Your photographic identity is the cohesive look that you present to potential clients that says, this is what to expect from me. It is not your portfolio, but rather more of your artistic or creative style. When you look at a Nadav Kander portrait, you know it’s a Nadav Kander portrait. When you see a Peggy Sirota image on the cover of GQ, you know Peggy Sirota took that photo.

What is Photographic Identity?

As a photographer, it’s important to establish a look that separates you from your competitors. If your work simply mimics the likes of Annie Leibovitz, Tim Tadder, Peter Hurley, Lachlan Bailey, or any other well-known photographer, then you’re not really putting your own stamp on your work. What you can do, however, is take inspiration from these photographers and build on it to develop your own style. This is especially important to consider when you work in the same industry, market, and country as these photographers.

So, that leads us to the first thing you can to create, define, and refine your photographic identity…

1. Create Inspiration Collections

If you have a collection of magazines and don’t mind tearing them up to make space, one thing I recommend doing, and this is something I did when going through a massive purge of my stuff a few years ago, and it’s something I still do today, is I went through my magazine collection page by page and tore out any image I either, loved, found inspirational, or there’s was just something about it that I couldn’t stop looking at, even if I couldn’t figure it out at that moment. I tore every photo out that I wanted to keep and put it into a box.

Then I sorted them into piles, studio portraits, environmental, ads, black and white fashion, whatever — I categorized them into a few basic piles. I bought a few simple school binders and a bunch of plastic slips to put into the binders. Each binder was a different category, and I slipped the full page of the magazine into the plastic cover. So, now I have multiple inspiration binders that I can quickly pick up and look through when I am looking for ideas. And you can do this any way you want, with a binder, a corkboard, an Airtable base, even a shoebox. It doesn’t matter.

If you don’t have a large magazine collection or your magazines are precious to you, put a request out on Facebook or Craigslist or whatever social media platform or free classifieds website you want for magazines. See if you get any bites.

Something I’ve started to do, because I’ve really reduced my consumption of print magazines, is I’ve created an Airtable database. I’ve included it here, and this is the actual inspiration collection that I made for myself.

2. Create a Dogma

I got this idea from the Dogme 95 Manifesto established by Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Simply, a dogma is a list of criteria that you create for yourself to follow and adhere to when creating your images.

This could include anything you want, such as:

• A lighting technique: 

  • Ex. always use a diffused 7’ parabolic umbrella as a large fill source

• An aesthetic idea. 

  • Ex. if you shoot food, shoot on dark slate tabletop backgrounds

• Things you want to do differently: 

  • Ex. only shoot environmental portraits, as opposed to studio portraits

Bear in mind this is to help define your photographic identity based on the set of criteria you are establishing for yourself. Obviously, if your client wants studio headshots on a yellow backdrop, do that. Your dogma is for your own personal development and portfolio. Make your list as short or as long as you want, but I recommend keeping it simple, with only about 3-5 items. Make it too short and it’s not terribly useful. Too long and it will become a restrictive albatross or you won’t even use it. Also, if you have a list of eight criteria, don’t beat yourself up if you only included 3 or 4 into a shoot. Keep it flexible.

3. Establish a Signature Lighting Pattern

If you are using and shooting someone else’s signature lighting pattern, you are not setting yourself apart from everyone else. That’s not to say you can’t do this when you’re learning and growing, but you’re not actually developing your own approach to the work. You’re just mimicking someone else’s photographic identity and not defining your own photographic identity.

When I think about signature lighting patterns, I think about Jill Greenberg’s portraits of children, Nadav Kander’s portraits, and Michael Muller’s movie posters. To establish a signature look for your interior photography, your editorial portraits, your family photos, you’re first going to need to figure out what you want the finished image to look like, and then engineer the lighting pattern to create that look.

Where are you putting the key light? Camera left or camera right? Is it a beauty dish? At eye level? One foot above eye level? Is it a hard light with a 7” silver reflector for a modifier? Or a gridded, 12” x 48” strip light rotated horizontally? Are you lighting the background? Only using blue gels to light the environment and pink gels to light the subject? Bounce? No bounce? Fill light? No fill?

Write it down. Sketch it into a diagram and tape it to the wall of your studio. If you have the room and gear, set it up in a dedicated space in your studio and leave it. Or set it up once and shoot a ton of subjects in one session to rapidly build your portfolio.

Summary

So, create your inspiration collection, sit down with a notebook and define your dogma, and maybe even create a signature lighting pattern. Stop copying other photographers and start defining a photographic identity that is truly your own.

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