The Photo Forum Journal: Documentary Photography and Practice

The journal publishes articles on documentary photography and photographic practice: how work gets made, how it gets published, and how to navigate the parts of the profession that nobody explains.

What we publish

The articles here are practical rather than critical. They tend to answer questions that come up repeatedly among photographers at the point where a project exists but the route forward is unclear: how to structure a photo essay, how to approach an editor, what a portfolio review is actually for, what self-publishing a book costs in time and money, where to find funding.

Alongside those, we cover the infrastructure of photography in London, because knowing where things happen is half of being able to take part. That means exhibitions and galleries, talks and portfolio nights, collectives and communities, and the practical questions of working in public places.

How these articles are written

Every factual claim here is meant to be checkable. Numbers carry a named source and a working link, studies carry the year they were published, and where an organisation has an interest in the thing it is describing, we say so rather than presenting it as neutral.

We do not pad. A guide that answers its question in 800 words is a better guide than one that reaches 2,000 by restating itself, and where we have not been able to establish something we leave it out instead of hedging around it.

We also do not publish fabricated material. There are no invented quotes, no interviews that did not happen, no composite experts and no reviews. Where a photographer's words appear, they were published somewhere and we link to where.

Practice and craft

Articles on making the work itself: building a photo essay from an idea into a sequence, the ethics of photojournalism around consent, staging and editing, and preparing images for exhibition printing. These are the pieces that assume you already take photographs and want to think harder about the decisions involved.

Getting work seen

Pitching a photo story to an editor, preparing for a portfolio review, self-publishing a photobook, and finding grants, awards and competitions in the UK. This group covers the transition from having work to having an audience, which is where most projects stall.

London photography life

Where to find documentary photography talks, how to plan a visit to London exhibitions and galleries, which collectives and communities exist and how to approach them, and what to know before photographing a protest. London-specific, because the detail is what makes these useful.

Reading alongside the archive

The journal sits next to a larger body of profile pages. If an article raises a way of working that you want to see applied, the photographer profiles and the talks archive are where the examples are. The guide to photography talks in London is the companion piece to most of what appears here.

Corrections are welcome and acted on. If an article is wrong, out of date, or links somewhere that has moved, tell us through the contact page and we will fix it.