A portfolio demands more than just strong material

I have been studying at DMJX for just over half a year. In that time, probably dozens of photojournalism projects have rotated through the ground floor. Students display them there, using the space as a small gallery so that other students, and perhaps even random visitors who happen to walk into the building, can see what they are making. I always stop, look, and read. And of course, whether I mean to or not, I judge. 

I think it happens almost automatically. Usually, I see a particular piece and think, “Everything is working together here — the photography, the text, the caption, the layout. This person will go far. This is a strong part of their portfolio.” 

But, honestly, sometimes the opposite happens. The photographs are strong, genuinely strong, but next to them sits a text that simply does not match their level. I would bet it was either generated in ChatGPT or written in a rush. But by putting something like that in a portfolio, you may be making a mistake. 

THE WORD ‘PORTFOLIO’ has become a trigger for me. I have read quite a few pieces published in Illustreret Bunker, and I can see that, for many students at DMJX, the word ‘internship’ carries a similar charge. But honestly, ‘portfolio’ scares me more. An internship procedure at least sounds like something that will happen later. A portfolio, by contrast, is something I am supposed to have already, now, to get that internship. And that is exactly what I do not yet have in the form I would like it to have. 

Of course, there is a great deal of chance involved in getting an internship, a great deal of unfairness, and a great deal that lies beyond our control. But I still think the best spots go to those whose portfolios are defined not simply by beautiful standalone pieces, but by a certain internal coherence. When everything within a single story works together at the same level, you, as an editor or future employer, immediately understand: this person does not just know how to shoot, write, or edit; they know how to be exacting and put together a high-quality journalistic product as a whole. 

AND THIS IS where I come to the most uncomfortable part of my argument. I think we often lose not because the school did not give us a chance, and not even because the market is brutal. We lose because we do not push things far enough. We produce a good photo story and then suddenly stop being equally demanding about the text that goes with it, deciding that the visual part was already enough. Or vice versa. At the final stage, we think: this part can be more simple. Here I can generate a description in ChatGPT, tweak it a little, and that will be enough, because the main part, it seems, has already worked out. 

And I do not want to present myself as someone with a sticker “ban AI” on the laptop. That would be, honestly, unfair, because I use ChatGPT a lot myself. It is obvious why, at some point, you want to hand the caption, the intro, the description, the summary, whatever over to the chat and simply get the task done. But for a portfolio to be genuinely competitive, we need to be able to work across several modes at once and, more importantly, to bring those skills together at an equally high level so that what emerges is a coherent journalistic product. 

I STUDY AT DMJX in the Erasmus Mundus Journalism programme, and for us the question of internships became relevant as early as the beginning of November. At one point, a friend of mine who was looking for an internship as a writing journalist happened to show me her portfolio. It was a Tilda website where she had collected her best work. And there was a separate tab called ‘Photography’ where she had uploaded everything she had shot. At the time, that struck me as almost strange, in a good way. It was as if, for the first time, it had occurred to me that this, too, could matter to a future employer, even if you are not applying for an internship that specifically involves photography.

AND FROM THAT follows a reason why, I think, we so often fail to push our work all the way. Many journalism students simply do not have a strong example in front of them of what a good portfolio actually looks like, or of how to communicate coherence both within a single piece and across the portfolio as a whole. I do not feel entirely entitled to advise DMJX, but I would still like us to be taught how to frame journalistic work as part of a portfolio. Because what we have now is this portfolio mindset, where all journalism students are fully aware of how important a portfolio is, yet we still seem to lack the academic grounding and concrete successful examples that might make this word feel a little less anxiety-inducing. 

THE SAME DYNAMICS plays out among students themselves. “Can I see your portfolio?”, “Oh, could I get the link to your website?”, “How have you structured it?”

I have asked these questions many times. And almost every time, they were accompanied by a strange awkwardness, as if we were asking not for the link to a public website, but for access to something personal. And here I cannot help but think of a piece published here earlier about how friends and classmates gradually become competitors. It really is a very fine line, and sometimes that tension appears even between close friends. 

THERE IS ALSO a second reason, which I do not particularly enjoy writing about, because I recognise myself in it. The quality of a portfolio is one of the things we can control. Unlike internship rules, leadership decisions, programme structure, the state of the market, the school administration cannot step into your own project. And even if, in some sense, it is comforting to hold on to that thought, it is still very difficult to admit that, right now, I am fully responsible for the quality of what I am showing. At least for me, that often becomes a barrier. If I can tell myself that the problem lies in external conditions, I feel a little lighter. But as soon as it becomes clear that this part depends entirely on me, fear appears. And that is exactly why the conversation about portfolios matters more than the conversation about internships. An internship, at least, can be discussed as a system. 

I WOULD REALLY like the school to talk about portfolios in more concrete terms, to explain what they can look like, what should not be overlooked, and why even a photojournalist cannot treat the text as an afterthought. I would also really like there to be a little more openness among students, because now this topic is surrounded by anxiety and competition at the same time. And as a result, all of us are trying to reinvent the wheel on our own. 

But even if the school changes nothing, my conclusion remains the same. A strong portfolio requires more than just talented photographs or texts. A strong portfolio is one that shows that, even if you are not perfect at everything, you are attentive to every element. And that, it seems to me, is something we should be learning no less than everything else.