When you are surfing late at night and you come across the site of a commercial photographer who looks interesting, where do you click first? In the galleries section, they may have entire galleries on mountains, ferrets, ice cream or homeless photographers. While they all sound compelling, I always look for the section titled ‘Personal Work’ because that is the work that will best describe who the photographer really is, much more so than their assignment work.
If I were an art director looking to hire a photographer, I would obviously check the assignment work to see who they have worked for and how they accomplished the task at hand, but I would be as interested if not more to see what they shoot when left to their own imagination. Your personal work says much more about who you are as a photographer than the assignment work does.
Having said that, get out there and shoot for yourself. Make yourself the client and shoot whatever interests you, in your own way and show it off. Better yet, spend a year or more and shoot a series of images that when shown together make a cohesive body of work. Project photography is a powerful way to show that you have what it takes to take on a larger project that is spread out over time.
I would guess that we all got into photography because we loved making images right? So keep making images in between the totally awesome assignments and start a project today…
Excellent post, Chris and so true. I know several photographers who have been selected for a project based on their personal work. I never really believed it until I started doing personal projects. Being primarily a portrait photographer, I produced a series of images of an abandon school house. A client saw the series and hired me to shoot some store displays. Another hired me for an architecture shoot. Go figure!
Most important, shooting personal projects is fun and takes one back to a time when you shot just for the heck of.