Photography and Editing: Creating a Portfolio

by David Ulrich on December 16, 2010 · 6 comments

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Michael Gilbert posted recently in “Coming Full Circle as a Photographer” on the importance of the printing process. I have to agree wholeheartedly with his view that printing is a seminal final step, and I would also emphasize the primary role that editing and sequencing play in the presentation of works of art.

TEACHING

I am a photographer and teacher of photography and digital imaging at Pacific New Media at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Recently, I taught a semester-long class where, for the very first time in my teaching career, I did not see a single print—or contact sheet—until near the end of the semester. Students brought their personally-edited work to class in digital format on thumb drives. The old adage of course holds true that photographers (I include myself here ) are the worst editors of our own work. In thirty years of teaching, I have used the contact sheets of students extensively to discover powerful images that they themselves have ignored and to help them to “unfold” their work gracefully from their initial camera vision into edited bodies of work with communicative substance.

old friends

I recently edited forty years of my image-making into a slide show for my students, and revisiting old images was like revisiting old friends. However, the beauty of the process is that I could bring my more mature perspective to bear now in the editing and sequencing of older images. To fully realize our vision we need to edit—and we need to edit with both discipline and skill, often experimenting much to find the optimum presentation of our work.

We cannot edit fully without making prints, often work prints to help us see the expressive potential of an image. I am reminded here of the recent publication, titled Looking In, of Robert Frank’s seminal document, The Americans, which includes not only every image in the book, but also the contact sheets from which every selected image was derived – as well as his letters, notes and preliminary sequences. Amazing and highly educational. It has now been over fifty years since the initial publication of The Americans, and not only is the content still highly relevant to American life, but the editing and sequence reveal Frank as a master of storytelling. The narration appears not only in individual images, but in the way


that images relate from page to page, and throughout the book. I know of no other photographic project with such integrity and mastery in the ways images speak to and from each other.

photography and editing

He is a great photographer, to be sure, and he is a highly effective editor—evidenced both by his selection of images from a scene and from his masterful, hard-won sequences. Look at the book, look at his contact sheets and selected images, and look at his preliminary and final sequences. You will learn ALOT. An awful lot.

And his prints . . . gritty, grainy, strenuous, and powerful. Of the many reprints of The Americans, the recent Looking In contains by far the best reproductions, most faithful to Frank’s original prints.

©Robert Frank, The Americans

We need photographers like Frank to reflect us back upon ourselves. And we need to see prints of their work to reveal the many qualities and nuances that a digital display, or even a reproduction cannot provide. From now on, I will ask my students for prints much earlier in the semester and request numerous work prints or contact sheets to help them edit and uncover their vision.

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David Ulrich is the Program Coordinator for Pacific New Media, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. He is an active photographer and writer whose work has been published in numerous books and journals including Aperture, Parabola, MANOA, and Sierra Club publications. Ulrich's photographs have been exhibited internationally in over seventy-five one-person and group exhibitions in museums, galleries, and universities. He is the former Chair of the Art Department at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Ulrich is the author of The Widening Stream: the Seven Stages of Creativity and the co-author of Through Our Eyes: A Photographic View of Hong Kong by its Youth. To learn more about David check out his website.

  • Nick

    Thanks David….its always fascinated me to witness how different photographers approach the process of taking photos, and evolving these photos from the initial camera vision into edited, complete bodies of work. It’s also interesting to see that there is a growing consensus amongst professional photographers about the critical role that printing has in this process. It seems that capturing the photo is only the beginning!

    Thanks for the recommendation on the book “The Americans”. Definitely sounds like a must have.

  • http://eljefe949.com Eljefe949

    David a question for you. When you said you just recently edited 40 years of your photo work can I ask what program that you use to catalog and organize a collection that big? Lightroom? Aperture?

    Thanks.

    • David Ulrich

      You ask about editing 40 years of photo work and whether I use Lightroom or Aperture.

      Remember this is 40 years of work, much of which exists in negatives and prints. I used a real physical light table and a large surface for editing. After the images were scanned and integrated with recent digital work, I did the final editing in Bridge.

      David

  • Michael

    Loved the article David.
    When Im doing my seminars at the large shows often I get some flak from the big labs. I tell photographers while on stage that if they want to become better at their craft that they need to learn how to print. I only wish everyone who reads this blog would be lucky enough to take one of your classes. For those who know me David gave me my first Digital Photoshop lesson.
    but we are not going to tell you how long ago that was.

  • Anonymous

    David – Great Article! I also have a question along the same line as Eljefe949.

    I find myself torn sometimes between using the stamp tool/healing brush in Photoshop, but recently I’ve been thinking about purchasing a program that specializes in taking out scratches/noise reduction in old photographs. That program, which I’m sure you’re well aware of is made by Nik Software – and the program is Called Dfine 2.0. In your opinion, is it worth buying a specific program that is dedicated to a specific effect, like noise reduction? Or should I just tough it out for 45 minutes and continue using Photoshop for my digital restoration?

    • David Urich

      I love Nik software but try to keep things as simple as possible. Have you tried the new noise reduction tools in Adobe Camera Raw 6 or Lightroom 3? In my mind, they are now as good as the third-party solutions.

      David

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