Travis Hodges and Rob Pinney: Photographer Profiles

Travis Hodges makes portraits of people shaped by technology, built around rules he sets before shooting. Rob Pinney works the other way round, as a news photographer covering events as they happen and a freelance whose long term interests are conflict and migration. The two practices demand almost opposite habits, and both are visible in London photography.

Travis Hodges

Travis Hodges is a portrait and documentary photographer whose work is organised around how technology moves from novelty into ordinary life. His profile at the Dutch photography organisation Noorderlicht gives his year of birth as 1981 and his place of birth as South Africa, lists him as living and working in London as a documentary, news and commercial photographer, and describes him as fascinated by the process in which technology is evolving from science fiction into a central role in everyday life.

Follow Me

The project that first drew attention to his work is Follow Me, a chain of portraits in which each sitter chooses the next person to be photographed from the people they follow on Twitter. The rule does the editing. The photographer cannot pick subjects on looks, reputation or convenience, and the resulting set of pictures maps a social network rather than a social circle. Coverage of the project while it was running reported that it had reached nineteen portraits of people linked by shared interests and by the platform itself.

Projects with a built-in generative rule have a long history in portraiture, and they solve a real problem. An open-ended portrait series has no natural end and no defensible principle of selection. A series with a rule has both, and the rule becomes part of the subject matter.

The Quantified Self

His second technology project, The Quantified Self, photographs people who track their own data and presents each portrait alongside a chart of the data that person collects. Noorderlicht dates the work to 2014 and 2015 and showed it in its Data Rush programme. The pairing of a lit studio portrait with a graph is a deliberately awkward combination, and that is the point: the chart is the sitter's own account of themselves, and the photograph is somebody else's.

Noorderlicht lists his awards as Flash Forward 2015 from the Magenta Foundation, the Observer Hodge Award, and three Vodafone World of Difference residencies. A profile for the UK exhibition project Portrait Salon, which shows work rejected from the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, adds the Royal Photographic Society's 155th print exhibition and the Jerwood Photography Award, and lists clients including Adidas, The New York Times and Virgin Media, with images published in The Independent New Review, Wired and ES Magazine. His portrait of Tim Andrews, made as part of Andrews's own long running project Over the Hill: A Photographic Journey, was selected for Portrait Salon in 2013.

His current site at travishodges.co.uk lists later work including Doi Moi, Brexit Cornwall, Mid Autumn Festival Lion Dancers, Wedding Farms, Baseball In Vietnam, Pokemon Go and Fruit Print, and gives his role as creative director.

Rob Pinney

Rob Pinney is a freelance photographer based in London. On his own about page he describes himself in exactly those terms, states that he is currently a stringer for Getty Images in London, and says his personal work is concerned with conflict and migration, with technology, globalisation and identity, and with the social and political questions that run through them. He lists publication in newspapers and magazines around the world, naming The New York Times, The Guardian, The Times, the Financial Times, The Economist and Le Monde Diplomatique among them.

His most substantial documentary work is from Calais, where he says he worked extensively from 2015 to 2018, photographing the situation faced by asylum seekers there. He studied at SOAS and King's College London, and his London news coverage includes the first months of the coronavirus restrictions in 2020.

Being a stringer is a specific arrangement that is worth explaining, because it shapes the work. A stringer is not staff. They are called for particular jobs, or they cover assignments on their own initiative and file to the agency, and their pictures then reach every subscribing title at once. The consequences are practical: fast turnaround, captions that must be accurate without a second pass, and an emphasis on frames that will read clearly at small sizes in other people's layouts.

Two ways of working, and what carries across

Put next to each other, the two practices on this page divide neatly.

• Control. A rule-based portrait series fixes lighting, pose and background in advance. News photography takes the light and the position it is given.
• Timescale. A chain of portraits can run for years with no deadline. Agency news work is measured in minutes from frame to wire.
• Where the meaning sits. In the portrait projects it is in the structure of the series. In news work it is in the single frame, because that is usually all a reader sees.
• Captioning. Both depend on it, for different reasons. The data portraits need the chart, and the news picture needs the verified who, where and when.

What carries across is access. Both photographers are working on the strength of arrangements made before the camera comes out: a sitter agreeing to nominate the next person, or a photographer being in the right place at an event because the relationships and the accreditation were already in hand.

More profiles of portrait makers and photojournalists are indexed on our speakers page, and the events archive lists the full set of talk pages. Related reading includes Stefan Rousseau and AJ Heath on agency political photography, and our guide to photography talks in London.

This page takes its address from a London photography talk listed for 13 February 2018. This site is an independent journal, is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group or with theprintspace, and does not organise events.