There are portfolios and then there are portfolios.

A normal portfolio for me and many others is prints that are just the prints, no mounts, no over matts, perhaps an interleaving sheet between the prints, maybe a title page, but maybe neither. All this for efficiency, less weight, bulk, and easier to travel with and store. This is a common print presentation at portfolio reviews. I often show work to museum curators this way. Not a bad system for presentation but not luxurious.

By the way, since we are conversing in the language of photographic prints, I have always made my own prints and will continue to do so.

The old way was that everything had a backing of museum board, a hinged over mat and the prints were either photo cornered to hold them in place, or with even a more ancient system, they were dry mounted. 

For the new portfolio of pictures from Utah made in November I decided to make a traditional portfolio, using backing museum board, white 4-ply over mats in a museum box. This is a boxed set made to high archival standards.

Open this 22.5 x 30.5 inch box and you are confronted with a white sheet of paper and a pair of cotton gloves. Yes, this is a heavy portfolio.

The idea is to set the tone: "Put the gloves on, please, or let one of the staff show you the prints. Thank you". Of course, I don't have staff, but you get the idea. I have worked to make something special here, and handling them entails a responsibility to take care to preserve their pristine quality. Pretentious? I hope not.

Here's the title, alluding to perhaps a second Utah portfolio coming (we'll see, I am working on that now).

Slide the white sheet over and the first image of 18 or so is revealed.

The Museum Box comes from Archival Methods, mats are by Stanhope framers in Somerville. Why not make the mats myself? My mat cutting machine, a C&H 60 inch leaves an unavoidable cross overcut in each corner. The Stanhope mats are perfect.

In fact, the whole portfolio is as close to consummate as I can go. The best prints I can make, the best imagery I can shoot, working to harness sensibilities and skills obtained now over 50 years. Not a particularly new way of seeing, this is landscape imagery that is not alarming or shocking but photographs that hopefully are beautiful, intelligent, compassionate, colorful, and working off the potential for what is in front of the lens of my camera to become photographs that are transcendent and perhaps sublime.

If you are interested in seeing more from this series, please contact Maru at Insight Arts Management.

m.rantoul@gmail.com

(978)496-4901

This is big. What I am about to write about needs prominent placement. Well, maybe not on a scale such as the election of our next president, the North Dakota pipeline debacle, numerous mass killings, earthquakes, forest fires, terrorist attacks, etc. But nevertheless big in the present day photo and art making world where imagery comes from some sort of  digital capture. I have written about this topic before, hit it tangentially but never hit it straight on. If ever there was a time you should perk up and read a blog of mine right through, this is the time.

It doesn't matter what you call yourself; a photographic artist, a documentarian, a photo journalist, a commercial photographer, an amateur. Whatever your definition of how you use photography, you must make prints of your work. It is that simple. 

Starting right off, I am going to go with the topic of death here and what goes on after you die. Forgive me for speaking of the collective "you" in such terms but yours and my death can happen any time and, after all, we all die. 

Say you die. What happens to your work, be it a career's worth of photographs or pictures just made recently because you're new to photography. Well, if it is in printed form, stored well, searchable and accessible then there are great options for it. Your heirs can donate it, show it, publish it and so on. 

But if your work sits as files on a computer, back up hard drives, raids for redundancy, in the cloud somewhere then nothing  will come to light of your work. It's a bold and blanket statement but think about it. No one really is going to go in there and make prints of your work contained in folders and files. The only situation I can think of where there might be an exception is that you've worked with an assistant or a partner for years and he/she is tasked and funded to continue working to get your work printed, seen and recognized after you die. Otherwise, forget about it. My nightmare is this: the tower or significant desktop computer is unplugged, brought down to the basement or the back of a closet to sit there unloved and unused or worse, wiped clean by that computer geek nephew who likes the idea of using your super high end Mac or PC for his computer gaming. OMG! Can you imagine? Literally years of work gone, dragged to "trash" and emptied. Not pretty, right?

If you have made work you believe worthy of more than just sitting in a hard drive  then it must be made as prints, made to the highest of standards you are capable of, sequenced, titled and annotated so that when it is looked at all questions are answered. In brief, work that is made as a portfolio that is publish-able, exhibit-able, donate-able, purchase-able. 

Or, again, back to after you die. You had a significant reputation while you were alive. People followed your work, came to your shows, collected it, purchased it and valued it. Your photographs are housed in many museum permanent collections. It is in book form (good, btw).While many or more prints you made are gone or scattered all over, the really excellent work that is made but not printed yet, sitting on that h.d. #3 that you cranked up only rarely to retrieve those wonderful files of the major photo shoot that was an epiphany for you years ago  on Baffin Island that summer where you made those incredible photographs that changed your perception of everything... whoosh, whisked away into thin air one weekday afternoon by some geeky 14 year old nephew who asked if he could use that computer that's gathering dust sitting on the floor in the basement to make more space for his "Grand Theft Auto V."

Listen, all the back ups and redundant storage of files, projects, RTP's (ready to print) are very important. But only while you are still working, still alive. You expect someone to go inside your computer  to find that stuff  and print or send it off somewhere? Not bloody likely. You want to saddle your partner with this task, perhaps a daughter or a son?

Don't. Make prints. Into portfolios, labelled, filed, sorted, dated and accessible, sitting on a shelf or in a flat file drawer. Turn the digital into analog and therefore making it relatively permanent, and certainly long lasting. Trust me. Make it so.

Prints have a great history as archives. Most prints are relatively stable and recognized as objects that last. Can you say that about your computer files sitting on a hard drive? Prints can be pulled off a shelf, looked at, reordered, edited, sent, exhibited, published, purchased and collected as valuable objects. RTP's (ready to print) files on your computer? While certainly valuable to you and thought of as  the reference for images you've shown, received critical acclaim for and perhaps sold, not so much. And most likely, totally worthless after you are gone.

Lastly, what qualifies me to write all this, to take such a strong stand making the assertion that prints are what matters? My career as a photography professor and experience for one. But also because a colleague and I started and continued as members for the past two years a working group formed to deal with just this kind of issue, called Photographers Legacy Strategies (PLS). Comprised of highly qualified photographers, lawyers, archivists, museum directors and curators, PLS tackled this head on. The issue of the need for photographers to make prints of their work came up early in our discussions when we realized that this was the only way to preserve important work in our digital age. Please. If you've made good work, work you believe should out survive you, make prints of your files on high quality paper, using good inks and store those prints well.

Finally, finally. The above article pertains also to viewing work and is why I will not look at files on a laptop or iPad at a portfolio review. Too much electrons moving around on a screen and not enough to prove the work will be the same, In effect, too slippery. Not fixed. Could be " here today and gone tomorrow" or at least different tomorrow. Prints show some commitment as well as demonstrate your skill.

Disclaimer: I do not receive anything from printer, paper and ink manufacturers. I accept no advertising or sponsorship and I have no reason to. While I use these things, I receive no discounts and am not loyal to any one brand. 

Thank you for reading my blog.

In this second installment on portfolios I will write about different kinds of portfolios and different forms of presentation.

But first a story. Back in August I met with Katherine French and Jessica Roscio, the head of the Danforth Museum and its curator, respectively. I had just returned from photographing wheat fields in Washington and we were meeting to flush out the show coming up in April, 2013, which, you guessed it, is Wheat. I had thrown in about 150 files from the recent trip to the Palouse of wheat on my iPad in case they wanted to see them. I had also made a couple of prints to show them. We looked at the prints and then Katherine asked if I had anything else to show. I pulled out the iPad, set it in front of them and let them start sweeping through a great many pictures. After looking at a few, Katherine turned to Jessica and said, "Don't you just love the iPad?"

To someone like me whose whole career has been print based, I heard her say this with some dread. But look at it from the museum director's point of view. What better way to get through a large quantity of images to choose a show? 

So, things change. When I review portfolios either one on one or at NEPR (New England Portfolio Reviews, held every spring in Boston, is a collaborative effort of the Photographic Resource Center [PRC] and the Griffin Museum of Photography) I will only look at prints. Why? Because prints are still the ultimate determiner of quality. Make a good print and you show that you know what you're doing. 

However, there are clearly circumstances where an iPad,  a website, an on-demand book, a screen-based slideshow are excellent ways to show your work.

My point is here that it is most important that you do your homework. Know who you are about to show your work to and research their preferences. Also, know what you want from the person you are showing your work to. Want a show? Want to know if the work moves them? Want to get the work published? Want their advice about what to do with your work? Want to know how to make it better?

So, I've written about different forms of presentation and, somewhat peripherally, about different kinds of portfolios but I probably should try to be a little more specific here. Foremost is usually the question about what to include, one body of work or representative examples of several groups. Again, this can only be answered by considering your intention and who you are showing the work to. As a general rule, think of a time frame of 20 minutes or so in which to show someone your work.This means that 30 or 40 prints is way too many. Think in terms of 20 or so. Play it through as a kind of rehearsal: introduce yourself, open case, explain the work, give him/her some time and space to look at the pictures, perhaps with asking you some questions along the way, some time for a conclusion, a conversation about what could be next, a thank you and a good bye. That's a lot to fit into a short time.

I am going to end this installment here but want to add one more thing and this is perhaps the hardest pill to swallow. Photographers suck at knowing what their best images are. We are too close, too involved, have some silly anecdote about how hard it was to get this picture or what we had to do to get that one. So what we need to do is to show our work to anyone that will look at it and learn from that experience. Their reaction to your work is key. This will give me a good place to start off in Portfolios Take 3.