Journal
01.15.2019

Portfolio Updates

First portfolio meeting tomorrow in maybe 1.5ish years after a busy 2018. I had 100 prints in my book (some double spreads) and took out half of em and put in 40 new ones. It was hard. Bye, some of my children. Today was also a day of recollection and memory sifting and, for the first time, taking ten big steps back to realize how long I’ve been doing this professionally (10 years) and how many phases I’ve had (2ish).

Editing through a decade of work today, I really felt that change and those years more than ever before. In many ways I still feel like a hustlin and hungry, starry-eyed kid. It’s still *hilarious* to see my name at the top of a call sheet on a 40 person commercial shoot. I literally giggle every time. I have not deserved anything. I fill up my own water bottle. People think I’m a PA on set all the time.




In general, I tend to cruise forward from one day to the next, never looking back too far and never looking past the end of the week either. Today, I reaaalllly looked back, and I guess I’m an adult now mostly. Felt my youth-y age. Photo-wise, it was a bit of a reckoning of how the work’s changed, both good and bad. My tones have changed for sure; seeing prints of how soft my film scans used to be compared to the much harder tone of the digital prints made the transitions in the book a challenge to pair. I have moved on from more formal and 4x5-y portraits into looser and chaotic scrums that tighten in on the face and features. I’m ok with that one. Oh, I also do food now, too!

Today just felt like a big survey, putting a decade of work into one single portfolio in a way that felt cohesive and was educational to see what images have stood well through the years. It’s impossible to have one single lewk forever, but one would hope the style would evolve in a way where you can feel the lineage of a photographer. Like a band putting together a single anthology pulled from their songs through the years. I’ll now look at portfolio re-sequencing as an important evaluative process; one that, for the first time, made me look a decade into the past and think about what the next couple years might look like.
Mark