Editor Brooks Jensen thinking about the next issue
How many photographs do I include in a folio, or a project? I think it really depends on the type of project and the medium where the project is viewed. Here’s what I have found. If you are going to one of the many photo festivals that now seem to have replaced workshops as the place to see and be seen in the Art Photography world, you will find the reviewers have determined the proper number of photographs to view at one time is seventeen. This is because fifteen is not enough and twenty is too many. This is number of photographs these reviewers can comfortably review at any one time.
On my website, I pretty much hew to those guidelines, but I have reduced the number of images in a specific web folio to around ten or fifteen photographs. People viewing images on the web want a quick look and don’t want to waste much time waiting for a picture or pdf file to load into their browser.
Books to me, at least, are a separate entity. The book is not limited to a “one time” viewing that seems to be the standard of web users. A book can be picked up, and viewed front to back, back to front or in any order the viewer wishes. Because there is no set way to view a book, the number of photographs that can be put in a book is limited only by what the publisher thinks will sell. The “Sense of the Seasons” is an interesting project, because I originally thought of it as a book project with around eighty or ninety photographs. In order to share it with the rest of the world from my website, I broke down my Sense of the Seasons Project to four separate books, each with about twenty images. (Check it out at this link for the whole story.)
I like to think of the “required” number of images depends on the mode of presentation and what you plan for your audience. It all comes back to trying to figure out what the project is going to be and how to tell your story to the viewers.
Comments