HOW TO | SEQUENCING (photography)

https://dphoto.co.nz/how-to-sequencing/ = HOW TO | SEQUENCING SEQUENCING FOR PHOTOGRAPHY Telling stories is a fundamental way that we understand the world, but arranging photographs in a way that tells a story best can be a big challenge. D-Photo speaks with three noted photo-book authors to explore their takes on sequencing for photography. Photographers are often preoccupied with creating the best images they can, and rightly so. But often the full potential of a body of work can only be revealed through the skilful sequencing of those images. Good sequencing can make images so much more than they are alone, but if the sequence doesn’t work, even the strongest images might not save a project. Three photographers who have recently published exceptional photo books give us their view of this tricky terrain. THE POETRY OF FLOW Wellington photographer Mary MacPherson’s latest book, The Long View, came about as she was studying the evening skyline from the window of a high-rise apartment on a trip to Auckland. “I thought, ‘Oh, there’s the place that sends our insurance bills, and there’s the one that sets interest rates’ … I thought it would be really interesting to try to make a very urban work about the city and get inside the feeling of Auckland being New Zealand’s centre of wealth and power, and the place that occupies our national dialogue,” she explains. It was an ambitious subject to tackle, and one that would very much rely on the correct sequencing to be told most effectively. But, at the time that she was initially shooting her images, MacPherson wasn’t yet thinking about the way she would eventually order them. “I work in a fairly intuitive way, so, when I start a project, I spend quite a long time following my instincts and looking for images that provide a clue as to what I’m doing. Often it’s quite painful, because there might be only one or two images in a year,” she says. During the image-creating process for The Long View, she did eventually become aware that the project had a dearth of close-up shots, but she cautions not to focus too intently on such things while a project is still growing: “I’m wary of trying to hunt too deliberately for certain things, because I want the photographs to have a fresh poetry that’s more than I could imagine. I want to be surprised by my own work.” For The Long View, Mary shot many hundreds of images between 2014 and 2017 before she was satisfied that that part of the work was done. Through a long process of studying and filtering images, she whittled those down to a group of 100, and then down to a few more than 30, before finalizing the 25 images that would ultimately comprise the book.