What is Editorial Photography? A Maine Photographer Goes Deeper.
I used to think editorial photography was something else. Until very recently, when I realized that giving myself a brief — a photographic project — and setting out to make it work was what I’d been doing all along.
Once I had that word, I went looking for more. Figured if “editorial” was sitting there unclaimed the whole time, there had to be others. Turns out there’s a whole shelf of them: observational, candid, vernacular, humanist, social documentary, concerned photography. I went through the list expecting more of what happened with editorial — that click of oh, that’s me.
Mostly what I found was a thesaurus.
Different decades, different critics, same basic act: point a camera at real life, don’t stage it. The words changed more than the work did. Claiming all of them would’ve been claiming volume, not claiming anything true, so I left most of the shelf where I found it.
One almost fit. Embedded. That one’s its own post — turns out it doesn’t quite fit either, and figuring out why took longer than editorial did.
Here’s what editorial actually means, once you strip the magazine off it: photography made to support a story. Someone else’s story — a publication’s, a brand’s, a business owner’s. Not a product shot. Not a wedding album. A visual record built to run alongside words, carrying a specific angle instead of a complete one.
The mechanics are nearly identical to documentary work. Natural light. Real environments. A small, curated sequence instead of a comprehensive record. A clear point of view running through every frame. The only real operational difference: who’s asking, and why.
I came up the other way around. Street photography first — quiet, patient, no posing, no second takes. Then live music, because a friend asked. Then businesses, because they kept saying yes. None of that ever felt like an assignment. It felt like documentary work that happened to have a client attached.
Turns out that’s not a contradiction. That’s life teaching you what you need to know, when you need to know it.
A business profile. A maker’s process. A feature on a place that’s been around longer than the people writing about it. Every one of those is an editorial brief, whether or not anyone called it that out loud.
For a Maine business or brand, the practical difference is this: editorial photography is built to be read alongside a narrative, not to stand alone as a product photo. It’s the photography you want when the story is the thing being sold — not the object.
If that’s what you’re after —
Or read the Old Orchard Beach Airbrush field entry first. That’s the method in practice.