Internal communications, branding and corporate reporting all benefit from photography. Brittany Golob examines the world of corporate photography

When photographer Toby Smith became interested in photographing energy assets across Great Britain's most remote landscapes, he found that access, above all else, was the inhibiting factor. After determining that most of Scotland’s renewable energy production sites are owned by SSE, he approached the company to inquire whether it would employ a photographer in a corporate capacity. Thus was the origin of the Renewables Project, a dual personal and corporate project undertaken with the support of Getty Reportage, an arm of Getty Images. Smith says,

“I went straight to their communications director and effectively told him what I wanted to do with the story. I told him his branding was really boring within the type of industry he represented. I was visually fascinated by the sites and I wanted to tell that story. I said he should fund it. In exchange I would allow them to associate with the work and allow them editorial selection.”

Serendipitously, the comms director was an amateur photographer who understood the benefits of having a professional photographer highlight sites that had previously gone unseen. Smith spent three months accruing a bank of images from which SSE could illustrate annual reports, internal communications and marketing collateral. The remaining images became editorial property of Smith and Getty Reportage, who have since sold the project to a number of publications.

The phrase ‘corporate photography’ evokes a banal, even cliché serious of images of office meetings and conference room functions. In practice, corporate photography can show a side of the company that most audiences cannot access. Just as Smith gave SSE a literal view from the top of a windmill, so too can corporate photography exemplify a company’s brand, personality, internal culture or assets in a visually compelling manner.

Getty Reportage, a five-year-old entity within editorial photography behemoth Getty Images, provides editorial support and leverage for photojournalists while simultaneously catering to companies seeking high-quality photographers.

Vice president of Getty Images Aidan Sullivan says, “Knowing how difficult it is in this market to get assignment works for traditional photojournalis, we try and take those very well-known, experienced photographers and present them to a corporate market. What we've found is when clients see the level of expertise of hte photographers we represent, they clearly get very excited."

This arrangement gives photojournalists entreé to otherwise inaccessible sites, like China’s renewable energy infrastructure, but also provides the photographer with a body of work available for editorial use and allows the commissioning company a unique and exclusive communications tool.

The use of photography for corporate communications has not been revolutionary since Lewis Hines and the rest of America’s New Deal photographers clambered onto the steel girders of skyscrapers or delved down into mines to photograph industry during the Great Depression.

In today’s recession, corporate photography is equally important. It enables a company to draws its audience into the subject on a personal and relatable level. Joe Hale, head of corporate branding and communications says of The Soldier’s Charity rebrand’s use of photography, “We wanted the imagery to have a sincerity and a grit to it. It’s human and it’s striking, it gives communications a punch and expresses a serious message about incredibly emotional and very human conditions.”

Similarly, Steven Taylor, MD of Raw, a Mancunian design studio, says of the use of photography in the Wolverhampton Wanderer’s recent rebrand, “We wanted to do something that was much more authentic and that told the true story of Wolverhampton and of Wolves fans at the matches and outside of matches. You can see that Wolverhampton touches people’s lives.” They enlisted the services of photography studio, SM2 to photograph fans in their homes, around Wolverhampton and at Molineux Stadium. The results are striking and, according to Matt Grayson, Wolves’ head of communications, “give people a good sense of who we are and what we stand for.”

While photography can evoke a sense of shared humanity while engaging the audience with the brand, it also has the capability of exemplifying the organisation’s core message. If that means fostering a football club’s fanbase or harnessing the power of nature for an energy provider, for the Bank of Scotland that equates to reconnecting a brand with its history and traditional audience to regenerate the business after years of detachment.

When the Bank of Scotland was decoupled from its parent company in 2011, a brand launch was rung in by a photo competition called “Slice of Scottish Life.” Eithne Anderson, head of marketing communications at Lloyds and Bank of Scotland,

says “The ambition was to add a contemporary, empathetic and energetic feel to our brand that would reach out to people the length and breadth of Scotland. Photography was key to this ambition as it has the ability to bring an insightful headline to life and convey a message in a very genuine, authentic and natural way.” Street photographer Matt Stuart handled the professional shoots, but the contest

was populated by contributions from amateurs. Photography, Anderson says, enabled the brand to establish a distinctive tone of voice. The bank has vastly improved its awareness, a phenomenon largely credited to the photography campaign. Photography is often used to support a rebrand, as was the case with the British Safety Council. The Safety Council’s rebrand, which primarily featured graphically-dominant illustrations for its external audiences, retained a strong photographic element. The organisation built up an image library to ensure both a consistency of tone throughout the rebrand but also to lend clear guidelines to the use of photography so that new work could be added in future. Chief executive Alex Botha says, “With a complex set of stakeholders and set of messages what you need is a brand that’s quite flexible but also needs to be coherent and consistent, the graphic devices and photography help with that.” Designer Carina Hinze says this was pursued by ensuring a consistent look and feel to the photos used in the rebrand.

The British arm of a Danish professional services provider, Falck Safety Services, uses gritty, high contrast and jarring photos in its branding. The organisation provides services that could be represented in an exceedingly dull manner. Instead, it employs a series of photographs that imply the activity in which they are representing, but project an image of trustworthiness, strength and support. With just a few images, the company has been able to create a visual identity for itself while also enforcing its brand’s personality.

Branding and rebranding is thus bolstered by the use of photography, but it must be properly integrated into the strategy of the rebrand in order to achieve its maximum effectiveness. Andrew Dobbie, founder of Made Brave, a Glaswegian design, branding and photography agency, says that coherence is not only essential for communications but also appealing to the client. “A successful brand is one that you can identify once you see the photography,” he says. When effectively integrated into the story of the brand, high-quality photography can become a stand-in for logos and wordmarks, as was the case with the Green Energy Awards which not only adapted their logo from but also used as an brand icon Dobbie’s time-lapse photographs of a green ball of light.

Smith’s work for SSE reflected the issues at play in most examples of corporate photography. He highlights aspects of the business that had previously gone unaddressed – the technical, industrial power and beauty of SSE’s physical assets. A coherent body of work, he says, “made them look really big and substantial, weighty and organised, whereas fragmented photographers’ work in different locations made it feel fragmented and different.” The company was appreciative of Smith’s efforts to draw its assets together and eventually used about 30 images in full bleed across its webpages. An additional few dozen were used in the annual report.

The fact that these photographs are typically taken by professional photographers or journalists allows companies to attain high-quality work while simultaneously ensuring a unique perspective of their organisations, Smith says. This is a benefit to the photographer as well. Sullivan notes, “What may start off as a corporate commission can grow and become something very important editorially. That becomes a perfect marriage of the two. Editorial photographers working in a corporate space tend to be incredibly passionate about what they do. They’re approaching it as their heart and soul and the client always appreciates that.” From steel and iron works in New York in the 1920s to wind farms and nuclear power in Scotland in the 2010s, corporate photography allows companies a unique asset to use in their communications and produces a compelling visual experience for their audiences.