How to Curate Your Own Photography Portfolio

Taking photos is easy; curating your best photos is hard.


Curate

To curate (in Latin) means “to care”. Therefore, when you curate your photos, you are showing the photos you care the most for.

And this is the difficult thing —

Which photos do you care for?

For myself, I care for the photos of Cindy (Cindy Project), photos of my umma (mom, as she will most likely die before I do), I care about photos I make that critique society in a beautiful way.


Nobody else can tell you what to care about

I don’t think you should ever let others dictate your preferences, or what you should care about.

You must dictate what is important to you — what you care about.

Which of your photos do you care for?


How to choose your best photos

Some ideas:

  1. If you died today, which photos would you want to be remembered for?
  2. What kind of social commentary or critique are you trying to make with your photos?
  3. What kind of feeling do you want to impart unto your viewer? Levity, beauty, joy? Or depression, sadness, and despair?

What is your top 5?

A simple tip for curation:

Choose your top 5 photos, and create a ‘mini-portfolio’ of your best 5 photos.

I like the number 5– because it is the same number of digits on our fingers.

To be honest, if you die and are remembered for 5 photos, you’ve done a phenomenal job. Even the most famous photographers aren’t remembered for (usually only 1) photograph.

So which photos would be in your top 5? (Remember MySpace?)


Distill

How do you know which of your photos are the best?

For myself the only way to determine which photos you care about is through time.

Once again, to “curate” means to care. If you have a photo that you’ve cared about for a very long time– it is a good photo.


Dynamic curation

This is also the tricky thing — photos you might have cared for 10 years ago, you might not care for them today. And also similarly — photos that you didn’t care for 5 years ago, you might really really care for today!

So recognize that your portfolio is dynamic. Don’t think that you must create a static and final portfolio. Instead, I encourage you to change your portfolio dynamically — every once in a while change up your portfolio. Add certain photos and projects, and subtract certain photos and projects.


Photo Flux

You’re in a state of flux; you’re constantly changing and in a state of ‘becoming‘. Thus, go with the flow, and allow yourself to change and evolve.

ERIC


Eric Kim Portfolio 2018

My best pictures (so far):

Eric Kim PHOTOGRAPHY 2018

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