What Can Photographers Learn from Monthly Talks and Meetups?

Monthly photography talks and portfolio evenings have been a fixture of British photographic life for decades, and most of them follow a recognisable shape. Knowing that shape in advance is the difference between an interesting evening and a useful one. This article describes how these sessions are typically organised, what a photographer can realistically take from them and how to prepare questions worth asking.

The usual shape of an evening

A monthly talk night normally runs for two to three hours and is built around one or two invited photographers. Each presents a body of work, usually projected, and speaks for twenty to forty minutes. A question period follows. Many groups then add an open section in which members show their own pictures, and the evening ends with informal conversation.

The format is old and stable because it solves a specific problem. Documentary projects take years, and most of that time is spent alone. A monthly session gives a photographer a recurring deadline to show something, and gives an audience a view of work before it is finished and tidied for publication.

Membership organisations run many of these. London Independent Photography was formed in 1987 by Janet Hall and Virginia Khuri, drawing on workshops led by Paul Hill, and says it has around 300 members and twelve satellite groups, each built around a location or a photographic approach. Those groups organise talks, photo walks and social events, and LIP also holds regular sessions where members discuss work in progress. Its magazine, fLIP, appears three times a year and is funded by membership fees alone, with no sponsorship or advertising.

What a portfolio evening is for

A portfolio review is a different thing from a talk, and the two are often confused. A review is a short, structured conversation about your own work with someone who looks at a great deal of it. The structure at Folio Fridays at The Photographers' Gallery is typical: a monthly in-person session, open to up to ten UK-based photographers, free to those taking part, with two one-to-one reviews of fifteen minutes each from two photography professionals, plus the chance to show the work to other participants and to gallery visitors.

Fifteen minutes is short, and that is the point. A reviewer who sees forty portfolios a year will form an impression of your edit in the first two minutes. The value is less in the praise than in watching which pictures a stranger stops on, and which ones they turn past without comment.

Open calls work on a similar principle at a slower pace. Photofusion's SELECT programme, for instance, chose four artists from its SALON open submission for a bursary, professional mentoring and an exhibition, with SELECT/16 running from 4 November to 1 December 2016. The gain there is not the prize money but the mentoring attached to it.

What you can actually take away

It helps to be honest about what these evenings do and do not provide.

• Process, not technique. Speakers rarely discuss exposure. They discuss how they found the subject, how they got access, how long it took and how they paid for it. That is the information that is hardest to find in print.
• A sense of scale. Hearing that a finished series took six years and three abandoned starts recalibrates your own expectations more effectively than any book.
• Funding routes. Fellowships, grants, residencies and crowdfunding campaigns come up constantly in these talks, usually with names and amounts attached.
• Editing under observation. Showing twenty prints to a room is an editing exercise whether you intended it or not.
• Contacts, slowly. Turning up once gives you very little. Turning up for a year gives you a set of people who recognise your work.

What these evenings do not reliably produce is commissions. A single conversation with a picture editor at a review is a start, not a result, and treating it as a pitch meeting tends to go badly.

Preparing questions that get a real answer

Question periods are often wasted because the questions are too broad. A photographer asked what inspires them will give a vague answer, because the question is vague. Specific, practical questions return specific, practical information.

1. Ask about a particular picture rather than the project. How a single frame came about reveals the working method.
2. Ask about access. Who had to agree before the work could begin, and what was promised in return.
3. Ask about what was cut. The reasons a photographer removed a strong image from an edit are more instructive than the reasons they kept one.
4. Ask about money and time in plain terms. How many trips, over how many years, paid for by what.
5. Ask about what did not work. Most long projects contain an abandoned approach, and speakers are usually willing to describe it if asked directly.

Two practical habits improve the odds. Look at the speaker's published work beforehand, so the question is about their actual pictures rather than about photography in general. And write the question down, because the room goes quiet and a half-formed thought tends to come out as a statement rather than a question.

Finding sessions that are currently running

Programmes change, venues close and series end, so the only reliable approach is to check directly with the organisation rather than with a listing. Galleries, membership groups, photographic societies, universities and festivals all run talks, and their own what's-on pages are the authoritative source for dates. Where a session is free and limited to ten places, it will usually be booked through the venue and not at the door.

The photographers profiled across this site presented at London talks between 2017 and 2020, and their pages give a sense of the range of work that turns up at these evenings. See the speakers index, the previous talks archive or the events archive for individual profiles, and talks for the wider background to the format.

This site is an independent journal. It does not organise talks, meetups or portfolio reviews, and it is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group or with any of the organisations named above. Information on this page comes from the published sources linked.