In this last of four blog entries on the photo-essay, we will explore the process of assembling and disseminating the final presentation of your the photo-essay. To date, you have defined your photo-essay, you have been photographing for it and you have paused along the way to perform a few edits/reviews. These pauses help you continually redefine your project while keeping you on-message with the idea that drives your photo-essay.
Assembling and disseminating your photo-essay has two major steps with many minor ones. Building on what you have done to date, you need to get the project down to a top twenty final images. Twenty is a good target because it is few enough images to keep any viewer’s attention, but a large enough set of work to allow you to fully tell your story.
I say final images because in some projects where you used diptychs, triptychs or grids, you may have more than one image in each final piece but you should only have a maximum of twenty final pieces. If you have decided to use such an unconventional presentation format outside of the single image/single sheet of paper format, you probably started thinking about that during the earlier editing phase.
You may have noticed how pairing images created new images that made your point. Or you may have noticed how triptychs drove home your point. No single presentation format is best for all photo-essays, but whatever you choose needs to support your photo-essay’s message.
If you choose an unconventional presentation format, you must get some outside feedback before disseminating the work. An idea that may be obvious to you, may be completely lost on outsiders so perform a reality check here with a photographic peer, an editing partner, a curator you know, etc.
Assuming your presentation format is set (non-conventional or straight prints,) it is now time to work on disseminating the work. If you are smart, you may have already done some of the required research. Once you have done a few edits of your photo-essay (while it is in process) and you have settled on your presentation format, that is a good time to look for potential outlets for your photo-essay.
In looking for places to disseminate your work the key is to think as broadly as possible. Photo galleries and art museums are the most obvious (and least likely) candidates. These are typically organizations inundated with work and they rarely have enough time or space to share any where near all the work they would want to show.
The best way to illustrate how to think about where to disseminate your photo-essay would be for me to give examples of partners who have disseminated my various photo-essays over the years.
- After they saw some of the work I had done on my own on the lives and experience of South Asian immigrants new to the U.S., a museum specializing in ethnic studies paid for me to create new work and then exhibited that newly created work along side the existing work.
- A regional gallery seeing that same work, then paid me to create new work of South Asian immigrants in the area around the gallery, for an eventual show at that gallery , similarly exploring the experience of South Asian immigrants new to the U.S.
- A regional art center in the south helped me access foreclosures to photograph (via their staff’s personal network.) Then the center exhibited the new work I had created along side my existing Foreclosed Dreams work in one of their galleries.
- A literary magazine saw an image from the Foreclosed Dreams project on-line. They asked and then published a portfolio of the work (which they paid me for.) This lead me to pitch the work to other literary magazines, who often used the work in thematic issues focussed on home, the recession, loss, etc.
- A museum specializing in anthropology exhibited (and paid me to talk about) photographs from my Israeli-Palestinian project.
- A university art gallery exhibited that same Israeli-Palestinian project in connection with a Middle East studies conference that was being held at that same university.
I can go on and on but the point is that the best outlets for your photo-essay are often organizations interested in the topic, the geography, the community that you are exploring and not just interested in photography.
In fact, limiting yourself to photo-specific audiences usually means you are going to miss opportunities. Photography is such a universal and compelling way to tell stories! You should think more broadly and find potential partners based on the subject matter, a route that has the potential to open up a world of opportunities.
For Part 1 of David Wells guide to The Photo Essay, click here.
For Part 2 of David Wells guide to The Photo Essay, click here.
For Part 3 of David Wells guide to The Photo Essay, click here.
David H. Wells is a free-lance documentary photographer based in Providence, Rhode Island, affiliated with Aurora Photos. He specializes in intercultural communications and the use of light and shadow to enhance visual narratives. He is an award-winning, digitally capable editorial, commercial and location photographer producing imagery for clients in New England as well as nationally and internationally. Past assignments have been for Life Magazine, National Geographic, the New York Times Sunday Magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine, to name a few. His photo-essays produced for publication and exhibition, have focused on globalization in India and Bangladesh, the pesticide poisoning of farm workers in California, the lives of South Asian immigrants in America, the challenges facing fishermen in New England as well as the complex relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. He has done work for numerous corporations including Consolidated Natural Gas and DuPont. He has also worked for a number of non-profit organizations including Brown University, the Ford Foundation and the New Israel Fund, among others. He is a member of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP,) Creative Eye and the National Press Photographer’s Association.
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