John Offenbach does it. George Logan and Nick Ballon do it. Nadav Kander says it’s the only thing he does. It’s personal work and, they say, it’s the best way to get commercial assignments.

Logan’s recent shoot for the Born Free Foundation, for example, was commissioned by ad agency WCRS after its creatives saw two of his personal projects. The campaign features various animals whose habitats are in danger of disappearing, depicting them as homeless living on the streets of London, harking back to Logan’s self-assigned series on gorillas and a wider project, Translocations, in which wild animals were digitally transplanted into Scottish landscapes.

“The guys at WCRS saw my work and we started talking,” says the photographer. “It showed them that I can work with animals, and that I can produce seamless Photoshopping. And it also showed the look and feel of the kind of work I can produce.”

Offenbach, meanwhile, was on a commission in Dubai when I caught up with him, shooting pictures for Armani that were inspired by a personal image in his portfolio. “Giorgio Armani pointed to a single shot and said, ‘This is it’,” he says. “It was an architectural shot but more important was the lighting and colour. This job refers back to that.”

For Nick Ballon the flow of ideas and commissions moves back and forth. For example, he spotted the ideal location for a personal shoot while on a corporate portrait commission in Ford’s factory in Essex. He asked his contacts for permission to come back, and the resulting project ended up on the front cover of Creative Review’s photo annual last year, which in turn won Ballon more work. “I don’t have two sides to my work,” he says. “I only get commissions that are relevant to what I want to do. I’ve developed a strong style so people commission me for that kind of work. I’m not a generalist. Only desperate people do anything.”

Nadav Kander scoffs at the very idea of personal work. “I hate the term,” he says. “What is any work I do? There is no difference in my photography except that I do some on my own and some in collaboration with other people. Would you ask Chuck Close if he did personal work?” Despite this, he concedes that his project Yangtze, The Long River, which won the Prix Pictet last year, did help him win the HSBC ad he’s just finished shooting.

“It reminded them [the ad agency, JWT] that I’m a landscape photographer,” he says. “Ads are always in pursuit of what art is doing.”

George Logan
George Logan has been shooting commercial work for 20 years now, and has seen art directors’ tastes change over the years. When he started out, he says, ad agencies wanted the assurance of experience, and wouldn’t commission photographers unless they’d shot half a dozen campaigns already. Now they’re after personal work, as his experience with WCRS demonstrates.

Even still, he shoots his personal projects for fun. “It has to be heartfelt or it feels like going through the motions trying to produce things other people might like,” he says. “The projects I’ve shot that have meant something to me have always led to commissions. Shooting gorillas in Africa was something I’d wanted to do for a very long time.”

Logan divides his time evenly between personal and commissioned work, taking three or four trips a year to do his own thing. He’s not afraid to invest in his own projects either. Translocation, which won an AOP Gold award in 2005 and is now being published as a book, entailed 10 trips to Scotland and another 10 to South Africa, plus assistants and extensive retouching work. “I don’t feel under pressure about money because I’ve found it does eventually pay off,” he says. “I put in whatever it takes. Finding the time can be more difficult, but that’s got easier since the recession. The only thing that’s hard is beating yourself up because you feel it has to be the best thing you’ve ever done.”

Logan always has projects on the go, and is currently working on eight different ideas. He’s often inspired by personal experiences: Translocations was inspired by childhood fantasies, for example, which blurred his Scottish roots with memories of Born Free. Another project focuses on Red Road, the notorious Glasgow housing estate. The only thing he doesn’t do is look at other photographers’ work, because he doesn’t want to repeat their ideas he says. Once he’s got an idea going he does two or three test shoots, and will abandon or rethink a project if these tests don’t go well. He’s currently trying out approaches to a series exploring CCTV, for example, but says he hasn’t cracked it yet.

Having finished his project, he makes “great efforts” to get it out there, entering competitions, putting the folio on his website, putting together exhibitions and getting the images into the ad agencies. It can be tough going sometimes but it’s been worth it, and the last time he had an exhibition, two of the guests at the opening night asked him to take on an assignment. And, he says, this kind of investment becomes even more essential in a tough economic climate, when sometimes he’s pitching with quotes against 11 other photographers. In other words, it pays to stand out.

John Offenbach
“I always take pictures for me, not anyone else,” says John Offenbach, who has shot for clients such as American Airlines, BMW, Air France and The Washington Post. “I don’t try to prepare personal work to get commissions. For me, doing work that really turns me on always turns out best. I think ad agencies like that sense of application.”

The self-taught photographer started out assisting Nadav Kander and says he learnt the
importance of personal work from his old boss. “Architecture and landscape feed into the ads I shoot, but the good art directors like to see your personal work,” he says. I just take pictures I’d like to hang on the wall.”

Offenbach doesn’t commit to long-term personal projects, he just does his own thing wherever he goes, taking himself off before and after commissioned assignments to explore with his camera. But through this he’s developed a signature style that’s evident in all his work, which is exactly what art buyers at ad agencies are looking for.

“I don’t want to go for just any job that comes up,” he says. “When I first started I didn’t want to be pigeonholed, so I had a very broad portfolio. In some ways that was good at the beginning, but in the long run it wasn’t.”

His approach to personal work also shows clients he can evolve ideas, he adds, reassuring them that he can take a commission and improve it, no matter how tight the brief (and in these tough times they are often very tight). The galleries on his website are divided into two rough halves, one personal and the other commissioned, but he says he’s never really sure where art directors have seen his work. “Sometimes they approach me after a recent project, at other times it’s something I did two years ago,” he says. “They’ll come to me with my own images in a layout.”

Nick Ballon
“I wouldn’t say personal work is always an essential,” says Nick Ballon. “My commercial work is often referenced in tearsheets when people commission me. But it helps you develop a personal style, which means you can direct the commissions you get. I often work with the art director on the brief, rather than just being brought in at the end and told what to do. That way it’s more collaborative.”

This has meant that his commercial projects have fed into his personal work as well as the other way around. For instance, he shot his own work at the Ford factory in Dunton, Essex after going to the plant to shoot a corporate portrait assignment. He says there’s little difference between his commercial and personal work, and he tries to build the same lighting and look in both. Perhaps surprisingly, being this specific ensures he’s commissioned quite widely, often for projects only loosely based on previous work. On a recent shoot for Ferrari, for example, the art director referenced the style and palette of a project he’d shot focusing on small details, even though the commission was to photograph portraits. “They picked out something quite obscure,” says Ballon. “It was the atmosphere, not the subject matter, that inspired them. I always try to keep my colours and post-production consistent. A lot of my commissioned portraits have a very natural feel.”

Ballon does personal work “as often as possible”, but he always thoroughly researches projects before he starts them, looking at a lot of images and taking reccies. He will sometimes abandon an idea at this stage, and by the time he starts shooting has a pretty good idea of how the final image will look. He even gives himself a brief. “I used to go in like a bull in a china shop but it’s not the best way,” he laughs. “It’s a waste of time and money. I enjoy putting the work in and preconceiving the project.”

Once he’s finished he contacts magazines and newspapers to try and get editorial, either publishing personal projects he’s already completed or using them to get editorial work. It doesn’t pay well, he says, but the publicity is invaluable. A cover for The Guardian Weekend magazine got him into The Telegraph and The Times, for example, while his Creative Review Photography Annual cover got picture editors both sides of the Atlantic to sit up and take note. “I got access to people I hadn’t met before,” he says. “Picture editors were suddenly answering my emails faster.”

Nadav Kander
“Some work I do on my own, other work is collaborative, but it’s all my photography,” says Nadav Kander. “I’ve done my own work since I was 16 and that work informs my commercial projects.”

The Israeli-born photographer is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading ad shooters of the past two decades, shooting for Nike, Mercedes, Air France and Absolut among many others, but it’s his personal and editorial commissions that have taken centre stage of late. His portraits of Barak Obama’s interim team administration, originally shot for The New York Times Magazine, were turned into a major exhibition last year, and his personal project on the Yangtze River won him the Prix Pictet and the wider attention of the art world. It was also directly responsible for him getting the HSBC’s forthcoming ad campaign, but he says, he didn’t shoot it for that reason. “That’s not my driving force. If anything, I do my commercial work so that I can shoot my own projects.”

Accordingly, he doesn’t make great efforts to get his personal projects out there – as he points out, he didn’t enter the Prix Pictet, he was nominated for it. He just posts them on his website and lets his agent look after that side of things, relying on the strength of the work to do his talking for him. In fact, he’s something of a living advertisement for the good life, spending a third of his time on commercial work, a third on personal projects and a third with his family – he was just about to go to the States for three weeks for a personal project when I caught up with him, and after that had some time with his kids planned. Of course he can afford to be relaxed about his commercial work because he’s so successful at it, but it’s also got to do with his mindset. Even for him the last couple of years have been tough, he says, with ad shoots shorter and considerably less well funded than they used to be.

He takes it in his stride. “It’s a good time to do my own work,” he says. “The hardest thing is coming up with projects ideas because I’m a very intuitive photographer a lot of the time. All my work is basically about humankind and what it’s doing to our planet, so I may start exploring and find nothing for three days. Then I’ll find something that
excites me and my course will be set. It’s something I find I need to do, but that’s not to say that I prefer doing it to my commissioned work. Work that’s not collaborative can be lonely, and it’s much more introspective.”