Jonathan Goldberg is a London-based portrait and reportage photographer with a passion for Sustainable Living stories and a great talent for creating contemporary, dynamic portraits.

Jonathan contacted me as he needed a hand for editing and presenting his long term project “Grow Heathrow”, a story about a small community of people living off sustainable energy and food in the outskirts of Heathrow Airport (UK); he had been working at the story for a few years, and he had troubles “seeing” the pictures with fresh eyes and creating an editing which could be descriptive and enticing at the same time.

As it often happens with long term personal projects, the number and variety of images was pretty wide, and their style would vary accordingly.

We started editing the work so that it was a bit more focused and showed off his strengths and skills in capturing real moments, especially with environmental portraits, keeping a cohesive style all through. Then we proceeded to sequencing it for his website, giving a rythm to the whole story by making the portraits the core structure and using the great landscapes and details Jonathan had shot as “breathers”.

Shortly after the publication of Grow Heathrow’s new editing, Jonathan was awarded a grant by One Planet Living, for an assignment on Sustainable Transport to launch during Brighton Photo Biennial in October 2014.

Jonathan has been so kind to share with me his thoughts on our work together:

“During the first one to one session Raffaela whittled 150 images down to a more manageable number, before proceeding to create a web edit with a far more suitable number of images. I was surprised at the inclusion of some images, but when placed next to several of my favourite pictures, it is clear that they add much-needed breathing space into the project as a whole. I'm really happy with the final cut and sequence, as I feel it has become more coherent and far stronger despite the omission of several pictures that I was previously reluctant to lose. Her method of consulting in person, then emailing back an edit was very efficient. I also think the tone of the pictures in the final edit is strong, and contributes to the success of making them a coherent set.

Since working with Raffaela I gained an important commission on Sustainable Transport, part of the One Planet public space commission, to launch at Brighton Biennial 2014.”