Introduction

Creating a portfolio of your work is one of the most important things you can accomplish as a photographer. Unfortunately, relatively few photographers create portfolios because they find the process daunting or think their work is not good enough to be included in a portfolio. Others squirm at the idea they will have to review thousands of photographs taken over many years. Yet others do not know how to select photographs for a portfolio. Finally, there are those who believe that a portfolio cannot be created by themselves, that such an endeavor has to be conducted under the control of a museum or a gallery or needs to take place in the context of a retrospective of the artist’s work.

While these concerns are fair, let me start by saying that they are inaccurate. Assembling a portfolio is not the daunting and frightening task it is touted to be. Let’s start by taking a close look at what is a portfolio, proceed to study why it is important to create portfolios of your work, and finally learn how you can create a portfolio of your own work. Throughout this article I will use portfolios I have created as examples.

2 – What is a Portfolio?

Let’s start by taking a look at what a portfolio really is. A portfolio is, literally, a porte folio, in French, meaning a page carrier. A folio is a large page roughly the size of a single newspaper page. Porte means to carry. A porte folio, shortened to portfolio in English, is basically a device designed to carry loose pages. The first goal of the porte folio we might say is to hold these pages together in a secure place so they do not get lost or damaged. For artists these pages are works of art on paper.

Although a folio is a large page there is no implied size for the contents of a portfolio. Similarly there is no implied restriction on the nature of the works of art placed in a portfolio. These can be drawings, paintings, architectural sketches, photographs, collages, etc. There is also no implied restriction on the type of container to be used. The device used to hold these works of art together, the porte part of the porte folio, can be a folder, a box or some other device chosen by the artist. Finally, there are no restrictions on who can create a portfolio. It is most often the artists themselves who create portfolios of their work.

3 – Portfolios and Portfolios

In today’s digital age, and in theory, a portfolio no longer needs to be printed. It can be created solely through digital means, either from scanned or digital photographs color corrected and optimized then presented in PDF, jpeg or other platform-independent (preferably) format.

Doing so is a perfectly legitimate way to select images, submit images for publication, apply for acceptance in a gallery show, or other similar purpose. However, in my view a portfolio is not a portfolio unless it consists of images printed on paper. Why? For the simple reason that in my eyes a final image is an image on paper, not an image on a computer monitor. There is a tremendous difference between looking at an image on screen and looking at an image on paper. For me, the end product of my efforts is a fine art print on paper and for this reason a portfolio of my work has to be a collection of fine art prints on paper. Of course my way is not the only way, so your opinion may differ. However, if you do not print your work you are missing on one of the greatest rewards offered by photography: looking at a fine art print which embodies not only your abilities as a photographer but also your abilities as a fine art printer.