Portfolio Reviews

Many photography festivals today include portfolio reviews, and I wonder how they manage to find enough participants. Festivals seem to be constantly advertising and extending their deadlines in order to drum up more signups. I also wonder what it would be like to participate, and I have considered signing up for one to find out. 

I suspect however that I might be disappointed. Why would I pay to put myself in a position of inferiority, looking for approval from someone whose work I may not know or admire? Though my work is not well-known, to my mind I moved on from apprentice status decades ago. 

And what if you do a portfolio review and your work is innovative or falls outside the established norms? What are the chances that you would get a reviewer discerning enough to appreciate it? Your reviewer may have mainstream photography-world values and may not be supportive of voices like yours. Or they may not be transparent about their personal preferences. Their background could be in commercial work or in a different genre from yours. They may like large-format, finely printed photos with lots of subtle tonal gradations, and your photographs may be edgy snapshots. 

If I can indulge in some speculation, I would imagine that reviewers’ feedback often revolves around form, form being easier to critique than content, which can be tricky to pin down. The problem is that there are no standards as to what constitutes universal good form in photography; you can’t apply Ansel Adams’ criteria to photographs by Robert Frank or vice versa – you can try, but it doesn’t make sense. 

It can be easy to fall back on supposed print quality as a way to evaluate photographs. But polished, richly-toned prints can be empty or derivative when it comes to communicating a point of view or an original message. We all have seen well-printed large-format Western landscapes or street photographs of New York that do not add fresh insights to their genres. On the other hand, done right, “badly printed” photographs can pack a memorable emotional punch. Some time ago I bought a small photobook that today would qualify as a zine. It was Notebook on Time by Richard Zybert. The print quality was not high, but the story was, and I still remember the gut punch of Zybert’s confessional cri de coeur.

Photographer Alex Soth mentioned somewhere that he had attended a couple of portfolio reviews, but I imagine that it was before the success of his book Sleeping by the Mississippi. What would a reviewer tell him about his work today, for example the work in his recent book, Advice for Young Artists? What if he submitted a portfolio of photos from it to several reviewers? If they didn’t know who he was, would they accept it or would they pounce? 

Writer Doris Lessing famously submitted two books anonymously to her publisher and was turned down, and her point was that standards are not the same if you are well-known: “What happens mostly is that an immense amount of space will be given to not very good books by established writers.” It is hard to argue with her conclusion when thinking about the contemporary market-driven photobook landscape, and one wonders whether many photobooks would be published or promoted but for the fact that they are the work of well-known photographers.

Thinking about it, if I did participate in a photography review, maybe it could be one where I got to look at the reviewers’ work and give them feedback. If they themselves were exposed and vulnerable they might be careful about their supposed authority and status. But then how would photo festivals get reviewers to participate if reviewers had to put their cards on the table and show their own work? That might be a deal breaker. Reviewers would not want to be in a position where their expertise was being questioned. That could be awkward and embarrassing.