How to Present a Photography Project at a Portfolio Night

An open slot at a portfolio night usually gives a photographer somewhere between five and fifteen minutes in front of a room of strangers. That is enough time to show a project properly, and more than enough time to lose the room. This is a practical guide to preparing that short talk: choosing the pictures, explaining the idea, holding the pace and collecting feedback you can actually use afterwards.

Decide what you want out of the slot

Before anything else, write down one sentence about why you are standing up. The three common reasons are different, and they produce different talks.

• You want criticism on an unfinished edit. Then the talk is mostly pictures, and you need to say where the work is stuck.
• You want the project understood. Then the talk is mostly structure, and you need to show the sequence rather than the best frames.
• You want to meet people who commission or publish. Then the talk is a short, clean introduction, and the conversation afterwards matters more than the slides.

Photographers who try to do all three in ten minutes tend to do none of them. Pick one, and build the talk backwards from it.

Cut the edit before you write a word

Most short presentations fail on the edit rather than on the speaking. A ten minute slot comfortably holds twelve to twenty pictures if you say something about each one, or thirty if you run them quickly and talk over the top. That is a small fraction of any serious body of work.

A method that works: lay out small prints or thumbnails on a table, pull out the frames that carry information the viewer cannot get from any other picture, and then remove anything that repeats. Repetition is the usual problem. Three good frames of the same person in the same room are one frame in a short talk. Keep the picture that holds the most, not the one you spent the longest making.

Then look at what is left and ask whether a stranger could follow it with the sound off. If the sequence only makes sense with your commentary, it is not an edit yet, it is a set of illustrations for a speech.

Say the idea in two sentences

Early in the talk, before the explaining starts, give the audience the premise: who or what you photographed, over what period, and why you kept going. Two sentences is usually right. For example, that the work was made over three winters in one street, or that it follows one family through a move, or that it began as a commission and turned into something else.

Avoid opening with the artist statement. Statements are written to be read slowly, and spoken aloud they sound evasive. If a sentence contains the words interrogate, liminal or notions of, replace it with the plain version of the same thought. The plain version is almost always more interesting, because it contains facts.

The same applies to method. People in the room are photographers. They will want to know what you shot on, how you got access, how long you stayed, whether anyone said no, and what you paid for. Those details are concrete and they travel well.

Pace: let the pictures take the time

A common mistake is to speak continuously. Silence while a picture is on screen is not dead air. It is the only chance the audience gets to look, and looking is what they came for. Build in two or three pauses of five seconds or so, on the frames that carry the most.

Practical points that make a short talk run cleanly:

1. Time it out loud, once, with a clock. Reading silently gives a false reading of about two thirds of the real length.
2. Put the slides in a single file in the running order. Shuffling folders on a shared laptop eats a minute and breaks the rhythm.
3. Know your last picture and your last sentence. Talks that trail off tend to get weak questions.
4. Leave at least a third of your slot for the discussion if the format allows it, because that is where the useful part happens.

Ask for feedback that is specific

An open invitation to comment produces compliments and tangents. A narrow question produces something you can work with. Ask whether the sequence reads, whether the text is doing any work, which picture would be first in a magazine edit, or which three frames should come out. If you are preparing a submission, say so, and ask whether the set holds at twelve images.

Write the answers down, or ask a friend to. People remember praise and forget the two sentences that would have changed the edit. It is also worth separating opinions about taste from observations about function. A viewer saying they dislike flash is taste. A viewer saying they could not tell that two pictures were made in the same place is a structural problem you can fix.

How these evenings are run

Formats vary, and it helps to know which one you are walking into. Some are presentation nights, where each photographer talks over projected work to a seated audience. Others are table-based reviews, where you sit opposite one reviewer at a time with prints in front of you.

The review format is well illustrated by Folio Friday at The Photographers' Gallery, which the gallery describes as a free portfolio review and networking session where each participating photographer receives two one-to-one reviews of fifteen minutes with two photography professionals, presents work in physical or digital form at an allocated table, and is asked not to bring framed work. Fifteen minutes with one reviewer is a very different exercise from ten minutes with a room, and the edit you prepare for one rarely works for the other.

Festival reviews are longer and more formal. FORMAT, the international photography festival based in Derby and established in 2004, runs portfolio reviews alongside its exhibitions and photobook market. Membership organisations provide a third route: Photofusion in Brixton, a photography centre and registered charity, gives members access to studios, darkrooms and digital production, and runs exhibitions and events in south London.

Whichever format you are preparing for, the preparation is the same. Cut the edit, state the idea, time the talk, and ask a narrow question at the end.

For background on the formats and venues, see our guide to photography talks in London and the location notes, or read about what photographers take away from monthly talks. Profiles of photographers who have presented documentary projects in the city are indexed on the speakers page.

This page takes its address from a London photography talk listed for 14 August 2018. It is written as a guide rather than as a record of that evening. This site is an independent journal and is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group or with theprintspace, and it does not organise events of its own.