WHAT TO DO AFTER A NEGATIVE PORTFOLIO REVIEW
Hey, it happens.
It happens to all of us at some point. We are not going to please all the people all of the time.
Ever.
So we will have negative reviews and portfolio showings.
It may go something like this.
You contact an agency or a designer in town and they want to see your work.
You send them your website address and wait for feedback.
It doesn’t come.
Ever.
You contact them at some point (three weeks out…?) and the art director tells you that they were not impressed with your book, but make sure to come see them when you are more polished, or ready, or whatever they will say. And remember, they are most likely being nice and in a hurry to get you off the phone.
You then begin the self-doubt boogie. Shuffling from why you are not good enough to why you ever thought you could do this to planning a whole new book to grabbing the largest bottle of cheap scotch and hit that bottle like Billy McBride.
None of the above is valuable to you in any way.
At this point you know your book is good. You have done all the due diligence and had other good reviews, so let’s put the pity party on hold for a minute and try to find out what exactly it was that went wrong.
Here are a few suggestions on how to handle this sort of rejection.
- Re-examine the agency and look at the work they do more closely.
- Was your work a good fit for them?
- Does the subject matter in your book fit into their general subject matter?
- What stylistic traits do they seem to follow for their work?
- Do you recognize any photographers that you know in the work they are showing?
Several things may be in play.
Perhaps you showed them a book full of people shots when they are clearly focused on medical technology. (That was me as creative director. So many inappropriate mailers and photographers showing me work that we simply didn’t do. And our portfolio was online.)
Maybe you are avant-garde and they are clearly traditional.
Maybe they use out of town photographers, or the imagery they used is mostly stock. This can be a big challenge.
Perhaps your work was TOO good for the types of clients they have and they fear your pricing. Hey, that happens. It does.
Or maybe, just maybe, the AD was knee deep with a client who had far different aesthetics than what you showed. The AD instantly sees your work as not appropriate for that thing that is right in front of him. And so he wrote you off.
(That happened to me. I showed an agency my book by “drop-off”* once. I always had a card in it asking for some feedback. Their feedback was not so wonderful and I thought maybe I should write these guys off. A few months later, they called my book in and loved it. What changed? I have no idea, but I got that gig.)
AD’s are people, you know. They can have all sorts of quirks and oddities. And sometimes they are wrong.
But none of that should chip away at your self-esteem or confidence.
You know your work is good, and you believe in it.
Remind yourself of that and then to these three things:
- Double down on getting clients to look at your work. Go from 3 contacts per day to 6 contacts until you get someone who will look and comment.
- Shoot something. Do a new shot for your book. Do it now while the criticism is ringing in your ear but do NOT listen to it. Make YOUR photo… damn the negative voices!
- Write a short note to yourself reviewing what you love about your work, and how it makes you feel to do it. On paper. With pen.
These positive factors will scoot those negative words right out of your brain and replace them with positivity.
And then you can get ready for your next showing.
(BTW, this is freelance art we are talking about so you may have to rinse and repeat… sorry, that’s life.)
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“Drop-off” means you would leave your portfolio at an agency for a designated amount of time. Often three days. Then you would go and pick it up. These sort of things are rare now because the AD’s and their clients can pull up websites as a group to help them make a determination as to who to hire.