WeTransfer’s commitment to photography
Inspire, Enable, Showcase
I’m always excited by the enthusiasm photographers have for WeTransfer and how they use it, what they like about our service and how we can improve. But at the same time, they always ask me: So why does WeTransfer have someone doing photography?
The short answer: Because photographers matter to us. If you’re reading this and don’t know who we are, WeTransfer is a file sharing company used by 40 million users who transfer 1 billion files every month. Of those, we know photographers make up a big proportion of our creatively-minded users.
Our aim is simple: to enable the transfer of ideas from one creative to many. To help our users to stay in their creative flow. We want to inspire, to give ideas and surprise people who use WeTransfer. Since we began WeTransfer has supported emerging artists, photographers, musicians and directors. We’ve always given away 30% of our advertising space to promote creative work we love and want to know more about.
Since 2016 we’ve been partnering with creatives to collaborate on projects that otherwise wouldn’t exist. For music, this has now led to close to 100 partnerships. We take our role seriously and not just as a service. We also see ourselves as a curator of creative work and a collaborator for one-of-a-kind projects with artists like FKA twigs, Sampha, Kamasi Washington and LCD Soundsystem.
And we do the same for photographers.
Over the last few years we’ve set up partnerships with some of the best photographers and curators out there. Since I was hired in 2016, I’ve been telling everyone I have the dream job here, because I get to collaborate with creatives whose work I love such as Akasha Rabut, Martin Parr, Emilia Van Lynden, Ziyah Gafic, Olivia Arthur and Ami Vitale, to just name a few. In partnerships with organisations such as World Press Photo, Unseen, Photo London and Magnum photos. We have experimented with different formats to show photography online, bringing to life projects such as Nadia Lee Cohen’s ‘American Worker’ and ‘The Backstage Sessions’ curated by Rankin, a video series with three legendary music photographers.
What I realised this year is we’re just getting started and we firmly believe 2018 will be even more exciting. We’re going to be doing even more to show our commitment to the photography community. Including:
- Investing significant time, resources and expertise to collaborate on passion projects that tell a story bigger than the photos alone. We want to help realize photography ideas and dreams that otherwise wouldn’t be realized due to a lack of financial, logistical or marketing support.
- Helping to develop careers by connecting emerging photographers with an audience of millions of creatives from around the world. In doing so we will be advocating diversity in hopes that this will enable photographers — known and upcoming — to connect and create things together.
- Strengthening and expanding our list of collaborations with photographers and curators to create exclusive work commissioned for WeTransfer users. I see WeTransfer.com as one of the world’s biggest online art galleries. Further our editorial platform This Works, will be undergoing significant changes to make the platform even more suitable in presenting photos, aiming to tell the stories behind the creative work we curate and create.
So, dear photographer, I hope this excites and inspires you — that you see there are different ways to get that personal project off the ground and for people to see your work. I look forward to a year of learning more about you, what you’re shooting and how we can help!
lucy@wetransfer.com
