Twenty Minutes Across the Table: Making a Portfolio Review Count
How to prepare and use a twenty-minute portfolio review: what to bring, what the reviewer actually reads, and how the notes become work.
A portfolio review is twenty minutes of someone else's reading speed. You do not control the pace, the order or the interruptions, so the portfolio has to survive being read quickly by a stranger. Everything you bring either helps that reading or gets in its way.
What should you bring to a portfolio review?
Prints, not a screen. Twenty to twenty-five prints in a clamshell box or a simple folio, sequenced, with a leave-behind sheet carrying your name, your contact details and three thumbnail frames. A notebook for yourself, because you will not remember afterwards in which order the comments arrived. What stays home: the laptop, the second body of work you are also proud of, and any frame you cannot explain in one sentence.
Other image fields have run this same meeting for a long time, and their version is worth reading. In children's publishing the portfolio review is a standard appointment: the Carolina Kidlit Review, an independent magazine about writing and illustrating children's books in North and South Carolina, describes the six-to-eight-piece portfolio and what happens across the table for illustrators preparing to show work. The etiquette transfers to photography almost unchanged.
What does a reviewer actually look at in twenty minutes?
Three things, in this order. Whether the sequence holds together as an edit. Whether the pictures on the table agree with the kind of work you say you want. Whether you can hear a comment without defending the picture. The reviewer's stated job is to judge the work; the job they actually do is to decide whether you are someone they would put in front of a client.
Events built around these meetings form a circuit of their own. Photolucida in Portland runs a portfolio reviews programme and publishes what participating reviewers expect at photolucida.org; the guidelines agree on one point, that the reviewer is reading the edit rather than admiring the printing.
How do you turn the reviewer's notes into work?
Write everything down the same day, while the order of the comments is still attached to the order of the prints. Then sort the notes into three piles: sequencing, gaps in the work, and names or outlets to follow up. The first pile changes the portfolio within a week. The second becomes the next shooting list. The third is a set of emails you actually have to send; a review that ends without a follow-up is a conversation, not a contact.
The portfolio itself is a discipline separate from the review, and the editing of it is covered on the page about editing a portfolio an editor will get through. The work a review can lead to carries its own paperwork, set out in the note on what a client actually buys in a commission.