Aperture came to us with fourteen pages and a decade of work behind them. The site had a page for every series, every collaboration, every year — and the effect was not abundance but noise. A visitor landed in a gallery of galleries and had no idea where to look.
The photographer already knew which work mattered. Three series carried their reputation; the rest was apprenticeship and overflow. The problem was that the site treated all of it as equal, because adding a page had always been easier than deciding.
So we decided. We kept the three series, gave each one room, and let the rest go into a single quiet archive link for anyone who really wanted to dig. The home page, which had been a wall of thumbnails, became one image and one sentence. The contact path, which had been buried under “Information” and “Enquiries” and “About,” became a single clear line.
What surprised the client was how much stronger the three series looked once they were no longer competing with eleven other pages for attention. Editing the site turned out to be a way of editing the portfolio — the same discipline a photographer already applies to a contact sheet, applied to the website itself.
Fourteen pages to four. Faster to load, far easier to update, and a clearer answer to the only question that mattered: is this someone whose eye I trust? The smaller site answered it in one screen. A portfolio is an argument about taste, and an argument is always strongest when it is brief and sure of itself.