Max Ferguson’s Journey In Professional Photography and Photo-Editing.

Max graduated university ten years ago and is currently a photo editor for the Granta magazine, a lecturer and is also a practitioner of his own personal work.

Max’s Personal Work - ‘Whistling for owls’

Max’s personal work is called Whistling for owls, which is a quiet project and was developed throughout his masters degree. Throughout this process Max ensures that he tests with book binding, sequencing and dummy books to ensure he gets the outcome he wants for this project. Furthermore, he products his own printing company, called the opal press so that he can bind his book the way he wants it to be, has full control over this aspect.

Throughout this project Max combines images with text as this allows him to create an atmosphere as he explore the complex relationships between image and text, as this is something he is interested in also. Furthermore, to enhance this idea of the relationship between image and text, his books starts with the first half of a quote and finishes the book with the last half of the water which is interesting.

Again in this body of work Max has an interesting and unique way of sequencing for example:

Max Ferguson - Whistling for Owls.

In his book he has a page spread, on one side is an image of a cigarette and the other side is of a dry landscape, with the idea that when the page is turned the cigarette will burn the landscape.

Progressing from this project, Max is currently working on his next personal project called Deadfall.

Photo-editing

To begin his photo editing journey Max began with The Financial Times, and now works with Granta Magazines as photo-editor, in which he has a lot of control and freedom over. Granta magazine, is literature based in which he gets to work with many different people and has public Tom Duffields work before.

With this job Max gets to work with many different and different standard photographers, meaning he gets to collaborate with other photographers which is great for his network. Max however, does not participate in commissions.