LPA Student Challenges / Catching up with Andrei Nacu
LPA Student Challenge winner Andrei Nacu recently spent some time at the LPA offices, receiving some vital advice on how best to present his portfolio from Lisa and the rest of the LPA team. We caught up with him last week and here is what he had to say.
© Andrei Nacu
Tell us about what you are doing at the moment Andrei? I have just finished my MA degree in Documentary Photography at University of Wales, Newport. For my final project I have produced a photobook about my parents so I'm looking for ways in which I can improve this work and maybe self-publish it. Besides this, I'm at the stage where I'm trying to put everything together for a project that I have developed over the last year, about small family farms in South Wales. My main reason for looking at this subject in the UK was the accelerated decrease in the number of small farms which have almost halved. More and more farmers are struggling to survive as they cannot keep up with factory farming and the changing economy.
© Andrei Nacu
© Andrei Nacu
Tell us a bit about your LPA portfolio experience day. I didn't know what to expect from this experience as it was my first chance to have an inside look at an agency like LPA. It was great to have this opportunity and at the end of the day I realized how valuable this was and how much I could find out in such a short time. Everybody was very friendly and the most important thing was that the team were open to answer any of my questions. Seeing the wide range of portfolios from LPA photographers was really inspiring and gave me a push to be keen on reaching that high level of presenting my work. I would like to thank Lisa and the LPA team for all the knowledge and enthusiasm acquired from this experience.
Did you get some useful advice on your own folio and website and some good information about the industry? Meeting with Lisa Pritchard was a very enriching experience. She gave me a lot of ideas about how I can promote my work and through our talking, she confirmed many of my ideas about the industry. There are many small details that you need to know in order to break through with such strong competition in the photography market and if you don't meet a person like Lisa to help you out, it's hard to find it out on your own. Lisa advised me on how to build up my portfolio, how to present it and most importantly, how to find and approach the potential clients.
© Andrei Nacu
© Andrei Nacu
What are you plans for the future?
I have a lot of plans and ideas for this year and I hope I'll manage to do most of them. I'm keen to go back home to Romania for a while to continue several personal projects and enjoy some time with my family and old friends, after two years of living abroad for studies. I'll try to work as a freelancer, so I'm looking for editorial and corporate commissions that may help me financially to go on with the personal projects. Also I would like to find publishing opportunities for the family farms project in order to raise awareness about the struggle of this small part of community that produces the goods for the rest.
© Andrei Nacu