There are various points I will respond to, what do you think of this review? Be honest please.
Dear Keith Goldstein,
Thanks so much for sharing your images with us at LensCulture.
Your photographs share an engaged sense of interactions between people and their environments. They are intuitive and read as having been produced by someone who is deeply connected and engaged to these places.
Your photography provides an incredible amount of human connection. It reads very clearly in the imagery, and a viewer is transported to these places that they otherwise might not have access too. It’s really great to see that you are pushing yourself to take frames that are rich and make incredibly good use of color. This precision really helps add to the engagement of these images as well as stimulates the use of space in relationship to the subjects. You allow everything a lot of natural light, which is lovely. These images have a wonderful amount of personality and capture something that would easily go missed or overlooked. It would be nice moving forward to shoot images with a little more focus or formulated plan. There seems to be a lot of the same thing here without a specific direction. Thinking about how or why you focus on these people and places you photograph will help push how you can think in the future when making images. I understand what these people do and what they may mean to you as the photographer but I would love a little more connection to them intimately. I don’t feel a strong connection to them as a viewer and the details of their lives and who they are. Seeing more of that will really launch the narrative here.
Having some sort of statement and thoughts for images like these is an incredibly powerful ally. Sorting out your feelings and giving some thought to how you’re interested in capturing the world is really important to help you as the photographer sort through what you’re looking for when making photography. These photographs have a lot of relatability and providing some more words to the work directly will give the frames value and vulnerability. What scares you about making these images? What posses you to go and find them? Why do you connect to these things you’re shooting?
I definitely think the images speak to one another but I would be careful with how you’re selecting images to show. In this case 10-12 really good images will let editors, curators, gallerists, etc. know that you respect their time and give them just enough to want more. You really have a rich sense of light and understand how to compose subjects in a busy environment. Keep in mind which images you are showing and how they are working together, they need to support each other in a cohesive way. Be careful of frames that start looking the same, for example images 1, 3, 4, 8, & 9. Being able to recognize when to make cuts to images that are structurally similar will leave you with space to show more frames that will add to the narrative you are trying to tell.
Thanks so much again for submitting your work.