A shoot ends with four hundred frames. The real work begins when we decide which photographs are allowed to stand beside each other.
A shoot ends and we are left with four hundred frames. People assume the difficult part is deciding which ones are good. It isn't. By the second day of looking, the good ones announce themselves without much argument. The difficult part comes afterwards, and it has nothing to do with quality. It has to do with order.
We print the selects small, postcard size, matte, nothing precious, and lay them across the long table. Then we stand over them and say very little. A photograph on a screen is a solitary thing; it fills the whole field of vision and insists on being judged alone. On the table it suddenly has neighbours, and it has to answer for them.
Order Is a Kind of Sentence
A woman looking away from the lens means one thing after a wide, emptied landscape: she is small, and the world is indifferent. Place the same frame after a close-up of her hands and it becomes something else entirely, a withdrawal, almost a refusal. Nothing in the photograph has changed. Only what precedes it. This is the quiet power of sequencing in editorial photography, and it is the closest our work comes to writing.
So we move them. One card left, two cards right, a frame pulled out and set aside for an hour to see whether the story misses it. Usually it does not. That is always a small grief, because the frame set aside is often the most beautiful one on the table.
Rhythm, Not Ranking
The instinct is to lead with the strongest image. It is almost always wrong. A sequence that opens at full volume has nowhere left to go, and the eye grows tired in the way an ear tires of a song with no rests in it. So we build in breath instead. A wide frame to establish the air of the place. A detail, a sleeve, a hand against a wall, to slow the pace. Then the frame we have been protecting all along, arriving late, earning its arrival.
Sometimes two excellent photographs simply argue with one another. They repeat a gesture, or a colour, or an intention, and standing side by side they cancel each other out. One has to go. Not because it failed, but because the story it belonged to was never quite this one.
What finally leaves the studio is rarely the strongest ten frames. It is the ten that agree on something, that move in one direction, that arrive somewhere. The rest go into the drawer, and every so often, months later, one of them turns out to have been the first line of a story we had not yet shot.
Share this story