(Credits: Far Out / MUBI)

It is hard to believe that Agnès Varda, one of the most revered filmmakers of all time, had little cinematic knowledge before she made her first film, La Pointe Courte. Predating the movies often credited as the first entries to the French New Wave, such as Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Varda’s 1955 film was incredibly innovative. 

She wouldn’t begin to attract widespread attention until the release of Cleo from 5 to 7 in 1962, a feminist film about a woman’s journey of self-discovery which subverted the male gaze and stereotypical notions of femininity. It didn’t take long for Varda to become one of France’s most acclaimed directors, always pushing the boundaries of the medium and creating films that tackled womanhood unlike anyone else.

Over the years, Varda discussed her approach to filmmaking, citing her lack of previous cinematic awareness and her background in photography as key to shaping her style. Paired with a love for paintings, such as those by Edgar Degas, Varda chose to shoot scenes with an emphasis on composition and lighting, with many stills from her movies appearing as though they could be photographs.

Varda once explained, via Agnes Varda between Film, Photography, and Art, “I took photographs of everything I wanted to film, photographs that are almost models for the shots. And I started making films with the sole experience of photography, that’s to say, where to place the camera, at what distance, with which lens and what lights?” In many ways, La Pointe Courte was an extension of Varda’s photographic career, challenging her to use a new medium to expand her creative practice. 

While Varda wasn’t the cinematographer for her film, she directed the camera so that her characters were framed distinctively, giving her movie a strong visual identity defined by carefully composed close-ups of the two main actors and street-photography-like shots of the villagers. From then on, Varda always ensured that her movies were visually impressive, sometimes even centring the practice of photography in her films, such as One Sings, The Other Doesn’t and Ulysse.

In the latter, Varda deconstructs a photograph that she took in 1954, almost 30 years before, allowing us to sit with the image for an extended period to consider its potential meaning. She once told Film Comment, “I learned a lot about how people can look at an image and load it with different feelings—the same image.” It’s this notion that propels much of Varda’s work. How can we freeze meaning into one image without words? 

The filmmaker approached her work in the same vein as a photographer, working with compositions which could be interpreted in a variety of ways in order to probe the audience into thinking about what they are consuming. Varda didn’t just frame her subjects artistically so that her films looked nice – she forces us to treat her films the same way we would a photograph, drawing attention to their very form with an almost-meta quality. We are made to acknowledge that we are watching something constructed, with Varda addressing us directly and asking us to pay attention.

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National Geographic is heralded as “the top of the mountain” when it comes to photographic journalism, or photography in general. This new six-part series gives us a glimpse into what it takes to be at the top of the mountain. As a landscape photographer, something I constantly hear from friends and family when they see one of my images is, “Wow, this could be in National Geographic!” If photography was a scale from never having taken a photo to being a photographer for National Geographic, I’m certainly closer to the “never taken a photo” side. Most of the time, these remarks happen because National Geographic is the most widely known and renowned photographic publication in existence.

Most people, even many photographers, don’t realize what it takes to be a National Geographic photographer. The trailer they released highlights six different photographers, all with very different genres, styles, and missions that will be highlighted over a six-part series. I suspect this means each episode will revolve around a specific photographer or mission. Seeing what it takes to create the images that can impact the world fascinates me. When I watch a series like the BBC’s Planet Earth, I’m left absolutely bewildered by how they film the animals in their natural habitat. War Photographer still sits vividly in my mind for what it takes to be a photographer in some of these spaces.

National Geographic’s “Photographer” premieres March 18th on National Geographic at 8:00 PM EST. If you miss it, you can watch it a day later on Disney+ or Hulu.

The game has changed a lot in 2024. Being a successful photographer is no longer about technical ability but a lot more about aesthetics and vision. In this article, I will tell you the five things you need to stop doing to be a successful photographer in 2024.

A lot of photographers focus on all the wrong things. This can derail your career. Some will spend years being derailed and not progress as rapidly as they can. I honestly believe that anyone can be a photographer with the right knowledge, understanding, and taste. Read on to find out the things you need to stop doing to be a successful photographer.

1. Reading Gear Reviews

The first one applies to a large number of photographers who have just started out and who are focusing on getting the best technical image possible. Being a combination of aesthetics and precision, it is easy to fall into the precision part of being a photographer. There is a new camera every other month, and new gear released almost every week. Reviewers, such as myself, will jump on this gear and review it as it’s exciting to try out. That said, if you are familiar with my reviews, you might notice that I only review the things I use personally, and not every new tool available. This is down to me finding gear reviews pointless to some degree. For example, I can tell you what each light modifier does because it has a direct impact on my work, but I do not know the latest camera Canon released, let alone other brands. The information I would get by reading a review of the latest Sony would not make my work better, or be time well spent. I only dive into reviews and gear research when I need to buy a replacement for gear that does not fulfill the purpose it has in my workflow. As such, I won’t be trying out the global shutter in the new Sony, but you bet I know more than I need about Phase One because it’s the equipment I sometimes get to use for jobs.

2. Getting Feedback From Other Photographers

Another thing photographers are constantly doing wrong is asking for feedback from the wrong people. Such people are fellow photographers in most cases. Truth be told, some photographers really hate my work because it is technically wrong. The skin tones are blown out, backgrounds overexposed, or the image was shot with a head-on flash and nothing else. While photographers will not find these techniques exciting, the clients who are paying me do. I care a lot about the feedback I get from such people, as it allows me to progress and deliver better results to the people hiring me. A random person on Facebook who knows every lighting technique (in their opinion) will likely look at my work and find a ton of mistakes with it. Rightfully so. I am inevitably asked to do portfolio reviews and feedback for photographers. When doing so, I focus on things such as aesthetic and vision rather than technique. Trust me when I say I did paid jobs with nothing more than a camera and a head-on flash. Those jobs sometimes paid more than jobs for which I had ProHeads with a ton of modifiers. Your images should be in touch with what the current zeitgeist is, not with what camera and lighting brands are marketing to you. I can go ahead and come up with a 20-light setup if I want to, but it will be useless if the subject in front of my camera is not right. Ask for feedback from your clients, not fellow photographers.

3. Watching Photography YouTube for Hours

Another one is photography YouTube. While a great pastime, you can’t possibly be watching photography YouTube and then go ahead and claim you did productive work. I rarely watch photography YouTube for that exact reason. That’s not to say that I spend a little too much on documentaries and all that sort of jazz. I do. The difference is, by watching documentaries, I expand my horizons a little more than by watching a photographer go to Iceland and capture the same exact image that was captured time and time again. While I would not be a photographer had it not been for some people on YouTube, one of whom is in a Russian prison at the moment, but still. Photography YouTube is very focused on technique rather than aesthetic. This would be all well if, say, we were living in the 1990s where knowing how to place a softbox would land you in the top 10% immediately. These days, every kid with a phone can get a better image than some photographers. What most can’t do is focus on aesthetic and vision. As such, if you spend your time thinking outside of photography, you will inevitably end up bringing something new to the table which will make your work unique.

4. Copying Other Work

There are so many photographers who spend too much time trying to replicate famous images. Fashion photographers will often complain that they don’t have enough runway, studio, or black and white work. Then they go ahead, take those images, and they end up looking like a 2007 Bavarian fashion magazine. Another one would be nude work. The idea of a black and white nude shot, or an extreme close-up of water drops on someone’s body parts has been done to death. Landscape photographers will do the same thing with the Eiffel Tower or the Delicate Arch. Portrait photographers will go to extreme lengths to copy Annie Leibovitz. I honestly believe that the rise of Annie Leibovitz gave companies that make canvas backdrops a huge sales boost. Having an Oliphant backdrop was almost like an accolade for people shooting portraits. Instead of trying to have a portfolio similar to what other people have done, go ahead and try to photograph something that speaks to you. It must not be the same as everyone else’s. At the end of the day, when clients review your work, they want to remember you. Few of them care that you are able to do a splash shot or a black and white nude. It is expected that you can do most things.

5. Not Charging Enough

This one is harming the industry as a whole. I tried having a low-cost-airline business model for my portrait business for a bit, but it failed miserably. The rule of thumb I got from this experience was that the less the client is paying, the more problems they will have. Think back to all the times you’ve seen a passenger act up on an airplane. More often than not, it has been in economy. Now look at Emirates first class: the story is quite different. The point is, people paying a premium for your work, even if what you are doing is not worth anywhere near what you’re being paid, will be far nicer to deal with. When you don’t charge enough or price-cut, you are getting the cheap client who is not familiar with what you are doing and is already unhappy that they need to pay a fee for something they think they can do on a phone. By charging more, you will end up losing the lower-end clients, but you will gain the higher-end ones. The goal is to work less and charge more.

As such, here we have the five top things that you need to stop doing to be a successful photographer in 2024. I must point out that these apply to photographers working in the commercial sector more than anyone else. Nonetheless, I’m sure if you shoot in a different genre and client base, you will be able to apply some of them to your work and have a more profitable and successful year.

Over to you, what are some of the things that you are looking to stop doing in 2024? Share with us in the comments below!

One of the most respected “noses” in the world, French perfumer Mathilde Laurent aims to light up people’s lives through perfume that results from the meticulous assembly of just the right ingredients. Born in 1970 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb west of Paris, she debuted her career as an apprentice to Jean-Paul Guerlain before working at Guerlain for 11 years, and has been the in-house perfumer for Cartier since 2006. She shares her path to a life in fragrance.

How and when did you become interested in perfume, and when did you know you wanted to be a perfumer?

The parents of a childhood friend were the first to tell me that I should become a perfumer. I was around 16 years old. It was the first time I heard anyone talking about this profession! They told me about a report they had seen about a school and said, “As you talk about perfume all the time and smell everything that you see, this school is made for you.” It was a perfume school, and that’s how I discovered that there were people whose job it was to invent these perfumes that I smelled in my little bottles. I kept it in a small corner of my head, but I did not develop a passion or a devouring ambition.

How did you discover your talent for perfumery and develop it?

At the time, I was especially passionate about photography. And to continue my education in photography, I needed a two-year higher education diploma in chemistry. By chance, the same diploma was needed to continue on with perfume, too. I wasn’t bad in math, chemistry and physics, so I did a scientific baccalaureate and then I took my time to do a DEUG [Diplôme d’Études Universitaires Générales, or two-year university diploma] in chemistry. And that’s when I had to choose between photography and perfume. I had already experimented with photography, so perfumery seemed more mysterious to me. I had never had the opportunity to smell essences, to make mixtures and to understand what this job was about. So I threw myself into it and prepared for the entrance exams for ISIPCA [Institut Supérieur International du Parfum, de la Cosmétique et de l’Aromatique Alimentaire, or French school for post-graduate studies in perfume, cosmetics and food flavoring formulation] in Versailles, France.

What are your earliest memories of scents?

Many scents stick out in my mind and are part of my life, such as my childhood garden in Normandy and the Corsican underbrush, which gave me my first olfactory shock. I have memories of Mirabelle plum preserves, lemon tea, the smoke from a Gitane cigarette, the smell of an oak barn, the scents of the forest, crushed fig, rivers, sand in my chocolate croissant. The list is endless, and happily so, because it allows me to find my bearings, as well as to learn and memorize the raw materials in perfumery.

What are your three favorite smells in the world?

The smells I love are not perfume ingredients. For me, perfume ingredients are tools, and I don’t favor my screwdriver over my scissors. When I need a screwdriver, I take a screwdriver. And when I need scissors, I take scissors. The ingredients of perfume help me go where I want, do what I want, and produce the smells that I seek. So in that regard, I don’t have any favorite ingredients. As for my favorite perfumes, some examples are Helmut Lang Eau de Parfum, Rochas Femme, Grès Cabochard, Mitsouko and Vol de Nuit by Guerlain, Mugler Cologne, Hermès Un Jardin sur le Nil or Montana Parfum de Peau.