Documentary Office Photography

Thank you, Paul.

I’m very lucky in a way. I’m finding that the documentary approach to photography is attracting the right kind of client: people who value what they do and value what I do.

It means I’m meeting passionate people who want to show the world how good they are. They are also very engaged in the photographic process – so much so that they are starting to look out for me to see what opportunities they can think of or generate on my behalf, either within their company or elsewhere.

It also means I’m being asked increasingly early on in the creative process what my recommendations are.

It is wonderful to work with such people.

Thank you for commenting, Stephen.

You raise some interesting points about the honesty of documentary photography and the trust people have in it.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I don’t think there is anything dishonest in what I have shown here about my client. These are all interactions that took place on the day of the shoot. Whether the viewer decides they should not be trusted is a personal matter. As you say, some will not trust them. Others will.

It raises a good question about the integrity of the company and the photographer. Does the viewer trust either to show real staff interactions? If they don’t, then you are right, they won’t believe the photographs.

While I believe that I have the integrity to show a company and its staff as they are, it doesn’t amount to much if viewers like yourself don’t share that belief. In that case, I have work to do. If my voice cannot be trusted, then my clients shouldn’t hire me. I become a liability.

An interesting dilemma, and one I’ll explore further in a blog post. That alone makes your comment hugely valuable.

You also raise the fascinating issue of good companies keeping their doors closed to avoid their corporate secrets leaking out. There are two aspects to this I’d like to discuss. One surrounding the word “good”, the other concerning the point of documentary photographs of staff.

I’m looking at “good” from a corporate culture point of view, rather than a financial one. What is the company’s attitude to towards staff? Towards clients? Towards what it does? Those are things that translate well into documentary photographs.

Because we’re interested in the people that make up the company, it’s business secrets are protected. For the story I want to tell about my clients, their secrets are not of interest to me. There is nothing in the photographs here that tell you anything about the company’s private matters. There are no photographs of claims dossiers, for instance. My role is not that of a spy. Rather, it is that of a communicator – a channel through which a company can show itself.

When Doug Menuez photographed behind the corporate scene in Silicon Valley, he would have seen many things in development that would have been highly sensitive. Yet this was irrelevant. His aim was to photograph the culture of companies like Apple and its people at work. He wanted to capture the story of the people who were go have such a monumental influence on all our lives. He did so and gained the trust of some of the biggest corporate entities in the IT industry. Documentary photography doesn’t have to be a threat to intellectual property.

As to how corporations should approach social media, commentators such as Jeff Jarvis, Seth Godin, Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk are much more authoritative voices on that than I am. Really worth reading. What is interesting for photographers, though, is that as social media outlets grow there is an increasing role for documentary photography – provided it can be trusted. Which brings us nicely full circle.

Thank you for a very considered comment.