On working with photographers

The single highest-leverage external collaboration the studio runs, on most brand projects, is with the photographer.

Most small-studio brand work, in 2021, ships with photography that is either generic stock, awkwardly staged in-house, or commissioned from a photographer who was briefed by someone who had not thought about how the photographs would be used. The result is brand systems where the visual identity is on point and the photography is on a different planet.

A few rules the studio has settled on for working with photographers.

Brief the photographer at the same time as the designer. Not after. The photography brief should be written alongside the brand strategy, by the same people, in the same conversation. The photographer’s input should shape the brand strategy as well as receive it. Most studios brief photographers after the brand is signed off. The photographer is then asked to produce images that fit a system they had no input into. The fit is, predictably, bad.

Treat the photographer as a co-author of the visual identity, not a vendor. The photographer’s eye, on a good brand project, contributes as much to the final feel as the type and colour decisions. Studios that treat photographers as a delivery mechanism for “the visuals” tend to get utility photographs. Studios that treat photographers as collaborators get photographs that elevate the brand in ways the design alone could not.

Pay for an in-person test shoot before the main shoot. A half-day, with a small crew, on the actual location, with the actual subjects, is the single best investment in the success of the main shoot. The studio learns what works. The photographer learns the constraints. The client gets to see early versions of the images before the budget is fully committed.

The photographer’s work is the photographer’s work. Studios that try to art-direct every frame of a shoot tend to produce shoots that are worse than if they had hired the photographer for their judgment and stayed out of the way at the moment of capture. The brief is the place to art-direct. The shoot is the place to trust.

The photographers I have worked with most happily, who do small-studio brand work and write about their practice in ways that are useful: Sun Lee, Charlie Bibby, and Brigitte Lacombe (for the largest of projects, when budget allows). All three publish enough of their thinking that you can brief them effectively.

For the smaller projects where a full shoot is not affordable, the studio uses a small set of stock libraries that produce work close enough to commissioned that they can sit alongside it. Stocksy and Death to Stock are the two I use most often. Both are paid. Both are worth the cost over the free libraries, where the standard for “looks like stock” has become impossible to escape.

The single thing I would change about most small-studio brand projects, looking at the work the field has shipped this year: bring the photographer in earlier, brief them as a collaborator, and let them shape the brand alongside the designer. The work that comes out the other side is, in nearly every case, substantially stronger.