About

Philipp S. Soheili,
freelance Photographer, Photojournalist

Was Ansel Adams a Landscape or Travel Photographer?
Did Picasso paint “Portraits” or “Nudes”?

Don’t you feel these questions are somewhat ridiculous?
Don’t you agree they miss the point, they prove the asking person has no clue whatsoever of the work of the artist in question? 

Yet we professional photographers are confronted with it every time we dare to add a whatever “off-topic photo” to an otherwise pure client oriented portfolio. ADs or editors don’t fail to prompt that picture with

THE MOST EVIL QUESTION OF ALL TIMES:

Back in the early 90s I had the chance to get a look at a lot of photographers portfolios. Usually they where full of pictures from what today we call “people”, “portrait”, “nude”, “nature”, “travel”, “architecture” and “wildlife”. You could not only see the personal style of a photographer, the broad band of subjects photographed (or not!) showed an almost intimate portrait of the photographer itself. ‘Clients’ liked you (or not), your “eye”, your style and gave you an assignment relying on your craftsmanship and artistry. Then the whole system changed when in the need to spend less magazines replaced editors with a journalistic background with hire and fire people from the ‘street’. People that had never had a look at a photo (from a professional point of view) came to be ‘editors’. They couldn’t ‘read’ the pictures anymore (I’m not blaming THEM – that’s why they were hired in the first place) and they got confused with all the pictures so they asked THE EVIL QUESTION OF THE CENTURY:

“What do you REALLY do?”

While I was so bewildered with the question that I almost choked every time on the thousands of words that came up in the blink of a shutter, I still had to face the fact that THEY WERE LOST and that I needed to be clear about what service I provided when I wanted them to trust me.So we “cleared the mess”, narrowed the portfolios to the one thing we believed was the most promising (not the most interesting or artistic – it often was the LEAST artistic). But your existence shapes your conscience: There was no more reason for taking pictures that your commercial mind (you were forcing on yourself) labelled as useless. We stopped shooting what couldn’t make it into the portfolio anyway. 

It took me almost 15 years to become aware of this and to go back to allow myself to photograph as I did when I started out, enthusiastic and with an open mind and not categorizing what I had in front of my eyes as sellable or not.

The truth is, I am a photographer not because I didn’t know what else to do with my time, BUT because I perceive the world through pictures, I relate to it in a personal way through my viewfinder, I strive to learn from it when I focus at its smallest detail, I celebrate it when showing my work to others.

What is it that I REALLY do?
I am a photographer. Full stop. There is no ‘Off-topic’ in photography.