Photographer, curator, photography researcher, and founder of the Odesa Photo Days festival Kateryna Radchenko spoke about how to make a photo project cohesive, where to show it so it doesn’t get lost among other photographs, and what questions a photographer should answer before starting work on a story.

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How to shoot a project

Dutch artist, designer, and curator Erik Kessels (Erik Kessels) created an installation from printed photographs that he took from the Flickr platform. All the images were simply dumped into the exhibition space to demonstrate the mountains of photographs being shot. This raises the logical questions of how, among a huge mass of images, your images can be seen, can matter, and will not turn into garbage. In reality, this is a long road that involves a lot of work, learning, analysis, and the shooting process itself.

All photographs created during the war are significant, but not every photograph is important right now, and not every one needs to be published immediately. Today, a person with a phone is a documentarian. You don’t have to have a professional camera to capture changes in space and time. Vernacular photography is interesting and sincere; it gives access to moments of life that professional photographers do not reach. With the start of the full-scale invasion, compositionally strong images have become very similar, and the author is no longer visible behind them. But if a photographer finds their authorial voice, they will be able to create a valuable photo project and it will be noticed.

A photo project is a cohesive structure that includes photographs connected not only by a theme, but also by a visual narrative. The photographs should interact with one another, and a strong selection of images for a project is 80% of its success. If you send an exhibition curator or a contest jury a selection where, for example, five frames work together, but three others completely fall out of context—visually or conceptually—then you will certainly drop out of the focus of interest of any publication or institution.

Every artist—and first and foremost a photographer—can fall into an emotional trap. For example, when a photographer made a shot, they experienced many emotions, or, to get the frame, they had to go through a difficult path and spend an incredible amount of time and resources. Such an image is important to the photographer, but visually it may be nothing special. The photographer is emotionally attached to it and will keep including it in the final edit, even though the image may be entirely inappropriate. It will disrupt the project’s concept and pull it in a negative direction. It is important to keep this in mind when creating a photo project and, if possible, to show the project to colleagues who can advise you.

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How to shape a project

Photo projects can take different forms—everything depends on the purpose. If the goal is to archive history, to record changes in a historical context, then a documentary approach is needed.

A project can also be a protest, the author’s voice. If a certain issue is very important to a photographer, then their project can become a language for declaring this theme—drawing broad attention to it through a visual sequence. The project becomes an authorial statement.

A photo project can also be a personal reflection. A photographer creates a visual sequence to make sense of themselves or a certain theme, or to live through a traumatic experience. Not every reflection project needs to be published. It all depends on the goal with which the author created it — whether to find answers for themselves to a set of questions and balance their story and their own being, or to share their experiences with other people. In the second case, it is worth thinking about how the author’s experience can be useful for others and how open the photographer is ready to be.

The first step toward working on your own project is researching the chosen topic. It is important not only to look through references and see what has already been done, but also to view the issue from another, non-photographic perspective. To understand the topic, it is worth exploring its historical, social, political, and other aspects.

The second step is finding a visual language for the photo project. If the story is planned for media, when the material needs to be supported visually on time, then it is enough to make high-quality documentary photographs, in color or black-and-white. In the case of working on a long-term project, a reflection project, archival materials, or other photo projects, the visual language should be unique, interesting, and appropriate to the theme.

The third step is the actual shooting of the photo project.

The fourth step is selecting photographs that can convey the project’s idea. At the stage of preliminary selection, you can see which frames are unnecessary and which images, on the contrary, are missing.

The fifth step is finalizing the photo project.

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How to present a photo project

After a photographer has found an interesting topic and formed a cohesive story with a defined visual narrative, the question arises of how to present this photo project.

First, there are portfolio reviews — short meetings with photographers, curators, or various institutions, during which you can show your project and receive feedback. First, meeting with professionals makes it possible to look at your project critically and from the outside, and to hear important questions you may not have thought about during the process. Second, it is a way to tell colleagues, curators, and various institutions about yourself — to make your presence known. Many curators of different projects use portfolio reviews to note potentially interesting authors and, in the future, may offer them collaboration.

It is perfectly normal to write to a person a photographer is interested in — a colleague, editor, curator, or publishing house — and propose your photo project. In that case, you should attach the work and treat the presentation with full responsibility. If the person is interested in the work, they will definitely respond.

Travel grants and creative residencies offer good opportunities for photographers. This is a good chance to live in another city or country, devote time only to photography, and work on your own projects.

You can make yourself known through various photography competitions. Broadly, they can be divided into three formats. The first is when the competition has no cohesive theme, and photographs are accepted in very general categories, for example “Black-and-white photographs,” “Portrait,” “Landscape,” and so on. Usually participation in such competitions is paid, and the award is publication in a catalog or a medal. Such competitions are unlikely to be useful for professional growth.

The second format is competitions with a defined theme that accept cohesive photo projects. Fewer people usually apply to such competitions, and curators treat the selection carefully. They look for valuable projects and build an interesting exhibition. For example, the Odesa Photo Days festival announced an Open Call to select 10 projects and form the main exhibition. In this case, the author has an opportunity to present their project properly at the festival. Curators and representatives of various institutions also come to such events, and the photographer has a chance to be noticed. Participation in such competitions and festivals may also be paid, but it will be a good investment in the future.

The third format is international photography competitions with free participation, for example World Press Photo. Such competitions are incredibly difficult to get through, and what can help is a unique theme, an exceptionally compelling visual sequence that will move the jury, and the topic’s relevance. Fewer people submit to the photo project category—especially long-term projects—than to the single-photograph category, so the chances of winning will be higher.

Other ways to introduce yourself to the world include Open Calls for exhibition projects and festivals, as well as grants or fellowships to work on your own project, for example the Magnum Foundation Fellowship. Photographers should apply for grants or fellowships when they already have materials with a professional and conscious selection of photographs on a relevant topic and a clearly written text explaining the project’s concept.

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How to write an application

When a photographer applies to a competition or festival, they usually need to prepare many documents, including a résumé. In a CV, if a photographer is at the beginning of their career, it is worth listing all projects and achievements. Over time, of course, the CV should be updated, leaving only the most relevant and significant accomplishments.

A photographer needs to have a portfolio. Ideally, you have a website, so curators or a competition jury do not need to spend time searching for information about the author across the internet. The website can be made even on free platforms; the main thing is that it contains information about the photographer and work that helps understand their practice. If an author does not have a website, it is worth making a high-quality portfolio in PDF format.

The next step in the application is a motivation letter and a project description. It is important to understand why you are submitting your work to this specific program, and to reflect that accordingly in the motivation letter. The project description and the images you prepared must correspond to each other. For example, if you plan to shoot a story about theater during the war, but submit a selection of photographs showing only one protagonist, moreover from similar angles, such an application will not work.

Another common mistake is when a photographer tries to replace the lack of images with text — when the application contains a lot of description, but the photographs themselves do not help you understand what the story will be about.

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What questions you should ask yourself

When a photographer begins working on a long-term author photo project, they should ask themselves the following questions:

  • Why is the topic you chose for the project interesting and important to you? Is there a personal connection?
  • Try describing the topic in one sentence to define the main focus of the photo project.
  • How can you reveal the topic without traumatizing other people? A photographer should consider whether they want to help people tell their story, or whether they want to use people to tell their own story. How ethical is the project, and will it not traumatize the protagonists—if not now, then in the future?
  • What will the visual language be, and how will it tell the story and support the photo project’s concept?
  • Why is the photo project needed, and for whom will it be important? Who will be the audience for your project?

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Kateryna Radchenko — a photographer and photography researcher, director of the Odesa Photo Days Festival, and a European jury chair and a member of the international jury of World Press Photo 2023.
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Worked on the material:
Prepared by: Kateryna Moskaliuk
Literary editor: Yuliia Futei

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