I deleted my portfolio PDF and made one page with three bad photos. Two serious enquiries that week.
For twenty years my portfolio was a PDF. Sixty pages, properly photographed, the works shot in good light, the lot. I sent it to maybe four hundred people over the years. Response rate near zero, and I never thought to ask why.
Earlier this autumn a curator in Brno asked to see my work and I was tired, so I sent a link to one page. Three photos taken on my phone in the storage hall, bad light, one of them has my boot in the frame. Four lines of text. Where the work has been, what it is made of, what I need to build the next one.
Two serious enquiries that week. One is now a real commission for next year.
I think the sixty-page PDF was doing the opposite of what I wanted. It was proving I was serious. It was not showing anyone a door. A curator has eleven minutes and forty other artists. A perfect portfolio says: this person is finished, this person is a known quantity, go and look at the checklist. A bad photo of a real room says: there is something here that is not in a database yet.
I am not saying make ugly documentation. I am saying I had confused thoroughness with invitation. Thoroughness is for your own archive. Nobody walks into your archive.
Now the part I am less sure about. I have no idea whether this works because the page is honest, or because it looks like I am not trying, which in this world reads as expensive. Possibly both. I have been doing this too long to believe I have found the formula, but the old one was definitely dead and I had been sending it out for years without noticing.
Still keeping the PDF. For grants. Grants love a PDF.
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The four lines of text are probably doing more than the three photos, honestly. "What I need to build the next one" is such a rare thing to actually say out loud, and people who commission work are usually trying to figure out whether you'll be able to deliver, not whether your lighting was good. Sixty pages of well-shot work answers a question nobody asked.
I do a bit of this with my own sketching, and the thing I keep noticing is that when I send people a curated set of "best" pieces, the reply is polite and nothing happens. When I send a single photograph of the page as it actually looks, coffee stain and all, people ask where the place is. Some of it is just that a PDF is a wall and one image is a doorway, I think.
So did you keep the old seventy-page version anywhere, or is it fully gone? Curious whether you'd go back to it for a formal submission or you're done with that format altogether.
I think I half agree. The four lines matter, yes, but I would not dismiss the photographs so quickly. A bad-light shot in the storage hall does something the good ones can't: it shows the thing at its real size, against a real wall, with a floor. Studio shots of large work flatten it and make it look smaller than it is, and anybody who buys work knows that. So it isn't honesty versus polish. It is that the phone photo carries information the professional one has edited out.
Where I'd push back on your sketching example: the single photograph works because it is one. Send twelve of them and you are back to a portfolio, just a messier one. The number is doing the work as much as the rawness is.
The boot is not a strategy, that is the thing. If I took it out now it would be a lie, and people smell that faster than they smell a bad photo. But you are right that I am not going to start staging boots either. The moment it becomes a formula it stops carrying information.
And yes on the flattening. My good photographer, God bless him, lit a twelve-metre piece like it was a watch. In the storage hall you can see it is taller than me, badly, and that badly is the whole point. He edited out the ceiling because the ceiling was ugly. The ceiling was the scale.
Twelve photos and you are back to the PDF with extra steps. Three is already one too many, honestly.
The "best pieces" thing is a trap I fell into for years. I used to choose what I thought made me look serious, which is basically choosing what to hide. A photograph of the page as it actually looks, coffee ring and all, tells them you are a person who works. The polished set tells them you are a person who curates. Curators are already good at that, they do not need help.
The four lines are the part that surprised me most, honestly. Asking for what I need out loud, after twenty years of never doing it, felt rude. Turns out it reads as competence. Who knew.