Photographer Brad Trent tells the story of shooting a medical manufacturing facility for a spread in Business Week at his Damn Ugly Photography blog. Going in, he knew he had to get a picture of the assembly line, but to his eye it was a pretty standard shot that didn’t do a lot to make the particular company stand out as the worthy subject of a magazine profile.
It’s a great shot, but it’s overly literal, and, as Brad writes, he wanted to push past it to deliver a more artistic statement about Conmed:
Dave loved it ‘cuz it showed off their new production facilities and how they used new ideas to solve a manufacturing problem, but for me it was more of a ‘point picture’ and I knew there was more we could do to sell the idea of individual, hand-assembled production.
After hunting around the corporate headquarters, Brad found an elevator lobby with an eerie green glow. Check out the final image in the Business Week article.
Brad didn’t put his subjects in a studio or an exotic location – he just dislocated them ever so slightly from their usual surroundings. The resulting photograph situates them inside their place of work, but it highlights the company’s human capital and its identity. The subjects of the photograph are clearly in medical manufacturing, but by moving away from their workstations, he told the story of the people at the company. It’s a more unique, more persuasive, and more human story.
One of the best services we can provide to our clients is to tell their story back to them differently than they tell it to themselves, with pictures or with words. Looking in a mirror every day can familiarize you with the bridge of your nose, but a content manager should be smart and brave enough to tell clients something they don’t see. There’s a lot of pressure to give a client exactly what they want, but there’s longer-lasting value in changing something ever so slightly in order to show them what they didn’t know they had.
