This past week I’ve been reminiscing on my recent trip to Argentina’s Puna region, that I have been photographing now for close on to a decade.

It was interesting hearing the group’s opinion about the landscape. The biggest impression I heard from them was of the variety of different landscapes that they saw. For instance, we visited a really beautiful sand dune complex on one morning which yielded some very nice new images (if my films turn out to be as good as I hope they are).

It was a reminder to me that my portfolios of what I end up showing from my travels are always going to be a subset of what I encountered. No matter how hard I work at trying to capture what I’m seeing, the final results that I publish will always be a skimming of the surface of what I saw.

There is a natural process of reduction: first we filter down our travels by choosing not to photograph certain scenes. Then we go through a further refinement or reduction by reducing down the set of images we shot to the ones we think are decent. In the process of working towards showing others our best work, we omit images because they fall short in some way. Either the compositions are weak or the light is not good. Either way, we inevitably reduce and reduce what we encountered into a very small subset that simply cannot convey what was encountered and experienced.

Then there is sylistic reduction. In an effort to make the work more cohesive, sometimes this may result in collecting images that are more focussed on working together as a set, rather than being a full documentary on what was there. In fact, when I think about this more, I have a strong feeling that tight portfolios are at odds with variances in the landscape, as my set of images from my visit to the Puna in 2022 may convey:

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In the above set I more or less reduced down a 10-day tour to a few key locations. The decision was mostly due to me looking for things I’m drawn to as a stylistic motif. I think I have not been interested in documenting a landscape for a very long time now.

Yes, there is much more to shoot in the Puna. Yes, there is little room for variance in my portfolios. I know this to be true. It’s just that one has to weigh up which is most important. Do you focus your final output on documenting what one saw, and risk losing a sense of stylistic sensibility to the work? Or does one focus on conveying a tight style, but do so at the risk of abandoning all the variety one saw of a place?

The choice is ultimately a personal one for each of us, and there is no right or wrong. Just a personal preference for one over the other. But this does assume that you’ve thought about this conundrum or are at the very least are aware of it.

So perhaps this is something that you should ask yourself about your photography:

“what is it that I am trying to do?

Are you trying to work towards finding and honing a sense of individualistic style in your work?

Or are you more interested in trying to document all that you experienced?

I have a very strong feeling that both cannot exist together in a portfolio. If they do, then I would expect compromise to feature largely in the final work. Which would ultimately weaken the final output.

So which is it for you? I know for me that I am more interested in developing a style in my work, and for that reason, any hope of documenting all that I saw, was abandoned a long time ago. But that’s just me. What about you?