So, I went to college and studied photojournalism at Western Kentucky University and throughout
college I did internships at newspapers.
I worked at like seven different newspapers.
At the end of that I did an internship at National Geographic Magazine and this is really
where this was in 1996.
This is really where I think I realized that I had an interest in editing.
When you're an intern at geographic at the time, the photographers were in the field
shooting slide film and legendary photographers like Bill Allard and David Allen Harvey and
Alex Webb, all photographers that I had looked up to forever were sending in raw film.
And part of the intern's job as mundane as this sounds is to stripe the film which means
you look at it, make sure it's the right side up, put them in a row and then put a black
stripe on it that the editors then drop it into a slide projector.
So while it seemed mundane, I was actually seeing every single frame that David Allen
Harvey shot, that Alex Webb shot, that Bill Allard shot and I realized like I can see
how they're working and it was a huge influence on me.
After that I worked at the Chicago Tribune for a year and then went freelance and freelancing
is tough.
You know, I mean there's, as the market changed throughout the early 2000s, assignments were
going down and I really realized that I loved other people's work much more than my own
and I was just telling your colleague that I get, it's so much more rewarding for me
to facilitate another photographer making great work than it is for me to be in the
field and I can be all over the world simultaneously.
I can have a photographer in Athens, in Syria, in Japan, all sending great work and I'm helping
them to produce great work and then publishing it and to me that meant more and what like
I said was more rewarding than if I was actually making pictures myself.
And I'm working with legendary photographers that I've always looked up to and realistically
I just wasn't, my passion lies in helping other people make great work, that's pretty
much it.
No.
Some of the best, my mentor in this business who is a very well known photo editor is a
terrible photographer and she would be the first person to tell you that.
It's not essential.
What is essential is your eye and your aesthetic and your belief in photography and your passion
for photography.
It has nothing to do with what you've seen or what you've been through in the field.
It just has to do with how you deal with people, how you relate to the photographer.
I think one thing that is important and helpful about being a photographer before you become
an editor is that you have a very realistic sense of what it's like for the photographer
in the field.
And I think that you want to get people paid quickly because you know everyone's starving,
you don't want to let invoices sit around, you want to make sure they're taken care of,
you want to try to buy their flights before assignments so they're not sitting on a huge
amount of expenses.
I mean there's little things you can do that I think having been a photographer helps me
but it's not in any way important for an editor to be a great photographer.
And I think sometimes, you know I don't even really shoot pictures anymore, I mean I make
pictures of my kid and I have some projects that I'm interested in doing but it's really
more about the people I hire.
I don't feel any political pressure at all in working at time in the United States, none
whatsoever.
Economic pressure sure, I mean the magazine industry is changing, ad sales are going down,
the magazine has shrunk over the years but like I said in my presentation that only allows
us to do greater work online which is the present, it is the future and it's you know
I think is, I really feel for Newsweek and you know ending publication at the end of
the year and going online only like you know it's a tragedy in the news industry that that's
happening and that could be the future for many publications, I have no idea but it's
not going to change the way we cover news, it's not going to change the photographers
we use, it's not going to change the quality of our work.
It's, choosing the right photographer is a huge part of the job, a lot of that depends
on their previous experience, it depends on where they've been, if they've been there
before, if they've covered similar things before especially if it's conflict, you know
I said in my presentation I would be very reluctant to work with someone that hasn't
been through proper training or had a lot of experience covering conflict elsewhere.
Getting them there is always hard, photographers are sometimes the best, you know they know
more, much more than I do, they know local fixers, many photographers are connected with
each other, there's usually someone there that we already know is on the ground, I said
I use Twitter a lot to get an idea of what the situation is like on the ground, where's
safe, where's iffy, where I want to be, where I don't want to send someone, and then it's
just a matter of logistics, you know a great part of what I do is kind of being a travel
agent in many ways, writing letters for photographers to get visas, buying plane tickets, arranging
for fixers, arranging for cars or drivers, a lot of times they're traveling with a reporter,
a lot of times they're on their own, every once in a while someone will already be there
and then call me and if it's someone I have a relationship with I'll pick them up and
put them on assignment, like with the tsunami and earthquake in Japan, I was on a plane
actually and when I landed in Paris I saw it on the news and I already had a message
from James Noctua saying he was going and I was like, excellent, you know, I mean they're
incredibly resourceful and motivated and oftentimes do my job for me in very cool ways.
You know, editing for the magazine is incredibly different than editing for Lightbox, you have
to think of it like this, you know some pictures look better at this size, some pictures look
better at this size, some pictures look better next, you know it depends on what's next
to it, where it's landing on the page, how big it is on the page, how much space we have
in the magazine, some pictures speak to each other, you just don't want to just throw two
random pictures on the page, they have to be complementary and they have to make sense.
Online you're editing, it's almost like you're editing a stack and it's picture after picture
after picture, so how they look together is less relevant than how they look after or
before one another.
A lot of it has to do with composition, even color, like the color palette of one picture
may look better before or after another.
A lot of times it depends on the gutter, which is the middle of the magazine, like if the
central subject of a great photograph is dead center, I never crop photographs and I wouldn't
want to crop and move it out of the way, but it might not work as a double truck because
they're landing right in the gutter, right into the fold.
A lot of it has to do with text, you know we often use a full spread as an opener that
has a headline on it and you want empty space for the headline, you want the headline and
that's where the art director comes in, you know that's where they're essential and the
art director I work with is amazing at making things like that work.
It allows us to really publish the amount of work and how we want to publish it and beyond
that, beyond just when I send a photographer out and they make 25 great pictures that in
the magazine I can only get six, I can publish them online, but also more people are going
to see it.
A lot of the photographers I work with are, you know they live overseas, they can't get
the magazine or they're in a war zone, they can't get the magazine, everybody has internet
and everyone's seeing this work and it's shared and it's spread and I think the more people
that see the kind of work we do the better, it's exactly why we do what we do, if no one's
going to see it then it becomes irrelevant at that point, so it gives us a bigger platform
for more pictures, more expression, there's room for the photographer to talk about their
experience and it's the future of really storytelling I think.
