Make Your Photographs “Work”

For a photograph to “work” you have to first decide what you want it to work for.

Will an abstract, experimental portrait “work” to illustrate an article about a businessman in a finance magazine? Maybe.

Will a macro still life of a bug “work” as part of a picture-essay from a war zone? Unlikely, but I’d be interested to see if someone has tried to make it work somehow.

Will an evidential snapshot of a broken cupboard by a council housing inspector “work” as part of an outdoor landscape photography series? Almost certainly not.

If you want to make a photograph purely to show something beautiful you have to make sure it actually shows that beauty. If you want to make a photograph which shows what someone looks like it has to actually show what they look like.

For a photograph to not work it has to fail to achieve the goal it was made to fulfil.

If it wasn’t made to fulfil a goal, or you’re unsure as to why you made it then how can it “work” in any way at all?

Decide on what you want to do, and then make the work which does what you need it to do – not the opposite, which is making work, and then deciding what you want it to do.

Understand that just because your photography might work for you doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. Context and support for your message, the story that goes along with your images will let people know what you were trying to do, so that even if they don’t like it, they can still see whether or not you achieved what you were trying to achieve.

Don’t spend too long trying to fit a photograph into a project it doesn’t work with. The photograph might be a standalone 10/10, but if forced into a context it doesn’t work in it may bring the quality of that project down to 0/10.

Whether or not an image itself is “good” may not have anything to do with whether or not it “works”. If the image works, then whether or not it is good on top of that will be the determining factor for it to achieve other statuses; great, memorable, iconic, and so on.

But first, it has to work.