The Documentary Photographer

The thing about unique selling points is – where do you stop? I could keep going for a good while yet. Here are two more off the top of my head:

USP – 8: I treat all my clients like unique individuals/companies rather than like carbon copies of all my other clients.

USP – 9: I prefer to let my clients buy from me, rather than sell to them.

And so on and so forth. We’d all get bored after a while. If you haven’t already.

Really, all the USPs I’ve highlighted over the last few weeks are a subset of one big, overriding one – the mother, the gospel, the big truth:

I am me. Nobody else is.

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I process my images in a very particular way

I spent a lot of time in February visiting advertising and design agencies in Dublin. With only two exceptions, my portfolio was met with great enthusiasm. That was a very uplifting experience, having previously doubted that my work was good enough to show in the capital.

[Incidentally, having overcome that silly mental block, I'm working on plans to meet agencies outside of Ireland - two countries in particular are very obvious targets for me. More on that in the weeks ahead]

Back to my Dublin experience. At least half of the creatives I met commented on the feel of the images. All of them struggled to put it into words. “Depth”, “Silver”, “Three-dimensional” were all used, along with “Different”, the most commonly used description.

This is important. Digital post-production has given photographers great freedom and control over the final look of their work. Previously, we’d have all sent our work to the same labs and the post would have been pretty much homogenous. Wealthier photographers would have collaborated with individual printers to get the look they wanted, but most of us didn’t have that luxury. Now we do. That gives us another way in which to set ourselves apart from our colleagues.

A friend of mine, a fellow photographer, once gave me some of his files to run through my post-production cycle. When I sent the images back, he initially didn’t recognize them as his own photographs. That’s how powerful developing a personal post-production discipline can be.

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I’m big on black and white photographs

I’m almost reluctant to list this as a USP. A lot of photographers prefer to produce b/w photographs.

Still, my preference for b/w does part defines me as a photographer, so I decided to include it.

B/w suits what I do. My photography is all about the story. Often colour can be a distraction, particularly if there is a splash of red in the picture.  We are drawn to red above all other colours – there’s a reason stop lights and brake lights are red. And that can get in the way of what a photograph is all about.

By taking out the colour, the story often gets a better chance to breathe.

There are photographers, some very influential and significant, who will tell you this is all hokum. Jay Maisel calls b/w photography an insider joke, a private jape between photographers. A step away from reality. After all, the world is colour, not b/w.

Steve McCurry, one of the great photojournalists, shoots exclusively in colour. As does Martin Parr. And there are others.

Maisel, McCurry and Parr are legends. Maybe it’s just too hard for a mortal like me to shoot colour documentary photographs. I mean, my brain is at full load when it’s limited to just subject, narrative and light. Conceivably, it might start to bleed out of my ears if I asked it to do colour as well.

In the meantime, I’m drawn to b/w.