Class Acts
Julian Lass meets three award-winning portrait shooters combining the best of modern and contemporary. Grounded in craft-based black-and-white techniques, and using their highly developed lighting skills together with a more relaxed approach to posing, they’re bucking the trend and increasing sales by pushing their creative, professional expertise. Just good enough just doesn’t cut it.
British Journal of Photography cover story 22.04.09
Article © Julian Lass 2009
Black-and-white is back - or is it? To some it never really went away. As award-winning social portrait photographer Lisa Visser points out: ‘I’ve always loved black-and-white. I’m bored with high-key photography because I see it everywhere.’
The Sussex-based photo-grapher runs Hamilton Studios together with her husband. While originally pursuing a high-key, white background portrait style, she has long been a black-and-white aficionado. And the preference paid off when she won the UK British Professional Photographer of the Year 2008 with a monochrome image (shown right). ‘I much prefer black-and-white when you’ve got beautiful lighting with a good tonal range,’ she says.
Mark Nixon also won in the 2008 British Professional Photographer Awards with a monochrome image - based in Ireland, he scooped the Overseas Professional Photographer of the Year title. ‘I spent about eight years shooting with black-and-white film and learned how to get the most out of a negative in the darkroom,’ he says. ‘That was a great foundation, and with digital I still apply the same techniques.’
And another photographer who picked up a prize with a black-and-white image is Paul Wilkinson, who won the Parent & Child category. The Buckinghamshire-based photographer didn’t set himself up as a ‘traditional’ photographer, he says, it came about almost by accident. ‘I just do what I love and people are coming in asking for it,’ he says. ‘Out of a hundred shots in a typical session, I’ll do 10 high-key shots. They never buy the high-key shots.’
Consumer demand
Black-and-white, it seems, is winning over both judges and clients in the social market - the BPPA, after all, was, until recently, run by both the Master Photographers’ Association and the British Institute of Professional Photography, the longest established trade organisations in the market. But why?
It could just be time for a change - high key has been in style for quite some time. But, suggest the professionals, it could also be the start of a significant ‘flight towards professionalism’, a process by which cash-conscious consumers demand work that only an experienced professional photographer could create.
Wilkinson, Visser and Nixon all aim at the high end of the market - Wilkinson typically earns £1000 from print sales per shoot, while Nixon averages out at about EUR1500. ‘I aim at the top end of the market,’ says Nixon. ‘My best sale was EUR12,500.’ Visser earns an average of £700 a shoot and says there’s no way of ‘pre-guessing’ how much people will spend.
This kind of money demands real craft, and all three shoot in the studio with an array of flash gear - Visser prefers Bowens, while Nixon and Wilkinson use Elinchrome (Wilkinson also shoots on location). Nixon and Wilkinson both use top-end digital SLRs, Nixon a Canon EOS-1Ds MkIII and Wilkinson a Nikon D3, while Visser favours a Hasselblad 503CW with a Phase One P20 back. She prefers working with medium format because of the waist-level finder, she explains: ‘I’m not hidden behind the camera.’
Nixon is open to medium format too - he’s tried the new Hasselblad H3DII, and found the focusing ‘certainly fast enough for the studio’. Hasselblad obviously recognises a potential in very high-quality social portaiture, as it recently lent Wilkinson a H3DII, 31 million pixel resolution back. ‘I met (the new UK MD) Chris Russellfish at the recent MPA awards and he suggested I try it,’ he explains. ‘I got some beautiful images as medium format really slows you down.’
High end
Producing this standard of work helps differentiate the end-product, they agree. ‘Ultimately, the client decides whether your work is worth paying for,’ Visser says.
She and the others are quietly confident about their work, even in the midst of the economic downturn, and with good reason. Times are already getting tougher for portrait photographers but, they say, they’re doing better than ever.
‘Quality will always win,’ says Nixon. ‘It’s the photographers in the middle and bottom that will find it tough. It’s so easy now to buy a camera and call yourself a photographer. Some photographers will fail because they are overstretched with the bank, but most of the good ones should survive. It will just mean being pro-active about generating work and watching the pennies.’
‘At (the first signs of a downturn) we were working all hours out of worry but our turnover was up 25% last year,’ adds Visser. ‘I think we can afford to relax a little this year.’
Paul Wilkinson, meanwhile, describes sales as ‘vibrant’. ‘We’re busier than this time last year,’ he says. ‘We’re promoting harder and the local (Aylesbury) Venture studio closed, so there’s loads going on and sales have gone up.’
Needless to say, they don’t feel threatened by the hoardes of semi-pro portrait photographers joining the market - in fact they’re magnanimous enough to say they need help. ‘At one point I was untrained too, but you need to do an apprenticeship,’ says Wilkinson. ‘We need new ideas, and new people, but the risk is that they price themselves too high, setting up as a pro when they’re untrained.’
Click here for article in BJP.
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