Personal Work

7 crucial reasons to talk about your personal work

If you work for discerning visual people in the advertising world you’ll know that personal work is the marketing back bone of your practice. (If you didn’t know that, now you do. It’s a non-negotiable habit of highly successful photographers). But something that may be missing from your personal work is a well articulated introduction.

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What kind of bus do you want to drive?

In August I talked A LOT about driving your own bus. So what kind of bus do you want to be driving? Is it a vintage model with loads of character and charm and a quirky crew? Or a slick stretch limo with a champagne bar for the celeb guests? Perhaps a Tesla vehicle with

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Sam Harris Neighbours moments of intimacy

Has your work made people take drastic action?

A photographer recently told me about a fashion shoot where the model’s nose was slightly retouched in post production. After seeing the shot, the model paid for a nose job. She actually had her own nose made to look like the final image. Horrified, the photographer contacted her afterwards. The model thanked her for showing

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The Bangkok Curveball

Patpong, Bangkok. The red light district. It’s dark except for the cacophony of flashing signs and pools of light as doors open into sweaty bars. Sue Stubbs and I are weaving our way through a throng of mostly men, and into the bowels of a seemingly never ending warren of alleys. We try not to

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You don’t know what you’re doing

I was sitting in a dark theatre, entranced by the black and white portrait on the screen. A freckle-faced Irish child with wonky teeth and a cloth cap crinkled his eyes as he looked into the lens of Dorothea Lange. It was 1954 and Lange had been on assignment for Time Life Magazine when she

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New fences, old fences

We stood on an almost empty parking lot outside a Rotorua hotel staring up at the distant windows, some with faces peering out, some of those offering a resigned wave to possible relatives or friends. Between us and the building were two soldiers and a 10ft high fence. We were collecting our daughter from her

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These days: Works in Isolation

A few weeks ago I wrote about helping 28 photographers bring projects to life at the outset of the pandemic, when the world first went into lockdown. You can read that post here. The Series Project: Iso Edition, the online programme created by photographer and ex creative Billy Plummer and myself, set out to help photographers

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