Why the firstweek is thrownaway

The usual sequence is to read everything first — the cuttings, the report, the previous pictures — and then, once the photographer knows the subject, to send them. It is a reasonable-sounding order. We do the opposite, and we have done since 2007.

What goes wrong with the usual order

A photographer who has spent three days looking at other people’s pictures of an estate arrives at the estate already knowing what is there. That sounds like an advantage. It is not.

They walk around, and what they come back with is the research. They find the damp where the survey put it. They photograph the resident whose situation matches the caption they had already written in their head. The knowledge arrived before the seeing, and it colours every frame after it.

The problem is not that they are dishonest. They genuinely saw it, in the same way that everyone genuinely sees the face in the electrical socket.

What we do instead

The first week happens before the file is opened. The photographer goes, walks the same route at the same hour, talks to whoever is there, and shoots without a subject in mind. That week’s frames are contact-sheeted, catalogued, and set aside.

They are bad frames, and it is uncomfortable, and that is the point. The photographer is building an account of a place that is not borrowed from somebody else’s edit.

The file arrives in week two and lands on top of something. Photographers say a version of the same thing every time: so that was the building they meant.

The cost

It is slower, and it makes the first sheets look like a waste of five hundred frames. Photographers who came from a wire agency find it particularly frustrating, because their usual strategy — read in, arrive, deliver — does not survive a week where nothing is expected of them.

By week three the difference is not visible in the take. It shows up at the second edit, when the editor asks how we know something and the answer is that the photographer had already been there four times.

That is the whole argument. It is not about shoe leather as a virtue. It is about not sending someone out to photograph what they have already read.