Completing a photography project is one thing. Getting people to see it is another.
Photographers often struggle with getting people to see their work and find it difficult to make people interested in what they do.
Trying to make people care about photos you have already taken can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. You may be lucky and find people who love what you do. Or, you might never really strike the right chord to generate interest in your work.
A better approach is to identify an audience or event that you will create a specific project for. This means that you know in advance that people will be interested in what you are doing.
Shooting specifically for a group of people who will have a connection to your images means that you can work out how you can reach them to tell them about it, and it gives you a better chance of those people being interested in your work when you do find them.
Shooting a project around an event like an awareness day or anniversary means there will be enhanced interest in you subject if you launch the final project around that time.
By doing this you will have a clear focus when shooting the project, and it will be 100 times easier to promote the work because you have a clearly defined target market centred around a specific event.
Rather than trying to attract everyone (which is impossible) you will be able to identify people who care about what you are doing and use your energy to talk to them. By creating a project around a date based event you’ll give yourself a clear deadline and will also be able to promote your images at a time when there is heightened interest in what you have shot.
Here is a simple 5 step plan to create a photography project that gets seen:
1. Decide on a group of people you would like to make a project for (your audience) or work out when you would be most likely to get maximum coverage for your project (key date)
2. Pick a topical or relevant subject that you’re interesting in shooting and that you can get access to
3. Shoot the project
4. Decide how you will publish the work: website, social media, book or exhibition
5. Promote and publish the work to coincide with the key date
Here’s an example:
1. We decide that the 10 year anniversary of the London Olympics will give us an audience of people who remember the games and we have a key date to aim for when there will be interest in the project (27 July 2022).
2. During the games thousands of people volunteered to be ambassadors and help visitors. With some research we are able to track some of these people down to create portraits of them.
3. We shoot the project with a similar aesthetic, so each image has a consistent look and we tell a little story about each person. We get 20 portraits.
4. This will be published on a website, with the aim of getting coverage for the photographer.
5. The final project is promoted to London and national bloggers, new publications and gets loads of coverage.
You can aim for events that are sooner, more local, broader or more specialised, depending on your interests and ability to execute the project.
Simple. Then why not do it?
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