Almost exactly three years ago I published this picture on my Instagram feed when I was using my time during Covid 19 to go through my archives and get them into better order than they ever had been. Shortly after it went live I had a really nice message from her daughter who wanted to purchase a copy. That one simple act made me go through Instagram and add lots of simple positive comments about pictures that I liked and ever since then I have tried to say nice things about the work of others.

This all came to mind this week when one of my editorial clients said something really complimentary about me and a set of portraits that I had done and, despite being in the business for thirty seven years, it gave me a real lift because it isn’t all that often that picture editors have the time to hand out compliments like that.

Social media has become a place where you get plenty’s of comments; some good and many not so good and on the whole I am the kind of person who wremembers absolutely of the good ones and genuinelyh we forgets the rest but I have a suspicion that makes me pretty unusual in this industry Ed.

It’s funny that most of the comments that I received about my Instagram archive images project were about the words that went with the pictures. I appear to have a very good memory for the time, the place and the experience of shooting pictures .

Here’s what I said about this portrait:
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun – was an American academic at Columbia University and a prolific feminist author of academic studies. When I was sent to photograph her in June 1994 I was given her pen name of Amanda Cross under which she published numerous popular mystery novels with a woman protagonist. I was about ten minutes into shooting portraits when the reporter arrived to do the interview and she was as amused as the subject that I’d been given the pen name rather than her real one. These days it is easy enough to research someone in ten minutes but before the internet it was, apparently, easier to find out about a novelist than an academic. #lovemyjob #portraitphotography #archive#locationportraiture #editorial #shotonfilm#imperfectportraiture #timeshighereducation#academicsofinstgram #itsallaboutthelight

Having read that one I scanned through quite a few others and realised that they were right. The text was every bit as interesting as the photographs in so many cases. One of my longest standing colleagues in the industry even suggested that there was a decent book waiting to be produced from this project. Anyone agree?