Reciprocal, not Transactional
I've been going to the Northern Exposure conference long enough that I know the shape of the room.
It's a small get-together, just shy of a hundred people, and full of photographers whose work I respect. It’s the kind of gathering of folks who still believe seriously in the importance of what we do. The talks tend toward retrospectives, showing work, the craft, and the stakes of community storytelling. All of it is worthwhile. A fair bit of it is familiar.
In April, photographer Dr. Zun Lee changed that. He's a Guggenheim Fellow and visual storyteller who explores Black domestic life in America from deeply inside the communities themselves. He'd spent months embedded in communities in Alabama — not parachuting in for a shoot day, not building a portfolio, not pitching a grant project. Attending weddings. Sitting with families during grief. Becoming, in some functional sense, a member of the families and communities before he ever made a frame that got published.
Standing in front of us at the conference, he described his work fundamentally as: “Reciprocal, but not transactional.”
I've been thinking about that line ever since.
A Difference in Frame
The transactional exchange is clean: you hire me, I deliver files, we both move on. There's a version of that which is entirely professional and fine. The problem is that clean and fine produces a specific kind of image. It’s an image that looks like everything else in the category, because it was made the same way everything else in the category gets made.
The deliverables are still there, the invoice still gets paid just the same. What changes is what happened before the camera came up. Whether the exchange was real. Whether the subject trusted it enough to stop performing what they thought I wanted to see and just be there with me. That quality has nothing to do with technical execution. Yet it's either felt in the frame or it isn't.
I believe you can even feel it when you're reviewing selects and reels where the exposure and composition are fine, and the set is decorated well. The subject is somewhere, not just present. The person who hired out the work feels it too, even if they don't have language for what they're responding to.
What it actually requires on a shoot day is more specific and more uncomfortable than the principal indicates.
What Earning It Actually Looks Like
Most of us can't move to Alabama for two years for a single creative project. That's not my point.
The point is that Zun Lee's work is staggeringly unique — not because of technical execution or access in the press-credential sense, but because the exchange was real and the subjects knew it. You cannot fake that in post. The best light in the world won’t deliver emotional authenticity. It either happened or it didn't.
The point is that the same exchange of real presence, the subject knowing the photographer is actually there for them, scales down to a week, a day, or an hour in a stranger's living room before the camera comes up. While the timeline may vary, the practical nature of the question underneath it doesn't change.
Before the Camera
The subject who trusts the exchange and the subject who's only just tolerating it produce fundamentally different photographs. The gap between them usually gets attributed to chemistry or luck, which is a convenient way to avoid examining what we actually do in the first few minutes on location.
It starts before the camera comes up. I've learned to treat the first stretch of any shoot as listening time NOT running through the shot list in my head. I’m actually paying attention to who's in the room and what they need from the day ahead. I see way too many photographers give the reassurance of “Don’t worry, it won’t be bad,” which anchors the interaction in something inherently negative. I just want to give honest information about what we're doing and why.
Brand and agency shoots are the easiest place to skip all of this. The call sheet rewards moving fast and either staying on schedule or getting ahead. Maybe the subject is a professional, and they've been on camera before. They know their marks, and won’t freak out under the array of lights and grip gear. That familiarity makes it tempting to go straight to the transaction, and it's usually where the gap between someone performing and someone actually present is most visible in the final work. Most clients don't know the difference until they're sitting with the selects, wondering why nothing feels natural.
The move is giving something before taking anything. On a call sheet with forty-five minutes at a location, that's not always possible. I've started treating whatever time I actually have as the only thing that matters before the camera comes up.
Which is a reasonable principle until you look at what the industry actually rewards.
The Floor
The embedded documentary photographer has months. The editorial portrait photographer has a half-hour in a hotel lobby. The brand content shooter has a call sheet and a client on-set who needs fifteen setups by day's end. These are different relationships to the question of what you owe the person in front of your camera.
The question I've started building into pre-production is what this subject actually needs from the exchange to fully show up. Not what the brief needs from them. That question changed how I run prep calls, how I think about location scouts, etc
The Ones Worth Keeping
Transactional client relationships often have a specific feeling after the invoice clears, like a kind of mutual relief that the exchange is over. *sigh* Both parties got what they came for. Nobody's building anything. Nobody’s focused on making better work the next time around.
The relationships that have turned into something real (repeat projects, referrals, actual creative partnership, and brainstorming) started differently from the transactional ones. The client called well before the project brief was solid and wanted to know what I thought. We could dig in hard as creative equals and I could be real with them when something wasn't working, days and weeks before shoot day rather than after in the edit. In reciprocal relationships, creative risk gets shared collaboratively in the process, becoming something my clients and I are both carrying together.
Here's the uncomfortable version of this: those relationships don't happen because you're likable or professional or deliver on time. They happen because, at some point, you made a move that was not purely self-interested, like flagging a problem that cost you something to bring up, pushing back on a concept that would have been easier just to execute, or giving the client an honest read instead of a reassuring one.
A brief that asks for genuine emotion from non-professional subjects, handed to a crew with a single shoot day and a long call sheet, is asking for two things that don't fit in the same container. There have been plenty of those jobs where everyone absorbed that conflict quietly, but were left without a way to do anything about it. Eventually, I got better at bringing it up, not as a complaint per se, but as a read of what the brief actually requires to deliver what the client is asking for.
The relationships that grow into something real tend to have a particular moment in common, where someone said something that would have been easier not to say. An assumption of reciprocity can have a real short-term cost, but as they say in relational therapy:
“We don't just have difficult conversations in relationships; difficult conversations are the relationship.”
The Other Side of It
Most photographers who talk about authentic connection are performing it. I know because I've performed it.
Most photographers who talk about authentic connection are performing it. Be honest, we’ve all done it once throughout our career. The spec project dressed up as genuine curiosity that was really just a portfolio gap. The documentary pitch framed around community impact that was actually about career trajectory. What distinguishes it for me is the internal monologue during the shoot and what the focus really is on: the gap this fills in my work or the complexities of the person in front of me?
The question I started asking myself I’d recommend interrogating in your own work is: What did the subject actually receive from the exchange beyond being photographed? Not what we hoped they felt, what they actually got. A release form and maybe a few selects is just the barter system by a different name
I've had art buyers tell me they can smell this in a portfolio review. It has a quality of performance in the work, a slight glassiness to the subjects' eyes, a composition that's elegant but somehow disconnected. Reciprocal work looks different in a way that's hard to specify technically. The transactional version has correct exposure and nothing behind the eyes.
None of which solves the actual problem: the market doesn't particularly care.
What It Actually Runs You
Tight timelines, content volume, rate pressure… the practical conditions of most commercial work push steadily toward transactional. It's what happens when the variables that get measured are speed and deliverable count. The variables that don't get measured are trust, presence, and what the subject actually felt about the exchange. The incentive structure is easy to see and points in the opposite direction of everything in this essay.
Operating this way is an economic argument that some folks will never value. Some client relationships stay transactional because that's what the client wants, and pushing past it can read as difficult rather than considered. Some months have a real dollar cost to this way of working creatively. The question I keep coming back to isn't whether the argument is right. It's whether I can sustain it long enough for the right clients to find it.
The commercial market is about to make that question more urgent. AI can produce technically excellent, emotionally hollow images at zero marginal cost and the waves of the tsunami are only just hitting the shores. The work that isn't competing with that are images and video with an actual relationship underpinning it.
Work made this way tends to generate the next thing worth doing. Whether it does that fast enough to matter financially depends on where you are in your practice. Whether that compounds fast enough to matter financially is a question each person has to answer for themselves.
Why You Make the Thing Nobody Hired You to Make
Personal projects are not a portfolio strategy. When they are, you can tell.
The spec campaign that was built to attract a specific client. The personal doc project that’s timed to a grant cycle. The fine art series that conveniently fills an aesthetic gap in your commercial work. It's practical, and most photographers do it, but it's not reciprocal work. It's transactional work without a client yet.
The personal projects that changed my practice were made out of genuine interest in something outside my lane and the difference is usually visible from the outside. ‘Roger; Restored’ is the clearest example I can point to recently: a short documentary about an elderly art restorer filmed in rural Wisconsin years before I had any plan for it, recovered from an archive, finished because the story deserved to be finished. Simply put, it was me caring about something that wasn't going to pay me.
What You Give First
In every relationship worth having, with a subject, a client, or a community I'm photographing, it’s been incumbent to extend trust before it was earned, presence before it was welcomed, and care before it was returned.
That's a choice about the kind of practice one builds. It's also just the work before the camera comes up, before the invoice, before any of the outcomes you're actually hoping for come to pass.
Zun Lee went to funerals in Alabama before anyone published a single frame. There was no client relationship it was building toward. He was just paying attention to something that deserved it, and the work that came out of it is unquestionably powerful in a way that has nothing to do with the technical execution.
That's the gold standard. Most of us won't meet it at that scale (nor do we need to).
What we’re left with is the choice to set our own standards and stay true to the work that demands the most of us personally.
