When Not to Commission

There are projects this kind of photography cannot help, and it seems more honest to describe them than to accept them. A studio that cannot say no has no basis for being believed when it says yes.

Editorial documentation should not be commissioned when the space is not finished becoming itself. A property in its first weeks has not yet learned its own rhythms: the staff are performing an idea of the place rather than inhabiting it, the rooms have not absorbed any use, and the photographs will record the intention rather than the reality. The intention is already in the renderings. Wait a season. The photography will be better because the subject will exist.

It should not be commissioned to solve a problem that is not photographic. A space that guests find disappointing will not be improved by photographs that promise otherwise; it will simply disappoint them with better evidence. Photography of this kind works by being honest, which means it can only amplify what is already true. If what is true is not yet worth amplifying, the budget belongs with the interior, the service, or the lighting, in that order, and the photography belongs in next year’s plan.

And it should not be commissioned for the feed alone. A week of content can be made in an afternoon by people who specialise in exactly that, at a fraction of the cost, and there is no shame in it. An editorial commission is justified when a place has reached the point of deserving a record: when it has become somewhere, and somebody responsible for it understands that being somewhere is an achievement worth keeping evidence of. The right moment announces itself. The commission that begins then is the one that produces the photographs everything else in this Journal has been about.