios, that you see?

GH: A need to show everything. Not thinking about the flow. Being objective about choices. You may have had a bad experience on a shoot and consequently feel negatively about a perfectly good shoot. In my experience photographers are often too close to the work to put together the best portfolio of their work.

OGT: Not to invest time and money into the portfolio. To not understand your audience. You have to see the creative industry as both a marketplace and as a group of critical thinkers.  The other is to imagine that you know best. The buyers know best and if you’re not sure, ask them. You’ll be surprised how open they will be to advising you on what’s working and what isn’t, whatever marketplace you wish to specialize in.

The photographers: Simon Roberts & Richard Baker

Do you use your online portfolio exclusively now? If so, is this solely because you aren't working with an agent?

Simon Roberts: My main portfolio now is my first monograph, Motherland, which published in May 2007 by Chris Boot Ltd. I'm able to send copies out to any potential clients as a calling card. I also have three of my own websites promoting my work, a website for the book Motherland, and a website/blog for my new project We English. I also have my work promoted by my galleries: The Photographers' Gallery in London and Klompching Gallery in New York as well as on online galleries like Saatchi Online, Art Slant  and Photography Now.

Richard Baker: I use my main website and my Photoshelter archive site to show and distribute my projects and book work. In the days when I had an editorial and corporate agent, there were no on-line galleries to administer so nowadays, I can update exactly what I want far faster than having to carefully traffic original transparencies and fine prints. 

Do you still think physical portfolios are important, or will they be rendered obsolete by online portfolios eventually?

RB: Ironically I do yes. I still have a print box that houses a set of 16x12 C-type prints that I still go and show along with digital prints and tear sheets. Art Directors don't seem to know how to handle them these days of course and don't appreciate how expensive they are to produce but someone recently told me how they ought to be dog-eared so the rougher they looked, the more she liked to hold proper prints. It's that tangible aspect to art .. that touchy feeling experience like the artwork that came with an old vinyl versus the anonymity of a CD. 

SR: Yes I do think they're still important. Editors, curators and art directors all still like to see physical prints or books rather than stare at a computer screen all day long. They're also inundated with emails containing links to photographer's websites. 90% of which probably get ignored.

When you did have portfolios, how many images did you include and what size were they? Did you produce different portfolios for different jobs? How may did you have, and what was the motivation for this?

SR: I tended to have custom made portfolio boxes which were about 16x14" containing between 20-40 prints. These I printed myself on Hanamulle paper. Because they were loose, I could easily change the order and customise the portfolio each time I went to see a different client. Along with this main portfolio, I also had a portoflio of tearsheets showing published work.

RB: When I had representation I had I think 2 16x12 print boxes along with some smaller A4 cases that held smaller versions of the larger. The idea was that some could be thrown on the back of a bike (and sometimes lost along the way!) and those which could be taken by hand and which encouraged more of a dialogue - what I called stories about the pictures 'from the horse's mouth' - rather than the anonymous courier delivery. In the 16x12s there were probably 25 images split into projects. Maybe 5 to 7 images per project or story. We constantly worried about what to leave out but were reminded of the cliché, 'always leave them gagging for more ..' Nowadays I also have copies of my published book, Red Arrows (about the RAF's aerobatic team). When I tell them I have a book I'd also like to show them, they don't quite understand that a book … is a book. Not a folio. Their body language is very interesting. 

SR: I had separate portfolios to show magazine picture editors and advertising/design agencies.

If you were going to develop a new portfolio now, what would you make sure to do, and what pitfalls would you be avoiding? 

SR: I'd make sure that I had someone to help me edit the folio and produce a tight selection of images - the saying 'less is more' is really true when producing a portfolio. Invest time and money into making it look as professional as possible. Remember that the portfolio should be an extension of your personality as a photographer. Don't show photographs that you wouldn't want to get commissioned to take!

RB: I would probably re-edit and re-print to take account of older material that clients still like to see, especially if it's off-beat and therefore dateless. My last large body of work was shot for a book called The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (Hamish Hamilton, April 09) which was a collaboration with the writer Alain de Botton and which is popular at the moment, so I'd definitely be popping in several choices from that alongside of course, Red Arrows. That was shot on 120 film so I'd also re-order my prints, plus putting in some digital prints from the new work. My Photoshelter site is also changing, and downloadable galleries created quickly for a trusted client if needed.