I also recognize that I am a hypocrite. I’m a photographer and my spouse is an actress. We live a nice middle-class lifestyle, but given our druthers neither of us would choose for our son to follow in our footsteps. That said, we would both support him in any career choice he made, even if that involved riding horses and herding cattle.

For artists, money is a means to an end. The goal of an artist is to create; money is simply a tool towards that goal, or (if there isn’t enough) an obstacle to be overcome.

If life were all about money it wouldn’t be very interesting, which might explain why so many wealthy investment bankers and hedge-fund managers spend so much money on collecting and supporting the arts. The world needs inspiration as much as, or more than, mere sustenance.

The allure for most young aspiring photographers is the stereotype as we are portrayed in movies and fiction. It’s a romantic image: we are dashing and brave, we travel all over the world, and we witness the historic events of our time. We socialize with beautiful models, celebrities, authors, and political power brokers. We create the images that define our epoch in history. We wake up every day to a new adventure. According to the Hollywood script, the lifestyle of a rock star pales in comparison.

At this point you are probably expecting me to tell you that this is pure myth, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that it’s all true. Really! Living the life of a freelance photographer is a privilege that is full of great adventures. The reward of this profession is that it dares us to be great, and demands that we are better today than we were yesterday. These are intangible perks that few other careers can match. We are responsible for our successes, failures, and the legacy of our vision. These are the rewards that make financial matters seem trivial.

Given this reality, who wouldn’t want to live the life of a photographer as Hollywood portrays us?

Hollywood doesn’t show us slogging around our portfolios, or spending sleepless nights building websites, digging through receipts for the inevitable tax audits, or calling clients who are overdue on paying their invoices. It doesn’t show how many times you are likely to be on the brink of bankruptcy. In short, Hollywood often does a pretty good job of showing the practice of being a photographer, but it never shows the business of being a photographer. It’s hard to be creative when you have no financial stability, so the creation of a fiscal foundation that supports their creative aspirations should be part of every artist’s plan.

There are a few inherent problems with the way photographers begin their careers that contribute to financial difficulties later on.

Most of us begin shooting when we are teenagers, and photography at this early stage is often very gratifying with very little formal training. In this formative phase we get a lot of positive reinforcement for adolescent work that seems very accomplished, original, and creative to us, and the people around us. This is truer than ever with the proliferation of smartphones and social networking. It would be hard for a 17-year-old with 50,000 Instagram followers not to be seduced by the idea that photography might be a pretty easy way to make a living and have fun. There’s a parallel for young musicians who quickly master the three basic “cheat chords” and begin to fantasize about life as a rock star. It’s one thing to impress your friends and family, but as your career progresses it is going to get much, much harder and you may not be prepared for the level of commitment it will ultimately require.

Another factor is that every professional artist starts his/her career as an amateur. Henri Cartier-Bresson was an amateur before he ever became “Cartier-Bresson,” so were Jackson Pollack and John Lennon. Lawyers and accountants don’t start their careers as a hobby. Doctors don’t begin their profession as teenagers by setting the limbs of their friends after accidents for fun, but judging from the application portfolios I see annually, every aspiring teenage photographer has photographed a pretty girl (in a white dress in the woods), or their friend performing a trick on a skateboard.

While all artists start as amateurs, it is also vital that even after we become accomplished pros we still maintain our “profession” as a hobby. We need to continue to innovate and keep our work fresh by doing projects and personal work that don’t earn income. This means that we often find ourselves saying, “Don’t tell anyone, but I’d do this job for free”; as a consequence we often undervalue our skills, underestimate jobs, and undercharge for our work.

Photography is, for the most part, an entrepreneurial profession, but very few university photography programs provide the requisite training for graduates to become successful entrepreneurs. Business professionals love to make fun of artists and photographers for the terrible ways we run our businesses. Very few photographers ever start with a real business plan or any start-up capital to speak of. We are all amateurs until the day when we get a call, usually the friend of a friend, and they want to know if we can shoot something, a wedding, a headshot, or some photos for a website, and we do it. Maybe it goes well, and we have a happy client who refers us to someone else. Then we do another job, and another, and in a year or two we quit our day job, build a website, get some business cards printed, and before we know it we have become professional photographers.

No other business is started like this; there was never a formal business plan, no capitalization, no advertising, no branding, and no market analysis. According to every commonly accepted business practice no photographer should ever succeed.

If you went to a bank and asked for a loan to start a business that would require you to spend thousands of dollars in materials and time, and allowed your clients to pay 90 days after the job was delivered, your application would be stamped “rejected” before you finished shaking the loan officer’s hand. Yet photographers buy thousands of dollars of equipment and materials for jobs on credit cards all the time. We accept credit card debt as a “cost of doing business,” and we routinely advance money to multi-million dollar corporations, ad agencies, and magazine conglomerates at zero interest rates.

And yet, in spite of the odds against us, many of us succeed; we build careers, make enough money to support our families and spend our days doing what we love. We work obscenely hard, but it never feels like work because if it’s all going well you are having too much fun.

It’s Not About the Money, But the Money Does Matter

I doubt that anyone becomes a photographer to get rich and even if that was the goal then they are probably doomed to fail. In my professional practice I have photographed hundreds of very successful business people for Fortune, Forbes, and other publications. Successful business people are a different breed; they compete in a world where money is their way of keeping score. If net profits are up by 10 percent then they are winning, if their stock portfolio drops by a few percentage points they are a failure. If they get a raise or a promotion, it is tangible evidence of their value.

Our successes are measured in exhibitions, books, magazine pages, and memorable images.

A young photographer friend of mine recently sold a personal fine art project to a major publication. He did the project on his own dime; he saved diligently for a year from the money he earned assisting other photographers and shooting weddings on weekends. He had no thoughts of the project being a financial success, and he never even sent it to the magazine; the editors discovered it on his website when they were randomly trolling Instagram for fresh young photographers. The money the magazine paid for the rights to the project was fantastic (he was able to pay off his remaining student loans in a lump payment) but the really exciting part was the prestige of getting 15–20 pages published in one of the world’s premier magazines. The story will launch his career and open up a world of new opportunities. The financial reward is appreciable, but that’s just a side benefit to the body of work he created. He is 23-years-old and his future is very, very bright.

In fact, even when you look at the careers of the few superstar photographers who are billing millions of dollars annually it is important to remember that they didn’t achieve their financial success by being good business people. They got there by being exceptional photographers, by taking every photograph, every assignment, as a creative opportunity. If you look at virtually every great and financially successful photographer from Avedon to Liebovitz you will see that they routinely took on projects that were financially disastrous, but creatively fulfilling. These are the projects (loss leaders in business parlance) that made them inimitable and allowed them to demand top dollar for commercial assignments; advertising, and so on, where the money available is much, much greater.

Why Do We Become Photographers?

Like many photographers of my generation I became a “professional” by accident. I was just a guy who loved getting up every morning and throwing a camera over my shoulder as I walked out the door. Life is a daily adventure and making photographs enhances that adventure; the challenge of being a participatory observer of the world around you puts “skin in the game”. Photography makes life, and your place in the world a little more vibrant, and lot more meaningful.

I hadn’t considered what I’d do after college. I had no plans to make a living as a pro because I thought professional photographers were “hacks”; technicians who just made the pictures that they were paid to take, and my few experiences assisting low-level professional studio photographers only confirmed that impression. My heroes were Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans. None of them worked for magazines, or ad agencies (or so I thought); they were pure artists.

As a student I had done internships at art galleries, so after graduation I got a job at a gallery that showed photography. I loved working at the gallery so I thought I’d become an art dealer and make photographs during my free time purely for art’s sake. When I started shooting exclusively in large format color film my personal projects got too expensive to fund from my salary, and as my job became more demanding I found I had less and less time to pursue my own work. I only became a professional photographer as a more efficient way to finance my addiction to making photographs and carve out more time to pursue my personal work. Being able to deduct the expenses for my personal projects was a welcome side benefit.

The point is that like most photographers, musicians, dancers, and cowboys, I never really cared about the money. The surprising thing was that becoming a professional raised the stakes and meant that I actually had more skin in the game. It gave me access to subject matter and situations that would have been difficult or impossible without the framework of a magazine assignment, and it presented fresh challenges and obstacles that made me a better photographer in my fine-art work. It made the thing that was already the most exciting and rewarding thing in my life even more challenging and fun.

For most successful professionals it’s a two-way street: personal projects nourish your soul and reignite your enthusiasm for your work; they bring fresh ideas to your commercial practice. Clients can sense when you are just “churning it out.” This is a creative field; if you aren’t excited creatively your clients will find someone who is. You became a photographer because you loved making pictures long before anyone paid you to. You became a good photographer by experimenting and trying new things. Keeping that passion alive is necessary for your growth as an artist as well as your financial success. You can’t be a good sales person when you are bored with your own product. When you are excited about your work so is everyone else.

You don’t become a photographer to get rich; you become a photographer to make photographs and satisfy your creative needs. When you stop being a creative photographer you are short-changing the very dreams that made you become a photographer in the first place. Running a business well is simply a way to serve your creative aspirations.

The Changing Scene: When One Door Closes Another One Opens

When I speak to my room full of nervous parents at NYU I have to tell them the same hard truth I will tell you here: It’s not easy, and it never has been. Every generation of photographers has to reinvent both the medium and the business for themselves and for their place in history. The ways that photography is used in the world today is completely different from the way it was used a scant five years ago; it is changing that fast. Reinventing the medium and adapting your business to an ever-changing financial landscape is not easy, but it is absolutely necessary.

This should come as no surprise to anyone conversant with the history of photography. It has always been incumbent on photographers to be adaptable creatures. This is because photography has always been tied to science, technology, and the economic realities of society. Avedon’s reinvention of fashion photography was largely due to the advent of commercially available strobe lighting and the rise of color reproduction in magazines. The introduction of faster films, the invention of the 35 mm camera, and the rise of mass media all presaged Cartier-Bresson’s reinvention of photojournalism. The work of the F.S.A. photographers was directly influenced by the economic realities of the depression, and in fact the work by the F.S.A. photographers was forced to evolve as the United States moved towards joining the Allies during World War II.

With the rise of e-commerce there is more demand for competent/creative studio photographers than ever before. A side benefit is that many e-commerce studio jobs offer a level of financial security that past generations of photographers could only dream of.

Conversely, the decline of print journalism also means that thousands of gifted photojournalists and sports photographers (many of whom had enviable staff positions) have had to transition to wedding photography in order to pay their mortgages. One possible bright spot on the horizon is that as tablet devices replace print magazines photojournalism may be poised to make a comeback (in my opinion).

Video, the rise of the HDSLR, and multimedia production offer new creative and financial possibilities that were unheard of ten years ago.

A recurrent theme among the professionals I have interviewed for this book is that any young photographer who has not embraced video is likely to have a very tough time in their future practice. Video/motion production is here to stay and must be considered part and parcel of the contemporary photographer’s skill set.

In this chapter I’ve interviewed a few photographers who represent a cross-section of traditional areas of specialization: fashion, travel, architecture. They are all very different from each other yet there are a few recurrent themes to their respective successes:

•  They have made learning new technology a habitual part of their practice.

•  They treat every project as a creative challenge, not a job.

•  They are all working far too hard, but they don’t mind it because the work is so fulfilling.

And that’s the best part …

Case Study

DIANE COOK AND LEN JENSHEL: LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHERS

http://cookjenshel.com/

If there is a better example of two people who have more fully integrated their creative careers, financial success, and love lives in photography, I haven’t found them yet. Len Jenshel and Diane Cook haven’t just made careers as photographers, they’ve made their lives and their marriage about photography.

Nina Subin

After studying with Garry Winogrand, Tod Papageorge, and Joel Meyerowitz at Cooper Union, Len Jenshel quickly established himself as one of the most original photographers of his generation; a pioneer who was reinventing the traditional notions about color photography and its acceptance as a valid form of expression in fine art/documentary photography.

In 1980 he received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and came to the attention of the New York gallery scene with a solo exhibition at the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery. He followed this success by publishing his first monograph, Travels in the American West.

Meanwhile Diane Cook graduated from Rutgers University in 1976 where she studied with Larry Fink. After graduation she continued to work on her personal photo projects, which consisted of mainly black and white landscapes, while making her living as a photo editor at Time Inc.

Introduced by mutual friends in 1979, they were married in 1983.

In 1990, Diane left her job as a photo editor at Time Inc. and they began their first collaboration—a long-term landscape project on the volcanic landscape entitled “Hot Spots: America’s Volcanic Landscape,” which was published in 1996. The success of “Hot Spots” cemented their lifelong collaboration in the fine arts—combining color photographs by Len, and black-and-white photographs by Diane—contrasting and joining their two mediums and their individual sensibilities.

In that same year they also began collaborating on magazine assignments. Because most magazines required color photography, Diane began shooting color when they were on assignment. As collaborators they were committed to the idea that there was less difference between the fine-arts world and editorial magazine photography than most people believed—and that the story was the thread between the two. That approach has been a cornerstone to their careers, both as individuals and as a team.

Two photographs from Len and Diane’s book Hot Spots:

America’s Volcanic Landscape

Len Jenshel

Diane Cook

Len Jenshel

Two photographs from Aquarium

Diane Cook

Over the last 30 years they have continued their commercial and creative success, shooting hundreds of assignments for “A-list” magazines like Condé Nast Traveler, the New York Times Magazine, and Fortune to name a few, while also exhibiting their fine-art work worldwide. In 2003 they published their second collaborative book, Aquarium.

In 2006 they got the call that every photographer dreams of; an assignment from National Geographic to shoot the newly erected wall between the United States and Mexico. That assignment was the beginning of an ongoing relationship with the magazine that has continued to the present.

As a longtime friend, and one of their biggest fans, I’ve watched their work develop as both collaborators and individual artists. It would be a futile exercise to try and over-simplify the similarities and differences in their sensibilities here. Suffice it to say that when I look at their collaborative work it’s akin to the experience of listening to two virtuosos playing a duet: The trained ear can hear both the combined melody and the individual players at the same time.

The Wall on the U.S/Mexican Border, for National Geographic

Cook/Jenshel

Interview

MJ: So I was especially happy that you guys agreed to let me interview you for this book, because when I ask every freshman class what their ultimate career goal is, about 25 percent of them say that they want to be a National Geographic photographer.

You two are living the dream of many photographers, you get to travel the world and make the pictures you want to make. But you aren’t really the typical National Geographic photographers. Neither of you are hardcore photojournalists, nor do you have the backgrounds in science or anthropology that Geographic traditionally looks for. You’re fine-art landscape photographers. How did you manage to make that switch?

LJ: The editor who brought us into Geographic had seen our books and other stories we’ve done for Condé Nast Traveler, Audubon, Fortune—and many of the other magazines we’ve worked for. Many years later, the Director of Photography told us that we were “the sweet spot between art and journalism.” It was really great to hear it stated that way—it really put things in perspective.

DC: More than any other magazine we have ever worked for, Nat Geo has really told us, “We want what you do—we want your picture.”

LJ: When they called us for our first assignment—on the building of the wall between Mexico and the U.S.—our editor told us, “I don’t want a story on illegal immigration. I don’t want photos of Border Patrol agents, or people scaling the wall—I want you to do landscapes.” So we got to do what we had hoped for—we treated the wall as a piece of sculpture in the landscape—an icon of sorts. It was a story about a cultural landscape.

The Wall on the U.S./Mexican Border, for National Geographic

Cook/Jenshel

Night Gardens for National Geographic

Cook/Jenshel

MJ: That particular story was an assignment, but most of your stories have originated as your ideas that you’ve pitched to the magazine. Tell me about that process. Because Diane has a background as a photo editor I imagine that you have some real insight into how to pitch a story and what the process is like from the editorial side of the table.

LJ: Well the reality is—you don’t just pitch the story once—you really have to pitch it many times during the process of working on a feature for National Geographic—first there’s the pitch meeting to sell the idea, then an interim show, and then the final show and the layout.

MJ: Really? I’ve pitched lots of stories, and there is an art to it, but it’s never been that involved for the stories I’ve pitched.

DC: The initial pitch is short, like a traditional “elevator pitch.” It should be no more than one page long.

LJ: [aside] Did we mention that the best advice we have for young aspiring photographers is to learn how to do an elevator pitch?

DC: It has to be well researched and it has to be a story that is slanted towards your work in particular and you have to make sure the magazine hasn’t done the story before—and, of course, it has to be brilliant and engaging.

LJ: For example, we just got a story approved on “wise trees.” These are historically significant trees, trees that have borne witness to history; like the Emancipation Oak where the Emancipation Proclamation was first read to the slaves, and the apple tree in England where Isaac Newton first witnessed an apple falling from the tree, and thus formulated the theory of gravity.

MJ: Wow, that tree is still there?

LJ: Yes, it’s still there—and still producing apples—though not many.

DC: So the initial pitch has to be short and to the point but you also have to do enough research to be confident that if they are interested you are certain that there’s a significant story there. The first pitch is sent in and we see if they are interested.

If they like the idea, then you really have to do a ton more research and come up with a full proposal—a work plan—a line-by-line list of dates and locations. And if that gets approved, then a budget—an estimate of expenses comes next. Then that goes in for approval—and then you’re on your way.

We look at seasonal weather patterns for every location—so perhaps (for trees) you want to photograph a particular specimen with spring blossoms, one with autumn foliage, etc. We also use tools, like Google Earth, to scout locations and possible vantage points for certain shots, and we use a program called The Photographer’s Ephemeris (http://photoephemeris.com) to predict where and when the sun and moon will be rising and setting, the azimuth, where shadows will fall from surrounding buildings or mountains—at different times of the year. It is an amazing piece of software.

LJ: That program saved us on our “Night Gardens” story—when we were shooting the Italian water garden at Longwood Gardens. We wanted the moon to be centered in a shot above a fountain—and the program enabled us to predict exactly when the moon would be in that exact position.

DC: We also really watch weather patterns. On the “Night Gardens” story we obviously wanted to shoot as much as possible by the full moon so that means you have about four nights a month that are ideal conditions. If it’s raining two of those nights we’ve lost half of our shoot time.

MJ: Are you paid for the time you are researching? The process must be exhaustive. I also imagine that Diane has to be really good at this given her background.

LJ: We share the load, but Diane does have a little more patience for this part of the process. The research is a huge part of the process that most people are totally unaware of but it helps us so much once we are in the field that it’s always time well spent. Yes—Diane is great at research—and I’m the one who gets on the phone and schmoozes and sweet talks the people into giving us ample time to make “great” pictures. How many times have I heard, “Why do you need three days to photograph that—when the local newspaper came by they only needed three minutes?”

Diane Cook

Backyard of Heirloom Rose subdivision, inundated with tumbleweeds, Lancaster, CA, for National Geographic

Cook/Jenshel

DC: When, and if, the editors approve the story, we pack our bags and start shooting. When we feel like the story is about halfway complete we return to New York, process files, look at what we’ve done, and prepare another presentation for the editors in Washington on the progress of the story so far—this is called the “halfway show” or “interim show.”

MJ: Does the direction of the story ever change based on their input from that presentation?

LJ: Sometimes, but it’s usually a change that was good for us, and the story. We did a story on tumbleweeds; it was an assignment from them, not one of our ideas, and it was initially supposed to be a fairly traditional science story about the proliferation of superweeds, specifically Russian thistle in the United States. But after the editors saw our quirky approach to the story the magazine changed the editorial slant of the story to suit some of the more lyrical and humorous photos we were shooting.

DC: After the interim show, the editors meet and decide whether to continue to fund the rest of the project—either a thumbs up or thumbs down. Or they can decide to switch gears, make a large or small change, etc. (to use a sports world term—a halftime adjustment). And finally when the second half is done, we go back to Washington and do a final presentation of the whole project. This is like defending a PhD dissertation—you need to show the entire arc of the story, along with great pictures (obviously), great stories, and facts and humor and charm—nothing less. Is that stressful? You bet!

LJ: But don’t forget, this is a very specific process to National Geographic. As is also the amount of time we have to produce and shoot a story. Most magazines don’t give you nearly as much time to work on a story.

MJ: This is all a far cry from the stereotypical image the average person has of photographers wandering around the world and relying on fortune.

LJ: There’s a great quote from John Szarkowski: “And whether good or bad, luck is the attentive photographer’s best friend, for it defines what might be anticipated next time.”

MJ: Szarkowski is still my favorite writer on photography and that quote is still true. We build photographic “luck” by paying close attention to the world, the same way a gambler builds luck by studying the facial tics of the other players at the table.

MJ: The other reason I really wanted to interview you is because you haven’t just built your careers on photography, you’ve also built a marriage, a business partnership, and a collaborative body of creative work in addition to your solo projects. This is a profession that can be tough on relationships, especially when one of the people in the relationship is traveling all the time. Can you talk a little bit about that? How do you divvy up the responsibilities?

LJ: [laughing] Well, we have no kids, no pets, and all our plants are cacti—so we only have to water them every six weeks or so.

MJ: I’ve known you both for a long time and I’ve seen many bodies of work that each of you have created individually so—to a certain extent—I can separate out the work and see the individual photos that each of you are making. It’s obvious in many cases because Diane still shoots black and white for her personal work but when you are on assignment you both shoot color. How do you actually work it out when you are shooting? I guess what I’m asking is are there times when you see a situation and you know it’s more appropriate for the other partner?

DC: All the time.

LJ: [laughing] Honestly, when I can’t make a photo work I call Diane over, because if it’s not working for me, then I figure it must be a black-and-white photo. And I think the same holds true for Diane. But, don’t forget, there were the exceptions to the rule—like Kathleen Klech of Condé Nast Traveler, who not only encouraged Diane to shoot in black and white but published the black-and-white work.

DC: And just as we were talking earlier about how I might be a little better at the research and preproduction, Len is really amazing when we get into the field. He can talk his way past security guards and get people to let us camp out for hours, or even days, in a location.

When we were doing the tumbleweed story we were driving around and we could see that a particular residential backyard on the other side of a wall was inundated with tumbleweeds, so we drove around and lo and behold, there’s a woman leaving that house and getting into her car. Len jumps out from behind the wheel of our car—while it’s still moving—and runs up to the woman to ask if we can go into her backyard to make some pictures for our story. Meanwhile I’m trying to put on the brakes and stop the car …

LJ: Well of course the woman is mortified because all of her neighbors have cleaned up all the tumbleweeds from their yards and hers is still covered with tumbleweed. She certainly doesn’t want us to shoot it and she’s on her way out for dinner with friends …

DC: [continuing] … but Len talked her into it. So we get into the yard and there are all the tumbleweeds and the wagon, but the light isn’t quite right yet …

LJ: … so Diane and I take turns talking to her and keeping her occupied until the sun gets lower in the sky and then we make the photograph. It’s the double-page opener of the story—and one of our favorites.

MJ: Nice. So we were talking earlier about the difference between photojournalism and fine art and that particular picture seems to be a good segue because you mentioned that it was a homage to the famous William Eggleston photograph of the tricycle on the cover of William Eggleston’s Guide. It’s a very straight-forward photo (so to say), but it also has those layers.

LJ: When I was a much younger photographer I thought the greatest difference between photojournalism and the fine arts was that journalism was overstated and art was understated. Put another way; journalism told a story, though sometimes at the expense of hitting one over the head, while art was better suited toward fiction—and could only suggest a narrative—art being much better at metaphor.

I think of it like this: Art, at its best, is ambiguous and intuitive and instinctive—and asks many more questions than it answers.

With that said, we both came to journalism through the non-traditional back door, we came from the art world. But we wanted to find a way to combine this wonderful notion of storytelling with a bit more subtlety, a bit more ambiguity, but with much more poetry. The real goal for us is to make wonderful photographs—ones that are totally capable of a narrative—but don’t ever need a caption. Imagine that!

MJ: Right, because great photographs have layers of meaning that are created by their inherent ambiguity and when the photograph uses the caption as a crutch all the mystery is taken away. There’s a great quote from Cartier-Bresson: “The anecdote is the enemy of photography.” Traditional photojournalistic captions are often used to reduce the photograph to a single specific meaning, which might be great if you are trying to inform the public. But if the photograph is wonderful the caption can suck all the life and mystery from it, and if it isn’t a great photograph then the caption isn’t going to make it better.

LJ: Agreed! And that’s a great line from Bresson—I did not know that one.

MJ: Actually, case in point, is that we have just related two anecdotes about the stories behind two of your photographs. The purpose of this book is to demystify the lives and careers of professional photographers so I hope the stories do that for the intended audience of young photographers, but there’s no denying that the story of how you researched and planned where the moon would appear in the night-garden shot changes the photograph in the mind of the viewer. The anecdote reveals your artistic process, which is great in this context, but it does make the photograph less mysterious.

LJ: Not really—because having as much information as you can get is only a plus. You can reject that later on—or make a whole different picture you never conceptualized. But knowing exactly where and when the moon will rise can’t hurt—if you know what I mean.

DC: All true, but even with all the research we were still sweating in that garden as we watched the moon come around in its orbit. We were never really sure it was going to do exactly what we expected it to …

MJ: Or if a cloud was going to roll in and completely obscure it …

LJ: And who knows? Maybe that would have made it better … Diane’s favorite expression, “When you’ve got lemons—you make lemonade.”

DC: And then we’d all be sitting here talking about the lucky accident!

MJ: Exactly. So something that you mentioned a while back was very interesting. When you were talking about the “wise trees” pitch I was surprised that you spoke about a story you hadn’t started yet because back in the day we were never allowed to leak stories or show any photographs in advance of publication.

LJ: Yes, that’s all changed, now they want you to post photos from the trip to your Instagram feed. It generates anticipation and helps to market the magazine and create buzz around the project.

MJ: Because your followers are the potential customers/viewers once the story is published.

LJ: Right, it’s amazing, now every publisher wants to know what we are “bringing to the table,” it’s not enough to just make amazing photographs and have a great book concept. They want money, they want us to have traveling exhibitions lined up in advance, and have a deal with a corporate sponsor. The marketing of photography has gotten crazy.

MJ: It’s true, this profession has always been about shameless self-promotion because every client wants to feel that they are getting the best photographer in the world. I know that has been awkward for me personally because sometimes I can have a hard time turning it off.

But social media has taken it to a whole new level. It’s a little insane how many monthly newsletters I get from photographers, how many Facebook posts from ex-students are about the assignment they just did, and how many requests I get to contribute to fund someone’s book project through crowdfunding. I get a little turned off by it, but some people do it very well. When there’s really new work or they’re doing a significant project I’m happy to check out their site or contribute to the book project.

You know it occurs to me that through all of this I have been referring to you as “landscape” photographers, but that’s not true and I’ve actually never thought of you as landscape photographers because the tradition of landscape photography is—if you really look at it—rooted in an almost religious reverence, for the natural world in its most pristine form. Sometimes that happens, like in Diane’s “dunes” project or the volcano pictures. But more often, your work is much more about the scars, or adornment, that humans have left on the natural world.

DC: We’re interested in making photographs that address different aspects of human intervention, boundary, and the control of nature. We make photographs in the documentary tradition, but hopefully we do not make documents. We hope to create a dialogue—one between the two of us—and another between our viewers and us; a dialogue that is intuitive, lyrical, and aims for poetry.

LJ: We love art, but we also love science, and we care deeply about the environment. We love nature, but we’re also intrigued how the altered landscape is a veritable battleground on our planet. National Geographic, Audubon, On Earth (the more journalistic publications) have recognized our passion and let us run with it. All of them have blessed us with some of the most interesting assignments we have had in the last ten years.

Every story is a huge amount of work—yes it sounds like a dream—but we work so very hard on all aspects of the photos and the story. Every story comes with amazing pressure, and incredible challenges to solve. But then—we’ll find ourselves waking up in Iceland or Greenland, in some of our favorite places in the world—and we’ll have to pinch each other, just to make sure we aren’t dreaming.

Case Study

KRISTIINA WILSON: FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER

http://kristiinawilson.com/

For many young photographers a big-time career in fashion photography is the ultimate Hollywood dream. A lifestyle filled with beautiful people, exotic locations, sweet cars, and fat paychecks. While I’m sure there are photographers out there who are living that dream, I haven’t met one yet, and I’ve met some pretty big-time fashion photographers.

To be sure, some of the stereotypes are true. You do get to travel, but what they don’t show in movies is that once you get to Morocco, Cancun, or wherever, you have to get up at 4 a.m. in order to be ready to shoot by dawn. Then in the evening, when all the models, stylists, and editors are at the bar you are in your hotel room on the computer, retouching, estimating, emailing, and negotiating for the next job. Fashion photography in practice is a huge amount of hard work that has to look easy and fun, because that’s the illusion that magazines and advertisers are trying to sell.

More than any other area of specialization fashion photography requires that you are constantly working on creating fresh content. A great landscape or portrait might be able to sit on your website for years, but last year’s fashion is so … “last year.” Maintaining a career as a fashion photographer requires that you are constantly testing, shooting, thinking, and reinventing the wheel.

Being a professional photographer is entrepreneurial by nature, and this ability to “invent ourselves” is one of the primary attractions of the profession. Kristiina is an interesting example of someone who has truly invented herself. She never had a mentor in the traditional sense, and just “made it up as she went along”; an approach that has its pitfalls, but also allows certain photographers to invent their careers without the preconceptions and poor practices they might have inherited from their mentors.

In talking to Kristiina what was immediately apparent was a formidable young woman with a solid plan and strong creative drive. She puts the business first but always has her gaze fixed on a horizon of fresh creative possibilities.

Kristiina Wilson

Kristiina Wilson

Interview

MJ: So one thing I think is kind of interesting about your career is that you never assisted for anyone did you? How did you do that?

KW: I just … started! I just decided to do it, and I made a lot of garbage! The other day my assistant and I were cleaning out files and I found one of my early portfolio shoots: I photographed my best friend and my ex-husband as a “pretend couple” at my parents’ house. My assistant and I were laughing: it was really bad.

I supported myself shooting weddings and building websites. People with web-design skills were pretty rare back then so I made a good living as a web designer, that’s how I was able to buy my house. But while I was doing all that I just decided to start as a fashion photographer. I started setting up shoots, testing models, and made it up as I went along.

I didn’t assist for anyone because I wouldn’t have been a good assistant. I can’t work for someone else, I just won’t show up. But I have a killer work ethic, I’ll work 16 hours a day seven days a week for years. Working for myself, doing what I love to do.

So yeah, I just made it up. I had no industry contacts, no mentor, no agent. I’d go to the magazine stand with a pad and pen, look at the masthead [the directory of all the editors and art staff] of the magazines I wanted to work for, copy down their names and cold call them to set up interviews. I’m sure I was really annoying but that was how I did it.

MJ: Well that’s amazing because that’s exactly how I did it as well. Although I usually sent them a promo card a week before I called because I figured that if they liked the promo then they’d take the call or call me back if I got their voicemail.

Another thing that’s interesting is that you don’t have an agent.

KW: I had an agent for a while but I felt that they hardly did anything except take 25 percent of my money. I’ve never found an agent who is willing to work as hard as I do.

I’ll forgo a social life, I’m not interested in going out to clubs, I’d rather be doing my own billings or following up on contacts.

I do have a studio manager who negotiates fees for me because it can get a little tacky if you are doing that yourself.

MJ: I’ve had three agents and two of them were useless; in fact one of them was actually detrimental to my career because many of my established clients didn’t want to deal with her.

But I do have to say that I had one agent that I was very happy to have as a representative of my work. She actually didn’t bring in much new work, but we had an unusual deal because she only dealt with my corporate/advertising clients and she only got a commission on those jobs, and she negotiated better fees. That freed up a lot of time for me to work on my editorial career which paid a lot less but was more fulfilling creatively. I’m not down on agents, but I think you really have to find the right fit and it is a lot more work on your shoulders if you are doing all the promotion, the meetings, the billing, and office work yourself.

KW. Well, yes, but who cares? Again, if you love it, you don’t mind the demands on your time.

MJ: One thing that perplexes me about fashion, and your work in particular, is that you seem to have a lot more latitude about your style from shoot to shoot. What I mean is that within a given story or spread, your work is really consistent. But looking at one story for magazine “A” and another for magazine “B,” they can be very different from each other. You seem to be able to change up your style or execution a lot.

KW: Hmmm, yes and no, there are a lot of fashion photographers like Terry Richardson who only do one thing and then there are other people, Steven Meisel for example, who change it up a lot from shoot to shoot.

Remember that I’m collaborating with the magazine or advertiser so often it’s a “look” that’s been dictated by the client, they’ll give me very specific direction: “white background, soft light, these clothes, this style of make-up, etc.”

But other projects, like the “Paper Doll” shoot, that was all my idea, so in my editorial work I’m trying more and more to push the edges of what I can do and incorporate more of the weirder stuff that’s on my Tumblr page.

Kristiina Wilson

Kristiina Wilson

MJ: So this “Paper Doll” shoot …

KW: I shot the model in the studio and then I had a life-size cutout made and I dragged the cutout all over New York shooting her in different locations …

MJ: And that’s the great thing about certain magazines, I know we have both worked for FLAUNT and I love working for them because they basically just give you ten blank pages and tell you to do anything you want. The creative freedom is fantastic, but then again they are paying you …

KW: Nothing! In fact I spent a couple of thousand dollars of my own money having the life-size cutouts made, assistants, catering, etc. so I lost money on that shoot. That’s the drawback to editorial but I got great portfolio material.

MJ: That’s true and I’ve also lost money on those shoots, but I have to say that of all the magazines I’ve shot for, the shoots I’ve done for FLAUNT in particular have generated the most calls from major advertisers. Unfortunately, because I shoot so little fashion I really didn’t have the portfolio to capitalize on the contacts. But, for instance, I love Ruven Afanador’s fashion work but every story is so different, so creative, that I sometimes wonder how any major advertiser can hire him because I don’t know if they can predict what he’ll do.

KW: I wrestle with that all the time because I have catalog work on my site that I’m proud of, it’s good solid work, but it’s “pretty” and sometimes I think that maybe I should just show the weird stuff that shows what I really want to do. But then I get afraid that I won’t work as much or be able to pay my mortgage. That’s why I started my Tumblr site, it keeps my website as a certain kind of marketing tool to a certain type of client, but the Tumblr page is younger, hipper, and edgier.

For an editorial fashion spread Kristiina had life-size prints made from photos she shot of the model in her studio. Financially, the shoot was a loss but generated great samples for her portfolio and website

Kristiina Wilson

Kristiina Wilson

MJ: Right, I think the value of the website is that when you are up for a certain, specific, kind of job you can send a client to that section. If you are up for a campaign that is all couture, you don’t want the creative director surfing through all the crazy stuff that you have on Tumblr feed.

MJ: Now, I remember that you used to do a lot of stories on spec and then you would sell them to magazines as a package later, do you still do that?

KW: No, that’s something you do when you are starting out and I don’t have to do that anymore. I’m too busy with commissions. I keep an idea book and a file on my computer of things I want to do. When a magazine calls I’ll try to push them towards something I’ve been thinking about.

MJ: Are you doing a lot of advertising?

KW: I do some advertising, but I actually make more money doing editorial.

MJ: What? How are you doing that?

KW: I work a lot for Asian magazines that pay much more than magazines in the States.

MJ: I had no idea. How did you tap that market?

KW: For them New York is an exotic, hip location. It’s amazing how often I shoot in Times Square because for foreign magazines it’s the iconic New York location.

But lately I’ve been shooting more and more in my studio, which is in the same building I live in, so it’s great. I can practically roll out of bed and I’m at work.

The one issue that is kind of interesting about the Asian fashion magazines is that they always want to cast very young models. It can get tricky because so many of the models I shoot are brand new and they don’t have a lot of experience. When we shoot on location I’m putting the model in an environment so I can work around their inexperience a little easier, but when you are working in a more sterile studio context there’s nothing except you, the camera, and the model to make the picture work. Older models know how to work their body and the clothes for the camera, they bring life experience and confidence. The young girls need a lot of coaching and direction.

MJ: Another thing that’s more particular to fashion photography is the idea of the “team,” essentially a crew of people that you regularly work with. How many people are on set with you when you shoot? How did you put together your crew?

KW: It can vary from photographer to photographer. Steven Meisel can have a hundred people on a shoot, not everyone is on set necessarily, but the crew can be huge.

But generally, maybe because I’m a control freak and I want to do everything, my crews are pretty small and I want them to be as small as possible. It’s usually just me, my assistant, then the hair stylist, make-up artist, and fashion stylist. It can vary; if it’s a shoot with a lot of models I might need to add more stylists.

MJ: And you are close to your crew? You work with the same people all the time?

KW: Absolutely. I work with the same two or three people all the time. Some of it is just … who you enjoy hanging out with, and people who have similar tastes. I like a team where I don’t have to give much direction.

MJ: Right, because I used to travel so much I always hire people that are good travel companions. If you have to spend eight hours driving or sitting next to the wrong person on a plane, it can be a huge drain and really affect your ability to perform well on set.

How did you put your team together? With my students who want to break into fashion it seems like this is one of the biggest stumbling blocks.

KW: In the beginning you just work with whoever you can find on Craigslist and is willing to work for free. You go to the modeling agencies and you get the girls who are at the bottom of the list and need pictures. It’s taken a long time, but I have a really solid team now.

MJ: When you estimate a job, how do you bill the team? Who is responsible for what? I guess what I’m asking is … Because I don’t shoot a lot of fashion, when I’ve done fashion shoots, usually the magazine casts the models. And provides the team. Sometimes I use a hair and makeup person I like, but more often the magazine has someone they assign to the shoot.

KW: Because I’m shooting the model, I’m responsible for casting the model. If they are available I’ll also ask my makeup person to come to the casting as well. My makeup artist really looks at the model from a different perspective than I do and her input is invaluable. It gives her ideas for how to approach the makeup because she’s looking at the face and the possibilities with her facial structure. I tend to focus on how the model moves, even as they walk in the room.

If we are doing something tight and more focused on the face, like a beauty shoot or sunglasses, then the makeup artist really has a better idea of how the model is going to look and how to achieve the look we want.

But in truth, these days I rarely meet models in person. We get a digital package from the agency and we cast from that. If we are traveling I like to meet the model because I want to get a feel for whether we’re all going to travel well together and just make sure they’re not crazy!

MJ: I know that might sound like a joke to my readers but it happens. I have a friend who was regularly shooting big spreads for Vogue. They were on a shoot in Mexico and two of the models got in an argument with one of the stylists. In the middle of the night the models jumped on a plane and came back to New York leaving an entire crew in Mexico with no models.

That story aside, I think models often get unfairly stereotyped as stupid or flakey. Because so many of my students are also models I think it’s important to remember that for the most part they are very young women, often straight out of high school, so they might not have the maturity of the other people on the shoot. Actually all the female models I’ve ever worked with have been great. A really good model is a joy and makes me look great as a photographer.

KW: I feel the same way. I’ve never had any bad experiences with models being unprofessional.

MJ: How much do sizes matter? The clothes are made to a fitting model right? But you might be shooting a model who’s proportioned differently …

KW: Yes, the clothes are usually made for runway models, and we might be shooting a print model who isn’t rail thin like a runway model. On big shoots we’ll have a tailor on set who will cut the back of the dress and sew in a stretch panel; it’s the same for celebrity photoshoots.

MJ: And what are you shooting with? What gear?

KW: I use a Canon 1DX.

MJ: Really? That’s a strange choice. That’s the Canon with the superfast 12 frames per second motor drive right?

KW: I shoot a lot for T.J.Maxx, and they like to have a sequence of pictures that they can animate into GIFs so I needed the 12 FPS burst rate.

MJ: And what about your other gear? Lighting, lenses, etc….

KW: I keep it simple. 24–70 zoom, a 135 prime and a 180 mm for beauty. That’s it.

In fact I actually get hired to shoot Polaroids a lot (actually a Fuji Instax), so I’m often on set with nothing but a point and shoot camera loaded with instant film.

MJ: I noticed those photos when I was looking through your website but you are actually doing some more sophisticated things than just using the cameras built in flash.

KW: Right, I slave the studio lights to the little flash that’s built into the Fuji, so even though we are shooting with a point and shoot the lighting is considerably more sophisticated.

Clients hire me to shoot fashion with that camera all the time which is actually kind of strange since it’s so low-res that you can’t see the detail in the clothes. But people love the raw-realness of that camera.

When I shoot for myself I still shoot film, but clients won’t let me shoot film on jobs. I have a hard enough time because I won’t shoot tethered.

MJ: Really?! You don’t shoot tethered? Why not?

KW: If I’m shooting a person, the computer pulls the energy from the set. Everyone is focused on the computer instead of the person who is working. People are looking at what just happened instead of what is happening at that moment.

Kristiina Wilson

MJ: I can understand that. Sometimes when I’m shooting tethered I’ll hear the art director or another person on set say something negative about a photo that is on the computer screen, they might be talking about a lighting issue, but what the subject hears is the negativity, that there’s a problem, and it can have an effect on their confidence. That connection between the photographer and the subject can be quite fragile.

What is it about fashion photography that made you decide to specialize? Do you love fashion?

KW: Actually I’m not interested in fashion at all, but fashion photography was a good fit for me. I think for me it’s about the mix of art and commerce. I have a lot of latitude and freedom because I work in fashion.

MJ: But you aren’t the stereotypical fashion photographer either, you’re very down to earth. I know that things get exaggerated by assistants telling war stories, but there are some pretty crazy prima-donna photographers out there.

KW: Fashion is a strange world because it’s so full of “yes” people and butt kissers, and it’s a party world, but I’m more likely to be at home reading a book with my cat.

I think everyone at that stratosphere level; the Steven Klein, Patrick Demarchelier, Mario Testino level, has some kind of weird reputation. It’s a very gossipy business and photographers at that level are surrounded by so many people kissing their butts that I think anyone would have a hard time maintaining perspective. If you think about it, in order to do the work you have to have a pretty extraordinary level of self-confidence and a really healthy ego. It would be pretty hard not to think, “Oh yeah, I’m all that.”

MJ: So when you’re hired, you have a series of conversations with the art director or the client, and somehow you each communicate the look and feel of the shoot. How does that process work?

KW: I’m not sure if photographers in your field market yourselves, or work this way, but in fashion you’re hired for your editorial portfolio, the cool, edgy stuff, but then if you’re doing catalog or advertising, they need to dumb you down a little, or maybe a lot. There are lots of big, mega-fashion photographers who shoot for Kmart, but that’s not the work they put on their website; that’s their payday for all the great editorial work they’ve done for a loss.

MJ: That’s exactly the way it works for me too. I do tons of ad and corporate work that never makes it onto my site because it’s too dull.

So take me through the process, step by step. You get a phone call or email for a job, like an ad client or a catalog shoot where you can’t necessarily call the shots, then what?

KW: Probably the first thing is to contact my team and make sure everyone is available on the date.

As I said before, you get the job based on the editorial work, but in the case of an ad or catalog the client probably already has a branded look that I have to … not duplicate, but be consistent with. I’ll ask them for some photos of the clothes, jewelry, or whatever we’re shooting. They’ll also send me examples of photographs, or model “looks” that are close to their vision.

Then I go to an idea/inspiration folder on my computer, or do web searches and get my brain working on ideas for the shoot. Then I create a mood board, and that process might go back and forth quite a few times between me and the client depending on the kind of shoot it is

MJ: That is different; we don’t have mood boards for what I do, but it seems to be a big thing in fashion.

KW: It’s a really big deal in fashion; even on editorial shoots the magazine will want to see a mood board, and the rest of the team, stylists, hair, makeup, and fashion will respond to the mood boards, add to them, or maybe create their own.

MJ: And who pays for everyone? What are people getting paid? How much does the model get paid, or the stylist?

KW: On editorial the model gets nothing, they are working for tear sheets.

MJ: Really? Nothing. When I’ve shot with models for magazines they usually got paid a token of a couple hundred bucks by the magazine.

KW: Not anymore; people expect a lot for a little in the fashion world. Although, if I’m shooting for one of my Asian magazines then the models get paid.

Then for the stylists … it depends on the shoot; for editorial it might be little to nothing, for a big ad shoot or catalog it might depend on the terms of usage, how many girls … there are a lot of factors. Fashion stylists get paid for one or two days prep and post time, pulling and returning clothes. If I need a producer or a location scout, that’s another budget item.

MJ: And how do you negotiate all that? It’s so complex …

KW: That’s where the studio manager comes in. I’m never directly negotiating for myself. If it’s really complicated or I feel lost, I have a friend who’s a big agent and I can call her for advice.

MJ: See, that’s where I feel like agents are a huge asset. I think they can have an overview of the market that can help them negotiate a better fee, and they have a different perspective because they are in it for the money. When I get called for a great job that I really want to do—and I’m sure you’ve had the same feeling—I’d practically do it for free because I just want to do it for the fun.

On the other hand I’ve often felt with my agents that sometimes their lack of flexibility has cost me jobs. I might negotiate something; like not budging on my fee, but giving the client an extra year of rights to a shoot, that would make the client feel like I’m willing to work with them. I think you need to find places in the negotiation process where you can be flexible without hurting your profit margin.

You are billing for your studio as well right?

What about your equipment, or post-production Photoshop?

KW: The equipment is included in the studio rental. I don’t charge extra for retouching because it’s been included in my creative fee.

MJ: And you require advances?

KW: Yes, 50 percent in advance.

MJ: That’s good. The thing I think is tricky about advances is that if you are going off for five days on a $40,000 shoot everyone understands that you need an advance because you are going to be incurring huge expenses.

The problem is when you have eight small $5000 shoots because each client thinks, “Really it’s just a little shoot, why do you need an advance?”

KW: I know, I know, that’s exactly the problem because a lot of small assignments drain your working capital more than the big ones. I’ve had to fight hard for advances but it’s in all my contracts.

MJ: And every client signs a contract?

KW: Yes; after my years of shooting weddings I found it was a great way to filter out the people I didn’t want to work with. If they won’t sign a contract I won’t work with them.

MJ: Let me ask you about overhead. You have a studio in your home right? And your employees are full time?

KW: No, I own half a building, I live on one floor and the studio is downstairs, so I have to leave my apartment and actually walk outside to go to the studio. It’s legally a commercial use space, and my apartment is residential. It’s good for legal reasons, but I think it’s also good for my brain. When I’m in the studio I’m at work, and it’s a different mentality from being in my living space.

I have a full-time assistant and a part-time studio manager.

MJ: And as regular employees you are paying them on the books, social security, federal withholding, all that good stuff. So you have all your other expenses, insurance, accountant, lawyer … Do you have a sense of what your yearly operating expenses are?

KW: Including the mortgage on the studio it’s almost 200,000.

MJ: That’s a significant nut, and the problem is that when you go to the dentist and you are charged $250 for a cleaning no one assumes that all that money is going into the dentist’s pocket but when you’re a photographer and you are charging $10,000 per day …

KW: Hah, I know! It’s so annoying, people think you just get to pocket that money!

MJ: Right; depending on how your business is set up (whether you have your own studio, employees, etc.) I figure you get to keep $1000–3000 that you actually get to live on, pay your rent, food, car insurance, etc.

The overhead is intense. Do you feel you need all that overhead? How many days are you actually shooting in your studio?

KW: Three or four.

MJ: That’s a lot! That’s an awful lot. When do you have time to do pre-production and post?

KW: At night! [Laughing.] Like I said, I work all the time, I have no life! Yesterday I shot for eight hours and spent hours doing post while I ate dinner in front of the computer.

I think the big misconception is that people think I spend most of my time shooting but I think I spend 80 percent of my time at a desk: writing estimates, making mood boards, billing, bookkeeping. Getting to shoot is the reward for all the other hard work I do.

Kristiina at work on rooftop in New York, shot from a drone

Kristiina Wilson

Case Study

BRYAN DENTON: PHOTOJOURNALIST

http://bryandenton.photoshelter.com

Imagine arriving in New York as a college freshman in the fall of 2001. You’re an excited 18-year-old, moving into your dorm room, making new friends, and getting to know your professors. Then, less than two weeks after orientation, your new home becomes the epicenter of a global conflict. For two weeks a solid column of smoke and ash rises from the cityscape to remind you that your country has just been attacked by an enemy you didn’t know existed. An enemy so full of hate that they would gladly die to kill you and your countrymen.

Many young men and woman with revenge in their hearts signed up for a war(s) that was supposed to be quick and easy. Bryan Denton’s instincts led him to take a different path. His impulse was to try and understand the cultural divide between the Western and the Arab worlds that led to the conflict.

Bryan is now an award-winning freelance photographer who has made his home in Beirut, Lebanon since 2006. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times as well as shooting assignments throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Afghanistan for TIME, Newsweek, Stern, the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair Italy, Der Spiegel, Monocle, and Human Rights Watch.

The images he’s produced in his career are not simple photojournalism: they are complex documents of our time that both inform us in the present, and serve the future as traces of our unique place and time in history; images made with a discerning lens and the pure truth of light itself. Of the thousands of conflict journalists roaming the world looking for adventure and bang-bang, Bryan’s work is distinct; in every photograph the viewer is subtly reminded that any man who is holding a gun (on any side of the conflict) has been driven to do so because of deeply held beliefs. Whether it is a U.S. marine manning a remote outpost in Afghanistan, or a boat full of Syrian refugees, every single person in every single image is rendered with dignity and compassion. Bryan’s work reminds us that every human, every culture, and every belief has a rich story to be told, if we would only listen with our hearts.

At the time of this writing Bryan was busy covering Kurdish refugees on the Syrian/Turkish border as they came under artillery fire from ISIS militants. What follows below is a series of email exchanges as he (somehow) found the time to answer my questions.

Bryan Denton

Interview

MJ: So of all the careers in photography, photojournalism is the most baffling to me. I can understand that a photojournalist can get hired to shoot an event, but the kind of stuff you do, especially the conflict journalism, how do you get started? Do you just jump on a plane to the nearest war zone? How do you sell work, and get assignments? How do you make a living at it?

BD: To be honest, I’m not 100 percent sure how I got to this point. It certainly wasn’t a linear path, which is what most graduating students are looking for, and to make matters more complicated, the photojournalism industry, in terms of its economics, that I broke into in the mid-2000s has been extensively disrupted by technology since.

I began focusing on photojournalism in university, but more than that, I was focused on the Middle East, which I spent a great deal of my elective credits at NYU studying. When I graduated, photojournalism as a general field was not really what I was interested in, but more specifically telling stories photographically in the Arab world. I knew that in order to make that happen, I had to get there, and I thought about it in fairly black and white terms. I could either stay in New York, where much of the magazine and agency world had their main offices, and try to survive in an expensive city in the hope that somebody would one day send me abroad. My thought process was that why be poor and struggling in NYC doing something I ultimately wasn’t interested in when I could be poor and struggling where I hoped to end up? That was the initial rationalization that got me out the door.

Benghazi, Libya, 2011: A young woman cries and hugs her father, a defecting Libyan soldier who is staying in Benghazi, before boarding a ferry for evacuation to Tunis.

Bryan Denton

2011, Tripoli, Libya. Libyan rebels battled cells of Qaddafi loyalists in the Souk al-Thalatha district, near the front gates of Bab al-Azizia, Gaddafi’s sprawling compound, in Tripoli as rebels fought to capture the city.

Bryan Denton

I initially moved back to Jordan, where I had studied abroad, and had some friends. I had also worked for a small English-language magazine published in Amman while I was a student, so figured I could use that as an initial way to keep busy. At that time I was making about $75 per story, so basically nothing, and I wasn’t sure how one went about getting introduced or seen by larger publications or agencies. This is one thing that NYU didn’t prepare me for at all was how the business of photography itself worked. Amman was a boring journalistic wasteland in the middle of a region that was quite covered and over-saturated with freelancers, so in a way I had the place to myself. This made it a great place to start, but one that I grew out of fairly quickly.

My first break came though from the New York Times, who I work primarily for today. In 2005, before Facebook really took off, there was a social networking site for photojournalists called Lightstalkers, which was started by photographer and now Facebook staffer Teru Kuwayama. I had no personal website at the time, but I did have a Lightstalkers profile, because many editors were also part of the community, and used it to locate freelancers for assignments. Beth Flynn, then the Foreign Picture Editor at the New York Times sent me an email out of the blue after finding me on the site, and asked if I was available to shoot an assignment in Amman. It was a small piece for the Education section on a new private school being built by the king. Not A1 material obviously. This would be the first assignment that I had ever had from an American publication, and it would come to define my career in many ways, and it all came out of luck of the draw so to speak. Without Lightstalkers, they never would have found me.

That same night, coincidentally, there was a terrorist attack in Jordan on several hotels, and I filed my first news images to the paper as well. They weren’t that great, but it started my conversation with them. Lightstalkers and social media also alerted editors at World Picture News, a now defunct NYC based photo agency, that I was in Amman, and I became a contributor with them as well. While I never sold much through them, this initial relationship with an agency gave me a bit of exposure to editors, as I continued to work.

Over the next six months after my first contact with the NYT, I did two or three assignments probably, including the funeral of Abu Musa’ab al Zarqawi, who was from Jordan. These assignments were paltry in terms of compensation. The New York Times hasn’t changed its international day rate of $250 per day, in quite some time, so I had to find additional work. I ended up working part time as a photo editor for a startup magazine in Amman to make rent, which was a really valuable experience because it taught me a bit about how the pie gets made. It also provided a steady stream of extra local work because I was able to freelance for them as well. All told, I was still barely surviving financially off of what I was making, probably $700–1000 per month, but I was making it work.

My first big break came during the war in Lebanon in 2006. I was at my desk at the photo-editing job when the news broke that Hezbollah had captured several Israeli soldiers, and I immediately sent a note to Beth at the New York Times saying that I was thinking of going. At the time, I think I had about $300 available on my one credit card, and maybe 200 in cash. Not enough to cover a war in Lebanon, but I had no idea at the time because I’d never covered a war before. I also expected Beth to write me back and say “sorry, we’re sending João Silva, Tyler Hicks” or someone else, but to my surprise, she said “you’re hired, get up there.”

So I went. I borrowed money from my parents and had them send it Western Union Amman after I spent my last cash on a flight that got canceled when Israel struck the airport and I had to then travel overland. I called my credit card company and bullshitted them into extending my credit limit by $4000 at insane interest rates in order to fund the trip. I had no real playbook to go off of and didn’t want to seem like too much of an amateur with the Times, so didn’t ask for too much advice from them, though I probably should have. Beth, who I’ve always viewed as my patron saint of photography, ended up keeping me on assignment for the duration of the war. 42 days. I didn’t cover the front-page news, but mainly red-shirted in Beirut itself, trying to pick up the smaller enterprise assignments and provide coverage of the air war in Beirut. I also got to meet and start learning from Tyler Hicks, João Silva, and Lynsey Addario during this trip—relationships that have since become close friendships in the years that have passed. Rather than looking at it as a financial success, which in many ways it was—I was able to buy equipment, move to Lebanon, and start working more functionally—it was a huge learning opportunity for me and one that I was lucky to have been given. Without it, I don’t think my career would have been the same. I visited New York shortly after the Lebanon war and went to the NYT offices for the first time to meet Beth, and she asked if I would be interested in a more consistent stringing arrangement that would have me based in Lebanon. There was no promise that the work would continue, no contract, but she said she wanted me to work with Bobby Worth, the new bureau chief who would be arriving in the next year. I was over the moon and felt like I’d made it. This filled me with perhaps too much confidence than I needed at that time—enough to make me feel like I was secure in the job and didn’t have to push myself as much as I should have.

With all that said, that was just a foot in the first door of a never-ending number of doors. That’s photojournalism. Beth was soon promoted within the NY Times and Patrick Witty, who went on to TIME, and now is the DoP (Director of Photography) at Wired magazine, would replace her, and didn’t have the same enthusiasm for developing me as a young photographer with NYT resources as Beth did. That’s not me saying anything disparaging about Patrick. We are friends, and I love his work and eye as an editor. It’s one of the most sensitive in the business, and he’s an incredible photographer himself. Every editor usually tries to make their mark on the paper and wants to do so with photographers who fit their vision. At the time it was frustrating but it taught me an important set of lessons. I realized that I would have to diversify my client base.

As a result, I started pushing for new clients in the region and abroad. This was also a relatively calm time in Lebanon and the Middle East outside of Iraq. Not much was happening in the news. I started doing lots of day work for The National, a broadsheet newspaper in Abu Dhabi that was paying well, albeit for fairly dry work—travel, real estate, and business section type stuff. I also worked for many of the region’s airlines’ inflight magazines. All told, 2009 was a great year financially for me, but it wasn’t very stimulating, and I was getting bored—wondering if this was what I was going to be here for, then I might as well go home.

The second “start” to my career came out of this dissatisfaction with the work I was doing, and in the fall of 2009, I decided to start covering the war in Afghanistan, which the US was increasing surging forces into. The prospect of which was frightening. I’d covered some clashes and unrest in Lebanon, but not conventional military operations in the 3.5 years that I’d been in the Middle East. I’d also never really covered American soldiers, especially within the context of the US military embed. I also didn’t have a publication that was paying me to go. I knew though that I needed to do something that I was interested in so I invested in better body armor, and started to make inroads with the military. More importantly, through Lynsey Addario, I was also introduced to Corbis—one of the world’s largest photo agencies, and was given the opportunity to join as a contributor. Up until then I’d been with boutique agencies that gave me a press pass, but weren’t selling that many images anymore, mainly because their prices were high and their reach was minimal.

A captured Qadafi forces fighter washes before prayer at a detention facility in Misurata, Tuesday. A wall tapestry of Col. Qadafi has been placed as a door mat for those entering and exiting the restroom—a serious insult in Arab culture.

Credit Line: Bryan Denton

I covered Afghanistan for most of 2010 and early 2011, until Libya exploded. I had still been doing work for the NY Times a fair amount, and Patrick left for TIME and was replaced by David Furst. I initially went to Libya on my own, with no assignment, but with a commitment from Corbis to pay for my satellite transmission fees—a huge favor from them, as the transmission costs are quite expensive. This would be the last time that I would embark on covering a war without an assignment. I picked up work there fairly quickly from my client in Abu Dhabi, but the extreme violence of the place, and that which has marked many of the wars in the region, left me questioning my decision to cover it without more support or an assignment. The potential costs just seemed too high. Since then, I have made the decision not to cover any highly kinetic, frontline stories without an assignment from a publication I trust. I will still travel to places that are considered unstable or dodgy to do personal work, but I draw the line at battlefields. That said, I don’t know if I would have my career if I had always had that rule, and there are many more resources now for freelancers, including insurance plans, and medical training courses that were not available when I started.

After some initial speed bumps in our working relationship, David Furst decided to take a chance on me and send me to Libya with Chris Chivers after Lynsey and Tyler were captured by Gaddafi forces. His decision to do so was based in great part on Tyler’s recommendation to Chris, my relationship with the family of a driver that was killed working with Tyler and Lysney (and myself before I pulled out after being injured days before their capture), and Chivers’ experience working with me briefly in Georgia in 2008. At this point, I’d lived and worked in the region for six years, and I knew that this was, in fact, likely the biggest break that I was going to get with the paper that had defined my career. I worked hard for almost six months in revolutionary Libya with only one real break, took a lot of risks, put my family through tons of worry, and almost lost the woman that would become my wife. The sacrifice was huge, but it was the story that ended up defining my current relationship with the paper, which has continued to grow.

Speaking of paper, if you look at any two photojournalists on paper in terms of how we pay the bills, our streams of income, chances are we’ll look completely different. For myself, I have been lucky enough to develop such a close working relationship with the NY Times that they include me as one of maybe five photographers that they use almost in a staff capacity. What that means is that while I am still a freelancer, and own the copyright to my work, I don’t really have enough time to work for other clients unless I make the time, and my working relationship with David Furst, the current International Picture Editor, is similar to that of a boss, not a client. I get paid a fixed day rate for every day on assignment, and my work-related travel expenses are reimbursed. My wife’s job with the Wall Street Journal provides us with health benefits, and I also benefit from Income Tax Exemptions that come with living abroad and making under $93,000 per year. I’m not rolling in it, but I have figured out a system where I can save for retirement, replace equipment, and most importantly, stay out of debt, but it relies on my working relationship with the NY Times staying at its current peak. Essentially, my annual income is comprised of two basic sources. There is income derived from assignments, i.e. the NY Times, with which I try to live my daily life. I use it to pay rent, buy groceries, and pay my taxes. My second stream of income comes in the form of royalties from Corbis, and from the New York Times syndication service which also resells the work I do for them on assignment, giving me a similar split to Corbis (roughly 40 percent) on resales. Since 2010 or 2011, depending on the year, between Corbis and the NY Times I typically make between $8,000 to 12,000 in royalties. I have become militant about saving this income, investing it, or socking it away for a rainy day.

MJ: You graduated from NYU with a BFA in photography, but you also did a concentration in Islamic/Middle Eastern Studies. You live in Beirut now, what is the fascination with that part of the world? What languages did you study?

BD: I was part of the 9/11 freshman class at TSOA Photo & Imaging. Myself and many of my classmates had arrived just a couple weeks earlier and were 18 or 19. I’m from the Los Angeles area, and had thought that I would be pursuing a career in either fashion or commercial photography to be honest. I hadn’t really thought about it too much. Then 9/11 happened and my conception of the world was immediately expanded dramatically. I was obsessed primarily with American history in high school, and felt instinctually that America was embarking on a violent direct confrontation with the Arab world. I also realized I knew little about Islam and about much outside of Europe, and so I signed up for Arabic classes. At that point, I hadn’t really thought about what else I wanted to study as part of a liberal arts education, so I just poured myself into both photography, and the Middle East. I also knew that I wanted to take advantage of a semester abroad while I was at NYU, and wanted the language I was studying to correlate with that experience. I’d visited Italy and Spain during my time in high school, and didn’t want to go to the usual study abroad designations like Florence or Paris. I wanted something a bit more off the beaten path, so Arabic was in many ways a strategic academic decision in that it pushed me to find a program that would allow me to continue my Arabic studies. This took about a year, but I finally settled on the SIT program in Amman, Jordan, which included about a month of independent study, which I used as a vehicle to work on a project about the sex trade in Jordan. My time in Jordan also crystalized a lot of my study of the region at NYU and I was instantly hooked. I felt like I clicked with the region. As soon as I got back, I began thinking of ways to return once I graduated. If I think about it, I unconsciously put a lot of thought and planning into my move over here, and it took time to work up the courage to do so.

As far as my attraction to the place goes. Since I first visited during that semester abroad, I have always felt like it is one of the most over-covered and yet least understood regions in the world. Having a small say in that has been what’s driven me all these years to photograph the place. At this point, it no longer feels foreign. It is home. My wife is Lebanese, and it will be a part of my life until I die.

MJ: I know you have a long relationship with your translator/fixer. How did you meet? How does one find a fixer in a new country? Who pays for it? How does the partnership work?

BD: I work with a variety of people across the region. At this point, many of the people I work with are local staff of various New York Times bureaus, and I’ve known them for years, and count them as friends, as well as colleagues. When I’m on assignment for other publications, I usually have to source my own fixers, and I typically rely on the suggestions of other journalists I know, usually through Facebook forums such as the Vulture Club for advice on who’s good. In a lot of places, there’s usually a standard range that fixers charge that might increase if you need things like a car, or if the trip is far out of town, or if there is a great deal of risk associated with the story. The fixer is usually an expense that is covered by the client, though many clients these days try to have that included in your fee. However, I typically insist on it being covered in my expenses budget.

Earlier on though, when I was working on my own, I would have to pay out of pocket. In order to keep costs down, I would usually try to find a college student, who was interested in journalism, or someone who just seemed switched on and ideologically flexible with a healthy dose of skepticism. It’s easy to find translators in a lot of places, but it’s hard to find people who can think critically like a journalist about their home country. Imagine finding a truly non-partisan American to help translate American culture for you and work you into incredibly conservative, as well as incredibly liberal communities. It’s not easy. Early on, I would meet people at cafes in places like Beirut or Amman, and start working with them bit by bit. Fixers that are already established come with contacts, but when you are working with someone who’s new, and you are new yourself, it’s like you’re both starting from scratch. As time goes on though, you get better at spotting people you’d like to work with or the ones who do get better as they learn.

Some correspondents can be almost colonial in their treatment of local staff, but I do my utmost to form meaningful professional and personal relationships with the people I collaborate with. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t get to many of the places I go to. Access is 95 percent of photojournalism and a fixer usually makes up a significant portion of that. I’ve actually always hated the word fixer—it’s always felt demeaning to me in some way. I try to look for people who are fellow journalists, and we work together doing journalism.

MJ: I know it can be difficult to talk about because it often comes off as either self-aggrandizing or falsely modest, but can you talk a little about the experience of shooting and keeping an intellectual perspective while you are in a life-threatening situation? How do you balance the emotions and the adrenaline with the intellectual challenge of documenting history and objective journalism?

BD: For me, photojournalism is really divided into two halves at this stage. There’s the actual shooting, and then there’s the editing. I shoot a lot, and I’m so used to my equipment now that I don’t really think much when I’m making photographs. I just sort of see a frame or a situation and my fingers are at work. Working in violent situations is challenging because you are balancing the decision-making process that relates directly to your safety while also trying to make pictures that tell the story in a powerful way. Fear is a strange animal that we all simultaneously try to listen to and suppress at the same time, and I don’t know if I’m as good at it as some of my colleagues—especially in recent years after losing so many friends in the field. I often times compare violence to music—you have to listen first before you know how to dance. I try to approach front lines slowly and methodically. I’ve also learned a lot through experience about battlefield weapons and tactics. The ballistics of a whole lot of weaponry. This isn’t about bravado but it’s about knowing how all the stuff that can hurt you works so that you have a better chance of being safe.

More than anything when I’m shooting, I try to slow down and really see what’s happening around me. I try to be as hyper-aware, but also as slow and methodical as the situation allows. I also spend a lot of time working. I’m up early, and home late—I try to get as much as I can, so that I can have a better pool of images to choose from.

That said, the amount of time I spend working depends a lot on safety. When I’m photographing fighting, or in a dangerous neighborhood, I shoot until I have what I need and then I leave. I try to report as efficiently as I can, and above all, I listen to my fixers if they start to feel uncomfortable.

Most of all, I feel like my work has been influenced a great deal simply by the amount of time I’ve spent covering many of the places I work. It takes time to notice things, for one’s perspective to mature. I see a lot of young photographers make one trip to a place and try to tell the same story that they’ve already seen, and while I think that stage is probably an important part of the learning process in this career, I think it’s also important to spend time and invest a bit of yourself in the work you do, beyond the physical risk. Ultimately, this job is pretty thankless. You’ll never be rich, and any fame or name recognition you have will extend to a relatively small pool of fellow nerds/professional family who follow the industry. Yet the sacrifices are huge. It’s because I love and believe in what I do that I’ve removed myself from a very tight-knit community of family and friends in the US who I rarely see now. I guess you could also say that part of that sacrifice comes from a pretty selfish place as well. I guess there are two sides to every coin.

MJ: What’s the workflow? Let’s say you go shoot something, like a suicide bombing for example. Do you just jump in a cab and go? Then you need to process the files? Upload them. How do editors know you have coverage?

BD: If I’m covering a breaking news event, I’ll usually rush out with my gear and try to start working as quickly as possible. Once I’m done, I’ll come back to my home or to wherever I’m staying and start working my files. Everyone has their system, but I use Adobe Lightroom for my editing, and the Photomechanic for captioning, partly out of habit, but also because I feel like it’s the best and simplest IPTC captioning program out there. When I was first starting out I would immediately notify my agency and the NY Times that I was going to have pictures, and the NY Times would almost always assign me after the fact. Once I have edited and captioned all my images, usually numbering between 10 and 25, I use an FTP program like Fetch to send them via FTP to either my agency or the client.

In general though these days, the wire agencies like AFP, AP, and Reuters are producing breaking news imagery that is difficult to compete with in terms of quality and speed. They employ tons of stringers who arrive before you do and always seem to get a better shot. For people getting started, I would focus more on telling unique stories and developing a photographic voice, rather than chasing news. The exception to that rule would be if you were interning or stringing for one of the wires, which is an excellent way to gain some initial exposure and experience within the industry.

Additionally, these days, a lot of editors are on social media like Facebook and Instagram, and they follow photographers. I often times get inquiries for assignments and pictures from TIME and other publications because they saw I was somewhere on Instagram. One of the most exciting new smartphone-based applications these days is called Blink, and was developed by two former photo editors for the WSJ. It’s a real-time geo-locating/social networking/and messaging app that is specifically designed for the media industry to locate freelancers around the globe, and many editors are starting to use it. One of the most important parts of being employable in this ever-changing industry these days is being present on Twitter and social media.

MJ: One of my favorite stories of yours was a video for the Times on street-racing cars in Saudi Arabia. Completely off your normal story. How did that happen?

BD: That was one of those stories that you just sort of hear about when you’re already in a place working on another story, and you decide that you’re going to do it because it’s both fun and interesting. Saudi Arabia can be great like that because it’s not a super-accessible place for journalists, so there’s a lot of uncovered ground. Once we heard about it, just through talking to young people and asking what they do for fun, we met up with one of their friends who participates and tagged along, meeting people as we went. Most good photography happens by accident, but requires you to put yourself out there and be aggressively social with people you normally wouldn’t be comfortable around. It’s not the default for a lot of creative minds, but you get used to it after a while.

MJ: Photojournalism has had some dark times as of late, many papers and news organizations have eliminated their photography staff; and you seemed to jump in just when things were at their bleakest. What were you thinking?

2010. Marjah, Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Lance Crpl. Chase Welch yells to his team between firing bursts from his M-249 during a firefight with suspected Taliban in Marjah, Saturday.

Bryan Denton

BD: I don’t think I was thinking to be honest. I just got really lucky, and my luck hasn’t run out yet. I think the industry is changing massively, and a lot of people have not been able to keep up. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t opportunity for young photographers out there though. Mainly, I think it means being flexible to the new market for imagery. The old models of working on assignment for print publications is shrinking to the point where you have just a handful of outlets left. But you also have new digital outlets on the rise, and opportunities in video that you never had before, both in terms of work, and how that video can be worked into rich multimedia packages. VICE, Al Jazeera America, Medium/Matter are just a couple of the new media outlets that are starting to publish great, competitive work. Also, the Washington Post is starting to assign more freelance photography—something nice to see after years of decline.

I don’t think it will ever get back to what it was, because imagery just isn’t that hard to produce anymore. The technology is infinitely more user friendly, and has proliferated around the globe. This has made the age of the staff photographer a thing of the past, perhaps, but there’s a lot rising in its place that is available to people who want to tell stories visually.

MJ: As a follow-up to the last question, I personally feel that tablet devices and e-magazines are a boon to photojournalists and I predict a second “golden age” of photojournalism because electronic devices have so much more space to cover stories in depth. What do you see as the future? Can you address your involvement in stories that are multimedia?

BD: I think it’s hard to say. So much of companies’ advertising budgets, which would have gone to print in the past, have been reallocated into “digital marketing” through other platforms online like Facebook and Google. I don’t know if that ad revenue is ever going to come back to journalism en masse. The NYT might have a couple hundred million unique views in a year, but Facebook has a billion users that login almost every day, so the metrics have changed completely. That said, I like to think that we’ve seen the worst of the decline—bottomed out so to speak, and that from here, a new, perhaps smaller industry will start to see its economics stabilize and new positions open up. Most of the people that I know who do this job successfully though are not staffers, and many of them wouldn’t want to be. Succeeding as a freelancer requires you to not only be a good photographer and artist these days, but also a good businessperson, sales person. I feel like in many ways, while there are less people working professionally, the quality of work has risen as society has become more visually literate. Social media has played a part in this and will continue to. One thing I’m really interested in these days is Instagram. I have 38,000 followers, but I have friends who have close to 400,000. That’s the power to put a picture instantly in front of the circulation of a major metropolitan newspaper. There’s a potential economy locked in each of our individual followers’ base, but we’re still in the infancy of figuring out how to monetize it.

MJ: Can you tell us about the ethics of Photoshop and journalism in general?

BD: In terms of journalism, I think most of the ethics of photography are pretty intrinsic. As a journalist on a story, I am there to observe. I never set up or instruct people when I am working, unless I am making a portrait, in which case it’s captioned as such. I don’t pay subjects for access. The idea is to capture what is happening naturally in front of you.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the ethics of retouching in the digital age, and some agencies like AP have instituted strict guidelines. Obviously altering the image, adding or removing objects is a cardinal sin. If you do that, A, you will get caught, and B, you will never work in journalism again. Where it gets gray is color correcting, toning, even spotting for some outlets is restricted. I personally try to make my image’s reality the way that I saw it in terms of tonal quality, and could tell you a parallel darkroom process that would yield the same result. If I’m shooting black and white, I remember what Tri-X looked like and try to make my files look like that.

MJ: Can you tell me about the embedding process? How much did the US military restrict or enhance your access?

BD: The US has consistently changed its policies towards journalists covering conflict over the past century. It should be said that in any war, journalists essentially “embed” with one side or the other. Covering a conflict from the middle of two opposing forces is a really quick way to get killed, so journalists typically cover a war from the perspective of a group, or of a military. In Libya, there were journalists reporting from rebel front lines and cities, as well as from Gaddafi-controlled Tripoli, though access was much more restricted there.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US was actually fairly open to allowing journalists to report on their activities on the ground. I think America’s conception of the freedom of the press to report on the military is rooted in the Vietnam model of having an all-access backstage pass, give the chopper pilot a six pack and he’ll take you anywhere sort of thing that’s emphasized in movies, but I’m not sure it was ever so unrestricted.

2012, Misurata, Libya; A man from Tawaraga, currently imprisoned at a prison in Misurata’s former internal security building, reads the Koran on his cot in a large open cellblock.

Bryan Denton

I spent a total of about six months with US forces in Afghanistan, on the ground in combat, and was never once told what I could and could not photograph by the troops I was with. During that time I photographed civilian casualties killed by US bungling, American kids with their legs missing, US Marines detaining suspected Taliban, and all the pain and filth that comes along with a one-year deployment. The public affairs officers in Kandahar or Baghram would push you out to one of the line companies and then from there, they’d push you out to a little firebase or combat outpost and you’d live with the guys for two weeks, shitting in the same holes, eating the same shitty food. There was never much pomp and circumstance, and most of the time you’re bored as hell. War, some soldiers joke, is 95 percent boredom and 5 percent sheer terror.

Where the censorship exists is in the fine print, literally. The Media Guidelines and Regulations, which all of us had to sign, was changed frequently throughout the Afghan War. One of the main changing points was in how you were allowed to publish identifiable photographs of wounded or dead US troops. By 2011, they required you to have prior written authorization from the soldier or marine in question, or after the fact, written permission from the troop or their next of kin. Essentially, you could take any photograph you wanted, but publishing it was tied up in permissions. This was the US government’s way of keeping the nastier side of our involvement in Afghanistan out of the news, and violating it would get your access cut off. Newspapers did argue the interest of the public and violate it occasionally, but it was a controversial subject.

Personally, I played by the rules, but never agreed with them. Soldiers and Marines would often complain to me about how the media doesn’t cover what’s really going on on the ground, how hard they’re fighting and the dangers they face. I would always tell them to complain to their chain of command—that their commanders at the top and their commander in chief didn’t want America to know what they were actually experiencing. In the end, I think that the visual document of Iraq and Afghanistan produced through the embed process has been incredibly powerful. Look at what Tim Hethrington did with his work in Kunar at Restrepo, or what Peter van Agtmael was able to do in Iraq and Afghanistan and the US with veterans. The work is at times as sensitive as it is shocking. There’s so much good work that’s been done though that it’s hard to single images out as iconic.

MJ: You’re established now so I assume editors call you with assignments but when you were starting out how did you get editors to look at your work?

BD: Some of them would find me on Lightstalkers as I said before initially, and then often times, I would meet a writer who would need a photographer somewhere and they would help arrange it. When I was starting out as well, I would try to get to New York at least once a year to visit with whatever agency I was with, and ask them to set up meetings for me at magazines. This was a slow, initially depressing process of beating the pavement, showing portfolios, but eventually people start to remember you and your work, and it slowly built from there. I find that graduates these days feel a tremendous pressure to finish their studies and immediately find creative, critical, and financial success. In photojournalism there are very few stories like that though. This industry is a marathon, not a sprint, and there are no shortcuts, and a lot of upfront suffering usually. My motto though was that if you don’t quit, you can’t technically fail …

MJ: Since you are a photojournalist, with the emphasis on “journalist,” how often are you bringing stories to magazines? How do you inform your editors as to what should be attended to, and do they listen?

BD: These days, I’m so wrapped up in the NY Times that I don’t pitch my work around as much as I used to, and it’s something I never really thought I was very good at to be honest. I think on the scale of photojournalism, I am closer to the journalist side of things than the photographer/artist in some ways. That said, I do pitch stuff in the region to the New York Times quite a bit, as well as to the various writers who staff many of the regional bureaus. I was hearing from colleagues and contacts that the situation in Kobane, a Syrian Kurdish enclave on the border with Turkey, was coming under increasing pressure from ISIS and that there was a building refugee influx, and pushed my editor to redeploy me there from Iraq, which he did. Most editors are incredibly busy managing all the moving parts of their next issue, or the next day’s paper, so it’s good to send a measured, non-hyperbolic pitch if you have a good idea. When you’re starting out, I think there’s a tendency to over-pitch stories as home runs. As I got older, I learned that it was smarter to under-promise and over-deliver, so to speak.

I’ve just completed the first round of work on a project I’m working on about the oil boom in the Bakken, which was a three-week trip. I like some of my work, and hope to use it to apply for grants to continue the project. That seems to be a method that a lot of photographers are using these days with their personal work. Initial investment with the hopes of securing magazine or grant funding to continue the work and push it along. Once editors start seeing you covering a subject as well, they will often commission you for their magazine or paper which helps expand your body of work. I’m known now for the Middle East and Arab world, so I get lots of requests here. There are very few “general assignments” photojournalists anymore. Most of us have specialized and branched off into regions or issues we feel passionately about which, in some ways, is like branding.

MJ: I could be wrong, but it doesn’t seem like you are writing your own stories. Can you talk about how the collaboration works with the writer?

BD: I usually work with a correspondent when I’m shooting for the NY Times, and that collaboration is one of the things I like the most about shooting for a newspaper. At this stage, most of the correspondents I work with are close friends as well as colleagues, and I know each of their writing styles fairly well. Good pictures and good writing can amplify each other. That said, some stories are more visual than others, by which I mean they translate specifically into a place, an event, in which case you know what to shoot. The hardest thing for me was figuring out what to shoot earlier in my career when I was assigned to illustrate a more analytical article. For those types of stories, you have to be creative, and that relies on you knowing a place’s history, and what’s going on on the street. These are the stories where I work more extensively with a local journalist or fixer, and ask a lot of questions about how they think the subject of the article manifests itself visually.

MJ: You got married recently and I assume you are planning a family at some point in the future. Will you stay in Beirut? If you come back to the US what are your plans? How does your wife feel about the dangerous assignments?

BD: That’s a good question. I don’t know if my wife and I will come back to the States to be honest. Beirut isn’t just home for us, it’s where her family is and where we have deep roots now. I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t have any immediate plans to do so. I’m really lucky to have my wife in my life. In addition to being my best friend and the love of my life, she lets me do this job, which is a huge part of who I am. There are tough weeks, especially when I’ve been on assignment for a long time, but she understands the rhythm of journalism because she herself is a staff correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. We talk about the dynamics of having a family. Our schedules would certainly have to change, but I think it would push me away from the news, and more towards projects that I feel really passionate about working on long term, and that could be a good thing.

MJ: What would be your advice to a young person who was looking for a career in photojournalism?

BD: I always get questions from graduates, who seem uncertain how to get from point A to point B in this career, or really, how to even start moving on that path. It’s not a linear one. I would say if it’s international work you’re looking for then leave the US and Europe for somewhere you are interested in. Buy a one-way plane ticket, not round trip. Most people are looking for the non-scary route to this career, but there isn’t one really. You have to be bold. That doesn’t mean you should run into gunfire, but put yourself outside of your comfort zone because that’s when you learn.

Also, one thing I was bad at was utilizing a lot of the educational opportunities that young photojournalists have at their fingertips. Apply for the Eddie Adams Workshop. Attend a Foundry Photojournalism Workshop. They are far cheaper than a college course, and will allow you to meet other working photojournalists and editors who make up what is ultimately a very small, tight-knit industry, where we all know each other’s work if not each other.

Case Study

PAUL WARCHOL: ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHER

www.warcholphotography.com

Full disclosure here: Paul Warchol has been one of my closest friends for over 30 years. Our photographic careers were forged within the same crucible when we were students at Cooper Union in the late seventies. We read the same books, shared the same heroes, and walked the same streets with our de rigueur Leica M2s dangling from our shoulders as we imagined and invented our futures as photographers. I don’t think we have ever had a meal together that didn’t end in a conversation about photography; in fact that might have been the reason to eat.

Listening to the actual recording of this interview is a little like listening to twins talk in a language that is unknowable outside of a very specific gene pool. As one of us paused to find an exact word it would immediately be supplied by the other. As a consequence, this printed version is more translation than transcription.

Interview

MJ: Just to establish the relationship … we’ve known each other and been close friends since college but I’m still going to have to ask you a bunch of questions as if I don’t know you.

So tell me about yourself, stranger, how did you get started as an architectural photographer?

PW: I was lucky. At the end of my senior year at Cooper Union I got to go on a shoot with Ezra Stoller and that was it. I knew immediately that it was something I could do, and something I wanted to do.

MJ: It’s amazing, I just showed Ezra’s work to my class the other day and of course they had no idea who he is or his importance in either the history of architecture or the history of photography. But it’s not an exaggeration to say that he is to architectural photography what Avedon is to fashion photography, or Eugene Smith is to photojournalism. He established the paradigm of the genre.

PW: Yes, although I’d actually draw the comparison to Walker Evans. There’s the thing itself—the building that he’s looking at—but then there are all these other elements, golden rectangles, space, light; he used the camera and his powers of observation to play those things like a cello.

MJ: Ezra documented several decades of important changes in architecture from the late fifties through the eigthies that we now call the “International Style.” And the motto of that school was that “form follows function.” I’ve always thought that the key or the genius of Ezra Stoller was that he took the mandate of the “International Style,” that form follows function, and applied it to the way he photographed. He composed the photograph as a vignette that enabled you to see the thought process of the architect and the function of the building. There was always a majesty to them.

PW: Yes, epic. I think of his work as … the ultimate authority of explanation through description.

But don’t forget that it was also the beginning of the “American Century” because Europe was in ruins and all the Bauhaus architects were relocating to New York and Chicago. It was a pivotal point in architecture, but it also represented a relocation of the world’s cultural center to the American continent and he was positioned in the sweet spot of that point in history.

Bryan Denton

MJ: Yes, yes. When I think of great fashion photographers, not the people who shoot pretty girls in frocks, but great fashion photographers, Avedon, Meisel, Peter Lindbergh—that level—those guys, I always say that they are really documentary photographers who are both documenting their culture and creating it at the same time because the pictures are widely published and those pictures in turn influence the contemporary culture that they are part of.

I think Ezra was like that. He was documenting the great architecture of his time, not unlike a product photographer, but in doing so he was also creating a visual document that had a direct influence on the architecture of his time, and would later become a source for teaching future generations of architects, so his influence extended beyond his lifetime. It continues to this day. Every architecture student in the world knows the work of both Richard Meier and Frank Lloyd Wright because of Ezra’s photographs and the way the photographs are made influences your thoughts about the architecture.

TWA Flight Center designed by Eero Saarinen, photographed by Ezra Stoller 1962

Ezra Stoller, ESTO

House on Shelter Island by Stamberg Aferiat Architecture

Paul Warchol

PW: Exactly. Coming from Cooper Union, and having had the education that you and I had, it was a natural fit for me.

MJ: But Ezra was not exactly a caring nurturer …

PW: No, he could be a real hard ass, and we were never chums, but in other ways, he and his daughter Erika [founder of the ESTO photo agency] were incredibly generous and kind to me.

I once left his bag of lenses, thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of special hand-picked view camera lenses, sitting in a parking lot. We went back later and they were all still there sitting on the asphalt, but it was a miracle that he didn’t fire me right then and there. His gruffness was part of his persona but there was that other side to him.

MJ: As I think of it, you were truly an apprentice in the traditional sense of the word.

PW: Yes, I think Cooper did a great job of preparing me for my career by providing the intellectual underpinnings that are part of my current career, my art history classes gave me historical perspective, and my studio classes honed my powers of observation and taught me the importance executing something with skill and authority.

But you and I both know that Cooper didn’t teach us any practical skills. I learned all that from working for Ezra.

MJ: Yes, the Cooper philosophy was that skills were something you learned from a book. Teachers concentrated solely on critique. We taught ourselves everything, and I still think there’s a lot of validity to that approach because none of the things we learned, or taught ourselves back then, have any relevance anymore. Cooper taught us how to learn which is really the most valuable skill.

Pazhou Hotel and Convention Center Guangzhou, China by Andrew Bromberg of Aedas

Paul Warchol

Monsoon Restaurant, Sapporo, Japan by Zaha Hadid

Paul Warchol

I always say that the only skill I learned in college that still has any relevance is drawing. I still use it all the time as a way to communicate with clients.

PW: I’d agree with that, and I still … When I’m scouting a building I make these little sketches, just doodles really, but they help me think it through.

Ezra also owned his own lab, so when we weren’t shooting I’d work as a color printer, or I’d make duplicate slides of his work. Doing that kind of grunt work helped me to refine my color vision and exposed me to his archive.

MJ: And bringing this back to you, I think that you are the Ezra Stoller of our generation in the sense that you’ve never thought of your work as just a job or an assignment you do. You’ve documented a new generation of post-modernist architects with an entirely new vocabulary, and you have a perspective on what that means to both the history and future of architecture and society.

PW: Well that’d be nice to think and I do hope that the archive has some value, both monetarily and historically.

MJ: So, you worked for Ezra for a few years and then you joined ESTO as a photographer?

PW: No, after I stopped working for Ezra I worked for three years on my own, then I was invited to join ESTO. Erika and Ezra started ESTO as Ezra’s career was winding down. It was a way to control and monetize Ezra’s archive, and it was also a photo agency that represented a new generation of architectural photographers for assignments. All of the photographers who formed the first ESTO stable were Ezra’s old assistants.

I was with ESTO for maybe … three years? Then I left and went out on my own again.

MJ: And that was the first in a series of significant leaps of faith along the way as your practice expanded. I remember when you got your first loft on Mulberry Street and thinking it represented a very large monthly nut that I thought was pretty scary, then you started hiring employees.

PW: The goal of the Mulberry Street studio was to create a virtual photo factory. That’s how I thought of it. I had a little alcove that had some Manfrotto stands and seamless paper for walls and that’s where I slept. The rest of the place was all photo gear and thousands of envelopes and file cabinets that held all the transparencies for all my jobs.

I had a studio manager who handled all the billing and two other employees who helped me run film and make selects.

MJ: Just keeping track of your calendar was, or is, a full-time job.

PW: It still is, because there is so much traveling, and so much of the billing/expenses on any given job is travel related it requires a full-time employee and they have to be very detail oriented. Although it has become my full-time job through the cursed enabling of the iPhone.

Then you need at least one more full-time employee just to handle stock requests and/or help with processing and post-production.

MJ: It’s crazy to think of how much traveling we did back then, and we traveled with so much gear. With the current airline situation it wouldn’t be fun, but then we don’t carry quite as much stuff anymore.

PW: I still travel with a full strobe set and hot lights as checked luggage but now that I’m shooting digitally I don’t have to worry about the 4 × 5, the lenses, and all the film holders that all travelled as “carry on.”

MJ: Tell me more about the stock side of your business. It’s almost a tenet of good business strategy that every business plan should create some form of passive income, and I’ve always felt that it was important for every photographer to be involved in stock, but since you left ESTO you have managed your own stock career.

PW: I think one of the important lessons I learned from Ezra was that my archive would or could become an important historical document. I hoped it would, and to a large extent I’ve managed my career with that in mind. Of course there are times when I just look at my bank balance, or my kids’ tuition bills, and think, “Oh, I’d better make some cash” but in general I think more about taking certain jobs because I think the building or the architect is historically significant.

The archive is important, and my legacy, so I didn’t want to see it frittered away in pieces by stock agencies.

MJ: I see, and of course that also makes sense for your practice. If a photo editor needs photos of an execution site for a story on capital punishment they aren’t necessarily going to think of me, they are going to go to one of the big agencies and then they’ll find my photos on Corbis.

But in your case, if a magazine or a book wants photos of a building by a particular architect they are going to go to the architect’s website and they will find your credit there so they know exactly who to call.

PW: And when they contact the office we have a standard set of rates that we charge depending on the usage …

MJ: And “Paul Warchol Photography” doesn’t have to split the fee with a photo agency, so if there’s enough volume in resales that pays for the full-time employee who handles the resale.

PW: Right, so there is a profit center there, but that’s really secondary to the idea of having control over where the images are placed, how they are used.

That said, much of the archive is on Photoshelter (an online image distribution and delivery site) so there’s a lot of work that is searchable and available for direct purchase there.

MJ: So back to how you started; eventually the studio on Mulberry Street became untenable …

PW: Well I got married and had we had kids so it was time for the business to relocate. I rented another loft nearby and moved the business there. Then later on we moved the family to Pennsylvania and the loft in New York served as a New York base for the business. But I’ve just rented an industrial building in Pennsylvania so I’ll move everything there by the end of the year.

It’s just not as important as it used to be to have a base in New York. Almost everything I do involves traveling somewhere, and all my shoots are delivered electronically. Fast internet has replaced FedEx and bike messengers.

I had a great run in New York, but it is expensive and not necessary anymore.

MJ: Let’s go back to Ezra for a second because one of the things I like about the traditional mentor/apprentice relationship is that as an assistant you get to try on somebody else’s life for a bit. I think there’s a lot to be learned from that beyond photo technique.

PW: Absolutely; the thing about Ezra was that there was absolutely nothing mediocre about the guy and that was a big lesson for me. I think that if I had ended up working for someone else who wasn’t as dedicated and driven then perhaps that’s as far as my boat would have risen.

MJ: Yes, exactly my point. I never assisted for a great photographer so when I started getting my first really big assignments, like feature stories for CN Traveler and Vanity Fair, I had to invent the wheel for myself because I had never seen how anyone else did it.

I always think it’s important for any young photographer to assist for the best person they can. This is a perfection business so you have to work for people who are committed to that level, otherwise it’s too easy to settle. I think it’s no accident that so many top photographers like Martin Schoeller started their careers by assisting people like Annie Liebovitz. As a young photographer you have to reinvent who you are in much the same way that an athlete creates a physique that is capable of accomplishing what their mind imagines. You have to become the person who is capable of making the images you want to make.

PW: And remember that in my business I deal with some pretty powerful egos. It was an education in itself to watch Ezra deal with clients.

MJ: But for clients it was also a mark of distinction for Ezra to agree to shoot one of their buildings. Especially towards the end, he would only take an assignment if he thought the building was worthy, and I suppose that’s also true of you now.

PW: Well, there’s only so much time, so many days you can work, so you do try to take the assignments that have a life beyond the initial shoot. The more important the building or the architect, the more widely it will be published and generate secondary sales, so there’s a practical side to being a little choosy with assignments, but then there’s also the historical importance.

I recently had an interview with a major magazine. The art director started the conversation by apologizing because the magazine only paid $200 for a shoot, and that’s everything, including expenses. He wanted to know if I would work for them at that ridiculous day rate that won’t even cover half of what I pay my assistant.

Armstrong Teasdale, St. Louis, MO by Studios Architects, DC

Paul Warchol

And the answer is, maybe … If it’s a great building that is historically significant, and I really want to shoot it, and it will lead to other opportunities then, yes, maybe I’d do it.

MJ: I feel the same way; I’m dying to shoot a feature film as a cinematographer. I might charge a lot to shoot for corporate clients, but if a young director came to me with a good script and no budget I’d happily shoot a film for free.

So let me ask a very nuts and bolts business question about a part of your business that always confused me, and still perplexes me when I get an occasional architecture shoot. You’re hired by the architect, but then there are all those secondary clients—interior decorators, contractors, etc.—who also want photos. How do you handle that?

PW: I established a pretty simple way to handle that a long time ago. If the contractor or designer wants to come in as a partner with the architect on the initial shoot then my day rate goes up by 25 percent for each additional client, and they get to decide amongst themselves how to divvy that fee up.

MJ: And if the contractor or decorator wants to buy photos after the fact?

PW: It’s $500 per image, but obviously that just includes usage for their portfolio or website.

MJ: Brilliant. That’s so simple and fair. It encourages the secondary clients to “join” the initial shoot, because it’s cheaper for them in the long run, but it also means more money for you.

And to a certain extent digital makes that possible, which brings me to the next point. How hard was the transition to digital for you? The whole aesthetic of architectural photography was based on the descriptive authority that the view camera brought to the scene. The 4 × 5 has a way of rendering space that is part and parcel of what we consider architectural photography to be. I always say that I don’t miss film at all, but I miss the 4 × 5 camera. I miss composing on the ground glass, so I still shoot a lot of my personal work with 4 × 5.

PW: I stopped shooting film when they stopped making Polaroid. It was that simple.

In the beginning of digital it was hard to make the transition, but now I enjoy it.

I do a lot of compositing; using the shift lens to capture different parts of the scene and then combining those elements. I also really like the fact that we can now really incorporate people into the scene. In the old days of film we always had the assistant posing in the shot mid-stride to supply scale to the building. Now I can use the actual people who occupy and use the space. I love being able to shoot a photograph quickly and possibly include a bird or plane that might be flying through the frame.

MJ: I imagine that the lighting is a lot more minimal as well.

PW: In most of my shoots the lighting design was part of the architect’s concept so I have always used their lighting as the starting point and tried to add light minimally in order to make the contrast work or “sculpt” the space. With digital, because the spaces are so well lit to begin with, and I have so much control in post-production, I often don’t do any lighting at all.

Broad Museum, Grand Rapids, MI by Zaha Hadid

Paul Warchol

The fact is that while digital has made “decent” photography easier for the layperson, it has also raised the bar for what is expected of us as professionals. I know a lot of photographers of our generation resented the shift to digital, it made many of our hard-won skills unnecessary, but I’ve enjoyed the challenge. I might even say that the challenge of it helped keep me interested in photography. You know, I play the piano, in a way using all the new tools; learning Photoshop, Lightroom, etc. has been like relearning how to play a familiar sonata with a new instrument.

Now that I have gotten better and better with Photoshop I can draw back on my original training as a painter and make several exposures—maybe I’ll have my assistant hold up a black cloth to eliminate the reflections in a window or something—and then I’ll combine those exposures in the service of a heightened reality. The control we have over color temperature is fantastic. So the digital camera allows me to create and render the scene in a way that is hyper real but doesn’t fall into cheesy HDR effects.

Sand Crawler, Lucas Films

Paul Warchol

In the end, yes, there was something nice about the view camera, but now that I have fully embraced digital I think the end results are far superior to what we used to achieve using film. Though the cameras look like 35 mm cameras, the image results are much closer to a large format view camera.

I know what you mean about the ground glass though. I never use the camera’s viewfinder. I use the live view screen the same way I used to use the 4 × 5 ground glass. Sometimes I use a wifi device to connect my iPad with the camera in “Live View” so I use the iPad as my viewfinder and I have a program that allows me to control the camera settings with the iPad.

[Laughing] Now if only I could make it turn upside down like a view camera.

MJ: Years ago, back in college, I was at the Museum of Modern Art research center looking through a box of original prints by Eugène Atget.

PW: Back when you could do that …

MJ: Right. They had this little desktop easel and I had an Atget print I was writing about standing up in the easel. It was late in the day and John Szarkowski goes to the closet, puts on his coat, then he takes the print I’m studying and turns it upside down and walks out the door without saying a word.

PW: Because that’s the way Atget saw the scene …

MJ: Yes, and when you were talking about Ezra playing the scene like a cello it reminded me of that story because there was something about the process of composing photographs upside down that made the photographic act more formal and less narrative.

But as we’ve talked about how Ezra was your mentor, what is it like to be in the reverse position? At this point we’ve both seen a lot of our assistants go on to become famous photographers in their own right.

PW: It’s great … I’ve always thought it best to not assume a zero sum situation (one person’s success does not take away from another’s). You still need to come up with what you want to do on your own. Yes, many of my assistants are doing well with my encouragement. I know you can’t actively expect Karma to smile on you so …

They do need to be someone you don’t mind traveling with because you spend a lot of time together. It’s great if they are eager, responsible, and they don’t mind hearing your stories, again and again. But deference to the task at hand is essential. I don’t especially mean deference to myself, though there is congruence between what I need to solve the problems that the task at hand suggests and the day’s mission.

Case Study

CORBIN GURKIN: WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER

http://corbingurkin.com/

In the entire profession of photography there are probably more photographers specializing in weddings than any other area of specialization.

When we consider the positive aspects of wedding photography as a source of ancillary income or an area of specialization it’s easy to see why wedding photography remains one of the largest subsets of the entire industry. As both a business model and lifestyle choice, wedding photography is hard to beat. It’s very lucrative, requires less overhead and a minimal investment of equipment compared with other fields. It is also more insulated from major shifts in the economy. Finally, as a wedding photographer you can live and work anywhere.

Wedding photography is also very seasonal which is a major plus for fine art photographers who like to work hard for part of the year and then take time off to work on personal creative projects.

With all that going for it what’s not to like?

It is physically demanding work and requires superlative people skills. Shoot days are typically 12–16 hours long, with more pressure than just about anything outside of being a conflict photojournalist. In fact, many photojournalists moonlight as wedding photographers as a high-paying alternative source of income. The required photographic skills and abilities to think/respond quickly are remarkably close.

Corbin Gurkin is a wedding photographer who is working at the pinnacle of the profession, shooting exotic destination weddings all over the world for highend clients, celebrities, and national magazines like Town & Country and Martha Stewart. Corbin is a very savvy businesswoman who has built her practice and brand with equal amounts of reasoned strategy, solid business acumen, and creative intuition.

Interview

MJ: So you’re kind of unusual because you’ve been shooting weddings since you were kid a right?

CG: Well, yes I suppose … My first exposure to any form of professional photography was getting a job in high school working for a wedding studio as their production manager, handling albums and print orders, that kind of thing. Eventually they started letting me go on shoots as an assistant. They’d let me bring my camera and shoot a little which was great because it allowed me to get some experience without the pressure.

Later on, when I was in college in New York, my old boss would refer shoots to me and I started to really shoot some things on my own.

MJ: But why weddings? Why did you choose to concentrate on weddings?

CG: It was just a good fit for me. It’s a combination of editorial/lifestyle and fashion photography. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to make my brides look like fashion models, that can get very contrived, but I do like the couture element of the gowns, and the details.

I’m often shooting with the aim of getting the story published so my approach is that I am shooting a lifestyle story for a magazine. I love the feminine aspect of it, and the lighting, which for me is always beautiful natural light.

I toyed with doing other things, I tried being a war photographer/photojournalist for a year or two, doing more intense projects, but I just kept coming back to weddings.

And let’s face it, the money is good.

MJ: It’s true, the money is good. For years I avoided weddings but after the 9/11 attacks in New York there was no work for quite a while so I signed on with a big wedding studio for two years in order to make it through that dry spell. And it was a pretty good fit for me as well, for many of the same reasons you mentioned: It’s kinda like a fashion shoot and I knew how to do that, and kinda like a lifestyle/editorial shoot and I knew how to do that, and a lot like photojournalism, so I had the skills to jump into weddings at a the deep end.

I did it for a couple of years and I was pretty good at it but I didn’t love doing it. I didn’t like having to be so personable all the time, but that comes a lot more naturally to you.

There are those crossovers, but then there are also unique aspects to wedding photography; all the portraits of guests and relatives, the candid photography, room shots, still lifes of floral arrangements, and the formula of shooting for a traditional wedding album. All of that coupled with the fact that a wedding is like a moving freight train. When I do a fashion shoot I can orchestrate things but whenever I shot a wedding I felt like the event dictated what I could do.

CG: Mmmm, yes, but you are describing a more “old school” approach and those aren’t really the kinds of weddings I do.

Because I’m usually shooting with an eye towards publishing I do all the still life photography the day before working with the wedding planner or the magazine’s stylist. One of the reasons wedding planners like to work with me Is because they know they are going to get a lot documentation of their work; detail photographs, like the bouquet, the cake, and the table tops all have to be exquisite and there isn’t enough time on the wedding day to do those photos as well, as they need to be done in order to get the story published in a magazine. By shooting those photos in advance of the wedding day I’m able to concentrate on the other aspects of the story during the actual event.

Hunt-inspired wedding, Ireland, 2013

Corbin Gurkin

Corbin Gurkin

Corbin Gurkin

Corbin Gurkin

If I’m shooting a wedding for Martha Stewart then the planner and the stylist for the magazine and I will shoot for a solid 12 hours the day before. We shoot all inanimate aspects of the story as carefully and perfectly as if it were simply a major editorial still-life shoot.

MJ: So how does it work? Is the magazine hiring you or is the bride hiring you?

CG: It depends, and it can work many different ways. Sometimes the magazine will hire me and the bride will hire an independent photographer. In that case I’m just brought in to shoot the aspects the magazine is interested in, so maybe I’m shooting décor, and the reception, but the other photographer is doing all the candids and family portraiture. We’ll have an agreement with the bride that I get to have the couple exclusively for a half an hour at the perfect time of day.

MJ: Does that get tricky? I’ve been in lots of situations where you are competing with another photographer on set and it can get nasty.

CG: I’m in the position of being the magazine photographer so the editors can step in for me and call the shots a little bit. But that’s also why we shoot so much the day before the wedding day; it allows us to be a little more in the background during the wedding.

In many of these situations the bride is either in publishing, or they’re a celebrity so they have a pretty good sense of what to expect.

MJ: How do you and the magazines find the stories/weddings that are publishable?

CG: When the wedding planner calls me they might know in advance that there is some aspect of the wedding that a magazine will be interested in; maybe there’s a crafts aspect, or a country theme. Or maybe it’s a destination wedding that we think the magazine would want to feature. In that case I’ll pitch it to the magazine.

At this point in my career most of the magazines check in with me periodically to see what’s on the horizon that might be interesting.

MJ: Now that’s interesting, because the magazine is treating you like you are a scout.

CG: Exactly.

MJ: But it also sounds like the wedding planner is actually working like an agent or a photographer’s rep. The planner is a strategic partner in the sense that you are relying on each other.

CG: Very much so; it’s fairly rare for a bride to contact me directly. I only get four or five direct calls or emails a year from brides and then we really have to interview each other to see if I’m the right photographer for them as well as figuring out if it’s a wedding I’m interested in.

Corbin Gurkin

MJ: Does the wedding planner get a percentage?

CG: No but they get all of the photos they need for their portfolio for free and when they hire me they know that I’m going to get all the shots they need for their client as well as their portfolio.

MJ: So you work with a variety of planners and they work with a variety of photographers?

CG: Right, I work with a small handful of planners that I like and the planner will suggest me or another photographer based on the theme of the wedding or the photographic expectations of the bride. I think whenever anyone hires me they are looking for that editorial feel because that’s what I do.

MJ: And the wedding planner tells them what you charge? Do they negotiate your fee?

CG: No but with clients of that caliber they’ve hired the planner to handle it all for them, so the fee is pretty much a given. My clients we’re talking about are pretty high end; the total budget for the wedding is typically in the $150,000—2 million dollar range so my fee is still a fairly small part of the total package.

MJ: It occurs to me that virtually every wedding photographer would kill to be in your position, shooting for Martha Stewart, Town and Country, etc. How did you crack that market?

CG: Well, I definitely studied the publications I was interested in being featured in. I looked really carefully and noted what kinds of photos were needed to flesh out an editorial spread. How were they shooting the scenarios? What photos are necessary? Whether it’s a wedding in Colorado or in Italy there are certain images that every story needs; there’s always a photo of the invitations, there’s always a shot of the wedding favor, that kind of thing.

But honestly I think it’s more a matter of aligning yourself with vendors whose work is representative of the styles you are seeing in those magazines. Because if you are shooting high budget “over the top” New York style weddings, then that won’t do it for most publications, because that’s not the kind of wedding that the magazines are featuring. They want soft, naturally lit, romantic outdoor weddings, so I really thought more about what kinds of weddings I should be shooting that would get me in the door.

Corbin Gurkin

My first published wedding was a very small destination wedding in Paris, but the interesting thing was the invitations, which were really beautifully hand written. So I took an extra day on my own and did beautiful studio shots of the invitations and the cake and all the details. It was that extra effort that got me in the door.

MJ: But you can’t be making much money when you are shooting for a magazine compared to shooting for a private client. I mean magazines pay …

CG: [laughing] Peanuts … right. But you don’t shoot for magazines to make money; you shoot for the magazines for the exposure. If I were to take out an ad in Town & Country it might cost $20,000 and it doesn’t have the same impact or cache as seeing a six-page spread that the magazine hired me to shoot.

MJ: It’s true, when you shoot a story for a magazine the private client sees it as an endorsement of your abilities. It’s a stamp of approval.

But it can work the other way around. When I was shooting a lot of stories on interior design and architecture for magazines like House & Garden, I was often pressured by private clients who were decorators and architects to place their work in the magazines for them. They saw me as the portal to the magazine. In many cases I knew that their work really wasn’t good enough or wasn’t publishable because there wasn’t an editorial “hook.” Do you have brides or planners who want you to shoot their events pressure you to get them into a magazine?

CG: Unfortunately, yes, sometimes a lot of pressure.

What it comes down to is that I know my work is good enough to be in a magazine because it’s already being published regularly, so it comes down to the wedding style. Did you choose black and gold as the colors? If you did, then there’s no chance your wedding is going to be published by Martha Stewart. But another publication might. There has to be something unique and visually interesting and it has to be paired to the right magazine.

MJ: Take me through your week. You are obviously giving up a lot of Saturday nights, but what’s the rest of the week like?

CG: Well, now it’s pretty routine, but in the beginning it was 24/7 back when I was shooting 30 weddings a year but now I’ve set some boundaries and only take about 15 shoots a year.

MJ: Wait! You only shoot 15 weddings a year? You must be turning down a lot of requests.

CG: Yeah, that’s it, and I do turn down a lot of requests. But remember that a lot of my jobs are destination weddings; it could be anywhere in the world, Spain, Italy, Ireland, anywhere. So it’s not just shooting on the day of the wedding, there’s travel time, pre-production, still-life shoots, and processing the files afterward. Each project is usually a four-to-five-day commitment or more.

I also do other small projects that are usually wedding related, like a look-book for a wedding dress designer, or a brochure for a small boutique hotel that is trying to develop a wedding business, that kind of thing.

MJ: It’s true, no one ever thinks about all the time before and after every shoot. I can’t tell you all the writers I’ve worked with over the years who said, “Yeah, your job is easy, all you do now is hand in the photos.” No one who isn’t a photographer has any sense of how much work goes into planning a shoot, or processing and editing the work afterwards.

There’s also the problem that when you take every job that comes along you don’t leave any time free for opportunities. There’s nothing worse than when you have to turn down a great editorial assignment because you are committed to some dinky project that you just took for the money. You are probably smart to make sure you leave a percentage of your weekends free for magazine assignments.

CG: Right, and there’s no point in taking a wedding just for the money that I’m not right for. I only want to do the jobs where I can deliver my best work and have a happy client at the end. Clients need to have the confidence that they have made the best choice they can.

MJ: Do you have assistants, and retouchers that work for you?

CG: I have freelance assistants and a couple of second shooters. For me the processing of the files and editing is as creative as the shoot itself, so I do all that myself after every shoot. I don’t do a lot of retouching; if it’s easy, I do it, but if it’s something tricky I’ll farm it out.

MJ: What kind of gear do you use? You mentioned that you shoot all available light.

CG: I hardly ever touch a light. Maybe for the dancing in a ballroom setting I’ll have an assistant holding a flash high on a light stand, but that’s about it. Or I’ll shoot high ISO black and white and let it go grainy, dreamy, and atmospheric.

I shoot with a Canon 5D and almost exclusively with a 50 mm 1.2. I’m just in love with that lens because it’s so versatile. I might use a wide angle for the church but there are days when I’ve never used anything but the 50 mm.

MJ: Are you shooting any video?

CG: Noooo, not at all! But I do have people I recommend; most of them are arty filmmakers who shoot super 8. I have no interest or skills in shooting video.

MJ: How do you deliver your jobs? Are you delivering digitally?

CG: Yes, but there’s a twist; they can order a digital package as an option, but I feel that presentation is really important in the wedding industry. If I am delivering only digital files I still deliver them in a beautiful custom box with a handwritten tag and beautiful calligraphy. I’ll also include prints of a few of my favorite images.

I don’t want to just upload the images to a website because I want to have a certain amount of control over their first impression of the shoot. If I send them to a website I don’t know what kind of screen they are viewing them on, or even if it’s color corrected. For all I know they could be looking at their wedding images for the first time on an iPhone and I really don’t want that.

I want their first viewing to reflect my care and attention to detail, so I really curate the work. Even the flash drive I deliver the photos on is customized.

MJ: Are you with a stock agency?

CG: Not really. I did sign with a stock agency but I’m not very diligent about keeping it up to date. At this point the magazines know me and call directly with specific requests.

It’s in my contract that I retain all rights to all my images, that I can use anything I shoot for marketing purposes and that I can resell them. The contract also includes standard model releases. So magazines will just call me directly to see if I have any images featuring certain hairdos or interesting floral arrangements, that kind of thing.

On the other hand there are lots of weddings that I shoot where I have to sign non-disclosure agreements. I’ve photographed lots of celebrity weddings that have never seen the light of day, and in fact, the public doesn’t even know that the people were ever married.

Corbin Gurkin

MJ: Thank you so much for your time, this has been terrific, so I’ll end with one last question. If you had to give any advice to an aspiring wedding photographer what would it be?

CG: Instead of getting caught up in large-scale marketing campaigns or falling for ad-sales pitches that may or may not deliver, start off by targeting a few vendors whose work you admire and find a way to collaborate with them. A more personalized approach to getting your name and your work out there has always been my most effective form of advertising.

MJ: Ha! That’s almost verbatim what I tell my students! I love it when my advice is confirmed independently!

Case Study

RACHEL MORRISON: CINEMATOGRAPHER

www.rachelmorrison.com

With the critical and financial success of Fruitvale Station a lot of doors have opened up for Rachel Morrison recently; a young woman who has transitioned in the last few years from being one of the most “promising young” cinematographers of her generation into one of the profession’s emerging masters. Rachel’s “overnight success” as a director of photography was years in the making as she honed her craft shooting TV (with an Emmy nomination) and a series of low-budget indie films.

In the past, photography and cinematography were always considered careers that were clearly distinct; like fraternal twins that were different offspring from a shared egg. There are overlaps in technology, history, aesthetics, and approach, but the visual vocabularies and syntax for each medium are unique.

Still photographs, whether a news photo of an event, a product shot in a catalog, or an image of a sharecropper’s cabin, are made to be contemplated. Photographers draw an edit frame around a piece of reality and a particular slice of time in order to direct our attention to something they think we should contemplate. Photographs draw their power from their ability to describe “things” and the photographer’s art is (traditionally) in the way he or she describes those things. Reduced to its most basic components, a photograph is a collection of nouns (what the photographer is choosing to describe) and adjectives (the creative choices employed in the way they are being described).

Cinema is built from sequences of images that describe action and movement. The motion-picture camera serves as a surrogate audience and directs the viewer’s attention to moments and successive events that are significant; whether it’s following a line drive to center field, or the look of horror as a ship’s captain watches a mammoth shark bite off the end of his boat. If still photographs are built on nouns and adjectives, cinema’s expression is built with verbs and adverbs.

Cinematography has long been a separate career track for other reasons. Most notably, the culture of cinema is rooted in its collaborative nature with big crews, long production schedules, and big budgets. Photography has always been a profession for lone wolves. With the advent of hybrid HDSLRs and tablet devices it’s rare for any young photographer to not be shooting video and creating across the mediums.

Director of photography Rachel Morrison on the set of Cake

Interview

MJ: You’ve been busy!

RM: Yes, I’ve been very busy. It’s been incredible, I can’t complain.

MJ: You’re an interesting person for me to interview because you are one of the very few students to graduate from NYU with a double major in both Film and Photography, I recall that you had a stronger concentration in photography. But then you went to the American Film Institute for graduate school. What did the experience at AFI do for you?

RM: The way you work your way up and make a name for yourself as a film student on the cinematography track is to DP student thesis films. Some of those kids are shooting 20 films a year and they graduate with very accomplished cinematography reels. As a double major I probably spread myself a little too thin and only started to make a name for myself as a DP in my senior year.

I graduated and I was actually pursuing both careers, working as a PA on films, taking my photo portfolio around to magazines, that kind of thing. Then I started getting more and more cinematography jobs shooting documentary. It was going really well. Then after 9/11, the economy tanked and all that work dried up. I realized that my career as it was couldn’t survive an economic downturn like that. To earn a living, I found myself getting sucked into the black hole of reality television. And I didn’t want to end up there.

Director of photography Rachel Morrison on the set of Cake

I had a friend, another NYU grad, who was miles ahead of me as a cinematographer. He had applied to AFI, gotten in and felt it was a worthwhile step. I guess I felt that if he, with so much more experience, felt it was a smart move, then maybe I should look into it.

MJ: You shot The Hills TV show for a while.

RM: Yes, if you aren’t a trust fund kid then you graduate from school with a mountain of debt. The Hills was a great way to pay off all those student loans and buy myself the time to shoot arty, low-budget films that were more creative.

MJ: What, exactly did you learn at AFI? I ask the question because when I look at the films you’ve shot, they strike as … consummately crafted.

Speaking as a photographer, and watching the films from that perspective, it seems like you really know exactly what you are trying to achieve in every shot and exactly how to make it happen.

RM: Well I think it was a combination of technical skills and confidence. They teach you craft for sure, but then there’s also just the experience of shooting a lot.

The fact is, starting out as a female DP—one of very few—I really have to have a strong skill set. If I’m not in complete control of my craft, or speak with confidence, then I’m going to get second-guessed every step of the way.

I learned a lot at AFI; for example, I learned a lot more about lighting specifically for film. Most of my lighting experience as a photography student was using strobes. I had to adapt my lighting repertoire and style to hot lights (continuous source lighting).

I also had to learn how to work with bigger crews on bigger sets.

MJ: [laughing] The reason I ask is because I had a Rachael Morrison film festival this weekend in preparation for this interview and of course I watched Fruitvale Station, The Sound of My Voice and Any Day Now, and while they are all beautiful, they are also all poignant dramas, shot largely in low light, or simulated available light, with a lot of night scenes and I wondered, “Could she shoot a big broad comedy with lots of effects?”

Then I discovered Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, which is a big broad comedy with lots of effects and it’s easily as well crafted as any of the quieter, dramatic movies that you are known for, but that movie required a cinematographer with a very big bag of tricks because you had the challenge of imitating a lot of different lighting environments and using the camera for comic effect. Based on all the other films I’d watched I was curious to see if you could pull it off, but you did great job on that!

I mention it only because when I went back to film school and toyed with the idea of switching into cinematography, part of the appeal was the fact that cinematography requires you to have that kind of versatility.

RM: Well that movie was a pretty strange detour for me because I am drawn to scripts that require a more naturalistic feel to the lighting. It was fun to shoot, but it’s certainly at the opposite end of my wheelhouse. That is one of the big differences between being a still photographer and movies. As a still shooter you get known for a “look,” and that’s why people hire you, but as a DP, the narrative trumps everything.

A scene from Fruitvale Station, starring Michael B. Jordan as Oscar Grant.

From Little Accidents.

MJ: Including the ego of the DP …

RM: Yes, because you want the audience to connect with the emotional life of the characters and the story, the cinematography should serve the script. I do love dark dramas, but being versatile to the demands of the story—and the director’s vision—is key for any cinematographer who wants to succeed in this business.

And remember, Any Day Now and Fruitvale Station, while narrative films, are based on true stories about real people. We shot Fruitvale on the actual train platform where the event happened; the hole in the concrete from the actual bullet that killed Oscar Grant is still there and literally underneath Michael B. Jordan (the actor) in the scene where Oscar is killed.

The story, the characters … everything I do is to support those stories, and those truths. I don’t want the viewer to be watching Oscar’s death (the main protagonist in Fruitvale Station) and be thinking, “Wow, that’s a beautiful shot.” It’s not about me, the story is bigger than I am.

MJ: But as a still photographer I think that’s actually the appeal of cinematography. To have a successful career as a still photographer there’s often a bit of showing off involved. I think a lot of what drives the style of many still photographers is in service to our own careers. We are most often hired to make splashy pictures. I think that cinematography requires an allegiance to the script, the lighting is often more natural. I think one of the hallmarks of a great cinematographer is that he/she knows when to hold back.

I think there’s something noble about that that I honestly envy.

RM: Right, I mean we are trying to get the audience to suspend their disbelief. We don’t want the viewer to be aware that they are looking at a screen. I want them to feel like they are walking in the protagonist’s shoes, living another life for the duration of the film.

In a still photograph the viewer is always separate from the image, it’s a print on a wall or a picture on a page. With cinema, you have the chance to immerse yourself in the experience.

MJ: Another thing that is really different from stills is the size of the crew and the level of collaboration involved. Early in my career that was something that scared me away from film because I thought I would just be a cog in the machine; now I think differently: I think it must be great to work with so many smart people.

A still frame from Little Accidents

I was struck when I was watching The Sound of My Voice, because Brit Marling wrote the script, played the lead, and produced the movie, even though she was brand new to acting, and film in general. That was a very smart movie, written by a very smart young woman with a script that was very achievable on a low budget. The logistics were quite simple, just a few locations, a strong script, and solid actors. You shot that all on a Canon 5D Mark II right?

RM: Actually mostly 7Ds because it was too hard to for my assistants to accurately pull focus with a sensor as big as the 5D, but you’re right, the collaborative nature of film is one of the most enjoyable parts of my career.

As a result, I definitely do my homework on the other people that I’ll be working with. The script always comes first, but a film is the sum of all the parts, so I’m looking a little more carefully at all the other players now than I did when I was starting out.

When you commit to a film you are tying up a big chunk of your life. So I want to be sure the project is worthwhile and that all the other people on set are as committed, and competent, as I am. I also want to make sure that the film is going to have a life; that it’s going to be distributed and seen. If the film never sees the light of day, or the darkness of a theater, then it’s not worth the time, money, and effort that it takes to make it. It’s a bit like a tree falling in a forest … it can be quite heartbreaking when you put your heart into it and no one ever gets to see the work. If a director is difficult, but talented, then I can usually push through for the sake of the art.

But you’re absolutely right about the collaborative nature of the process being one of the best parts of the job. I love it. If I had to pick any single reason I chose cinematography over still photography it’s because of the collaboration.

When I was pursuing a still career I was drawn to photojournalism and I was specifically interested in conflict photography. I admire those photographers, but that’s a lonely life and an isolated existence.

For the film I’m working on now I have seven people in my camera department, seven or eight grips, and another seven people on my electric crew. Those are all people I hire and they report directly to me. We’ve worked together on five or six projects at this point and they’re my team, we’re like family, and I love getting to go to work with them.

MJ: Let’s talk about the process. Fruitvale was a breakout movie for you and many of the other people involved. How much time were you able to devote to that project?

RM: It was actually very, very quick. We shot that for under a million dollars. I had three weeks prep, which is short.

Then we had 20 shoot days. Some of those were nights; when we were shooting on the platform. We had to shoot semi-guerilla style; we had permission to shoot there, but it was still a controversial story, so nobody wanted the press to get wind of it. We could only shoot on the platform on three days from 1 a.m. till 5 a.m., and those were all crowded scenes with lots of actors and extras. Very difficult to manage.

MJ: So that whole scene, the pivotal scene of the film, all the different angles, all the action, all the retakes, was shot in less than 12 hours?

RM: Part of the job is to work within the circumstances and time constraints that I am given.

MJ: And two months total?

RM: That was a movie on a very tight budget and schedule; you usually get a little more time.

I just finished a film with Jennifer Aniston called Cake. That movie had a bigger budget—about 7 million—so I had five weeks prep, and then we were on set for five weeks. If I ever get to shoot a studio feature … that kind of project can be a six-month commitment.

MJ: Exactly my point; if I get a big shoot, well that’s maybe a week or two of my time. Even if it goes badly, I can stand anybody, any client or art director, for a few days …

RM: That’s why the script is paramount for me. If I love the story I’ll pretty much endure anything and anybody, but if I’m not committed to the story it becomes very difficult to go to work in the morning.

MJ: What about commercials? Are you shooting commercials?

On the set of Cake with Jennifer Aniston

A still frame from The Sound of My Voice

RM: Yes—I’m shooting commercials specifically so I can be pickier about the scripts I take on.

MJ: Because they pay so much more?

RM: They do pay well! And they are fun. You know, you’re in, you’re out, all in a few days. You can be showier, so in that sense it’s a little more like being a still photographer and maybe that’s one reason so many still photographers can make the jump to commercials so easily. There are lots of DPs who just shoot commercials for all those reasons.

MJ: Was it hard to make the transition?

RM: Commercials are interesting because you have to tell a story very quickly. I feel like it just helps my career to have the broadest skill set possible and there are different challenges in commercials that make me more versatile.

It’s a little like starting over, but I think it’s easier to move from features to commercials than the other way around. I like shooting them, but the main reason I want to do them is so I can be choosier about the narrative projects I take. If I were to give advice to a young person who wanted to have a career like mine I’d tell them to go after features first.

MJ: I’m also interested in the technical aspects of all the different gear you have to work with. On The Sound of My Voice you shot with Canon 7D, on Any Day Now you shot on a Red Cinema Camera, on Fruitvale you shot film on an Arri Super16 camera. What drives the choice of camera, digital or film? How do you and the director make that choice based on the script? And how do you get to know such a vast array of very intricate equipment?

RM: While you do have to be versatile, you don’t have to know every camera intimately. You need to know how to illustrate a story through light and composition, but the technical details such as the internal menu settings of each camera are actually the responsibility of your camera assistants.

When it comes to camera choices, such as 16 vs 35 mm, digital vs. film—that’s a series of conversations between the director and myself.

Most often it comes down to “What’s the best camera we can afford?” I think any DP you talk to will probably tell you that given a choice they would always prefer to shoot film. We shot super 16 mm on Fruitvale because the director, Ryan Coogler, and I both agreed early on that we wanted the grittier look and grain of film for a semi-documentary feel. We had to fight for it because of budget issues, but it was something neither of us were prepared to back down on.

MJ: How many scripts are you reading right now, and what are you looking for in a script?

RM: Well, I am a “dark drama girl” [laughs] but at this point I also want to make sure I’m taking projects that will be seen and critically well-received. I’m not sure there’s a big audience for the scripts I’m the most drawn to, so now I’m looking for scripts that have some kind of crossover appeal.

MJ: But looking at your work, if I were a director I’d certainly think you would have been a good choice for August: Osage County or Nebraska and those had mainstream releases with star casts. Even though both of those movies look very different from most of your films—Osage County is full of hot daylight scenes for example—I have no doubt that you could have pulled that off.

RM: Absolutely, they’re the kind of projects I’m looking for, but even those projects can be difficult to predict. The movie I’m working on now, Cake, has a star cast, Jennifer Aniston, Anna Kendrick, Sam Worthington, etc., but it’s not a typical Jennifer Aniston movie. It’s a drama with some dark, comedic moments. I think it will do well, but you’re never certain.

A production still with Rachel rigging for a car shot from Cake

MJ: Can we talk a little more about the toys? I love equipment and part of the appeal of cinematography for me has always been the opportunity to work with all the gear that you guys use. What specifically did you learn at AFI?

RM: Well, AFI is known for its cinematography so it attracts all the best contemporary DPs to come and teach lighting seminars, discuss their techniques, etc. It was very hands on. So naturally we went through all the different cameras, shooting film tests, lighting tests, etc.

As a student you shoot three short films your first year and then a longer thesis film your second year—I actually shot two films during my second year.

MJ: Did you apprentice with anyone?

RM: No, and that might be my one regret. I never had a mentor, so I’m always discovering things as I go. Every time I walk onto a new, bigger set, it’s the biggest set I’ve been on. I never got to work on a big studio film as an assistant.

A still frame from Cake

But the great thing is that as I’ve moved up in my career a number of the established DPs view me as a peer now, so I feel like I can call them and ask for advice, and they’ve been very generous.

The other thing I’ve realized is that as I move up, and the budgets get bigger, the people you are working with are also getting better, more confident, and more experienced. That makes my life so much easier. When you’re working on a low-budget indie movie with a first-time director, or a relatively green production designer, you have to take on a lot of responsibilities that aren’t yours. In a lot of ways, more money makes my job easier because I have the budget to hire the best crew I can afford.

When I was shooting Cake I lucked into a very experienced camera assistant, Zoran Veselic, who has been an A.C. for longer than I’ve been alive. He’s worked with everyone—all the great directors, all the great DPs—he’s a wonderfully talented, sweet person. Having someone like him on your crew only makes your work better.

MJ: I know what you mean; sometimes when I am nervous about a big shoot I’ll look around at my crew and realize that they are all there to make me look good and there’s no way I can fail when I have so many good people rooting for me.

Do you want to direct eventually?

RM: Mmmm, that’s a question I’ve been tossing around. I never thought I wanted to direct, it wasn’t in my plan, but I just got the opportunity to direct an episode for John Ridley’s new TV show called American Crime and I’m actually really excited about it. I’ve also got a couple of scripts for features that I’ve been asked about directing.

I’m torn, because I know people are always talking about how few female directors there are, but there are even fewer female directors of photography. I almost feel a moral obligation to make my mark as a DP. I also love shooting, so while I’m sure I will be directing from time to time, I’m also sure that I’ll always be shooting.

MJ: What’s the best part of your day?

RM: Every day it’s something new. Whether its closing down a freeway to shoot a stunt, panning across a beautiful landscape at sunrise, or simply when I look around at all the incredible cast and crew coming together to tell the same story, I can’t tell you how often I find myself thinking, “I can’t believe I get paid to do this.”

Case Study

LARRY ZINK: VICE PRESIDENT, PHOTO STUDIO AND PRE-PRESS, MACY’S PHOTO STUDIO

IN-HOUSE STUDIO/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHY POSITIONS

While certain niches of the photography profession have been devastated by widespread cuts in staff positions (most notably newspapers and photojournalism) the growth in e-commerce and online catalog sales have brought about a resurgence of staff positions for studio and still life photographers. Retailers like Ikea, Target, and many large chain stores employ veritable armies of photographers who are always busy shooting new products for online sales and print catalogs. Smaller retailers often use commercial studio/production houses like Sandbox Studios with their own staff of in-house photographers, assistants, and retouchers.

Freelance photographers might snub their noses at in-house positions because the work has the reputation for being boring and repetitive (as indeed any field in photography can be) but the reality is that many staff positions offer as much creative freedom and encouragement as typical freelance gigs; all while offering the job security, and benefits, of a traditional nine to five job.

A tour of the Macy’s photo studio in Brooklyn has become a regular stop for the students in my Advanced Lighting class at NYU. As a longtime freelancer I was as snobbish as anyone about the quality and creativity of in-house studio work. Later, as several of my ex-assistants later went on to work at Macy’s I was forced to reevaluate my prejudices as I watched them build their portfolios and grow into strong photographers as employees of the Macy’s photo studio.

Larry Zink has been employed by Macy’s off and on for almost 30 years, starting as a photographer’s assistant and rising through the ranks to become the vice-president in charge of the photo studio and pre-press. In short, he runs the entire 100,000 square foot studio with a veritable army of photographers, assistants, stylists, retouchers, and production managers who all report to him. He oversees everything, from product photography, digital retouching, inventory, to pre-press quality control, All this, and he still finds the time to shoot photographs when the studio is at its busiest.

The studio is fully digital, and owns over 50 Phase-one digital backs. Indeed every piece of equipment, whether it be a lens, light, or a computer, is state of the art. But to a knowledgeable observer there are clever old school studio photographer tricks in evidence as well, a reflection of the vast experience and versatility of the typical Macy’s staffer. For the most part, each photographer works in his or her own space, with a regular staff of assistants, digital technicians, and stylists. Walking through the studio, it doesn’t feel like a factory, but like a friendly photo-village, where 30 independent photographers each have their own separate studios and are free to practice their craft. For the most part, they are allowed to work as they wish and employ whatever techniques they choose.

On a recent tour I was able to catch up and ask Larry how it all goes together.

Larry Zink

The work coming out of Macy’s in-house photo studio is as creative as anything in the market

Macy’s Photo Studio

Interview

MJ: So the first thing my students and readers will want to know is: How does someone get a job here?

LZ: Honestly, it’s not easy because we have almost no turnover. The people we hire tend to stay because it’s really a great job. Sometimes we’ll hire an established photographer who has a unique skill set, like a lot of experience shooting jewelry for instance. But for the most part we start everyone as a freelance assistant when we are really busy. If we really like them and they are reliable, hard working, etc, then we’ll hire them as a full-time assistant.

The Macy’s studio uses a nice mix of high tech and old school techniques. The photographer is shooting with a state of the art camera while the light is diffused through a simple wooden frame covered in tough frost

Macy’s Photo Studio

MJ: One of the things that has most impressed me about Macy’s is the way the studio has really encouraged and supported the careers of many of my NYU alumni and former assistants. How does that work?

LZ: We do annual portfolio reviews with all our assistants. We expect our assistants to be shooting and building their portfolios with the long-term goal of becoming photographers, either with us or with someone else. No one should be viewing a job as an assistant as a career; it’s a paid education.

If I had to generalize, I’d say that when someone starts as a freelance assistant they will eventually discover an area of specialization that they enjoy, it might be shooting furniture in room sets, still life, jewelry, or digital file prep for instance. Then they’ll work as an assistant to one of our photographers or retouchers in that field. The only part of the studio where we don’t have an in-house specialist is in fashion. We have two fashion studios, but we hire freelancers for fashion and they shoot here in one of our fashion studios.

MJ: It is a huge operation; how does the whole workflow work?

LZ: We get a sketch or a series of layouts from one of the art directors at our Herald Square offices (in midtown Manhattan). From there I’ll assign the project to one of the photographers or a team, based on their current workload and abilities.

Let’s use a cookware catalog as an example; maybe there are 40 pieces in the catalog.

If it seems like things are going too slowly and we might not make our deadline, then I might need to assign an additional photographer or step in myself in order to help out. From there the photos go to digital retouching/pre-press for final preparation.

Once everything is done the files (photos) are sent back to the art director for approval.

MJ: Suppose the art director doesn’t like the shots?

LZ: Then they mark up the files and tell us exactly what they don’t like or what needs to be changed, and we reshoot if necessary.

Sets are built on site at the Macy’s studios. Stylists carefully prepare (iron, fold, stack, etc.) everything to minimize post-production retouching

Macy’s Photo Studio

MJ: Yes, I notice that almost every photographer has multiple setups going.

LZ: Right, it might take a day or two for the art director to get back with specific feedback on a particular shot so the photographer will leave the shot set up until it’s approved.

MJ: I noticed that some of the photographers are doing their own retouching and compositing (a technique of combining different exposures of the same scene in order to optimize the lighting or create deep depth of field).

LZ: All of our photographers are fully capable of doing their own retouching but it’s seldom time efficient, we need them to be shooting, so most of the retouching you’ll see in the shooting studios is just a form of quick compositing in order to get the lighting right, or to make sure the retoucher can stack the focus in a jewelry photo. The photographer is responsible for making sure the digital retouchers have the images they need to assemble the final product, but the real nitty-gritty of retouching is done by one of our specialists.

MJ: So what actually gets shot here?

LZ: Pretty much everything Macy’s requires except some of the very high-end fashion advertising. We obviously do all the catalog and online photos, and much of that is fairly workaday but it still needs to be done well. But we also do a lot of high-end creative work, like all the advertising photos for still life and home furnishings. Billboards, subway, magazine, and bus advertising is all done here. We also do advertorials for magazine spreads, which is really fun and very creative.

Recently we were asked to do some experimental video work by one of our art directors who just wanted to test the potential for video in jewelry sales and we totally blew him away on that project. Those shoots are now running as video walls in the Herald Square store.

One of the Macy’s jewelry photographers checks his photos against the art director’s desired layout

Macy’s Photo Studio

A digital retoucher prepares final files for printing. Retouchers often work in darkened rooms in order to retain their fine color vision and avoid eye-strain.

Any freelance studio photographer who Is actually making a living Is going to be doing a certain amount of routine work mixed with great/creative assignments. Our people get a very similar mix of both catalog work and the fun creative projects that a lot of freelancers dream of doing.

MJ: One thing I’ve noticed as we’ve been walking around is a very interesting mix of old school and high tech. All the gear is completely state of the art, but I still see lots of the photographers using simple canvas stretchers with diffusion material stapled in.

LZ: Lighting techniques are influenced a lot by trends in editorial photography. Ten years ago a very highly stylized and controlled lighting was in vogue. Now the trend is towards a very broad and open daylight look, and that kind of light is more easily controlled using some of the older, or more classic techniques. But what might be more interesting is to think about the versatility we demand from our photographers because they have to be able to respond to those trends.

MJ: That’s very true, actually. If any one of your photographers were running their own practice they would be more constrained to a particular look or style defined by their own brand marketing. There are tons of photographers out there who only know “one thing” and that’s all they do, but working here probably demands a much bigger skill set.

LZ: Exactly and that’s also one of the things I take into consideration when I assign things. I probably wouldn’t assign one of our jewelry specialists to do a furniture project where they had to build a set, even though I know they could do it. I’m sure any of my people can do anything, but it wouldn’t be time efficient. On the other hand if you have someone who is really good at shooting cookware you don’t want him or her to be stuck just shooting pots and pans every day.

I want the photographer to be able to do the job, do it well, and do it efficiently, but if you assign them the same things all the time it’s boring, which isn’t good for anyone. My job is to manage a staff of creative people, and part of what keeps someone creative is to constantly feed them fresh challenges. I try to mix it up.

MJ: You mentioned that you’ll step in and shoot if a photographer or a project is running behind schedule—how tight are the deadlines? What are the time pressures?

LZ: In general things are planned very far in advance. We are aware of the seasonal demands of a retail operation and we plan accordingly. However, we do have very real time constraints. Our printing presses need to be reserved very far in advance; if the photography isn’t done in time we could end up paying for press time that isn’t being used. Missing a press deadline would be a very expensive problem.

MJ: The retouching and pre-press aspect of the studio is a little harder for the average person to understand—exactly what is happening and how do they fit into the whole flow?

LZ: Well, of course they are an integral part of the process but, yes, I’m sure it does just look like a lot of people looking at computer screens.

There’s the obvious and traditional photo retouching, eliminating dust spots, hair “fly-aways,” or smoothing a model’s skin, that kind of thing, but then there’s other work that is more specific to a genre: We shoot a lot of jewelry very close up where there is almost no depth of field, so we might shoot 17 different exposures of a necklace with different points of focus and all of those images are composited to “stack” the focus and make the image into one seamless image that has focus throughout.

The pre-press preparation also falls under our jurisdiction; in that case we are taking the photographer’s RGB files (the digital photos) and converting them to CMYK (the color space used for offset printing). There’s a color shift that happens when you make the conversion, so we make sure that the CMYK files are as close as possible in translation to the original vision of the photographer. That’s a fairly seamless process with our in-house photographers because they understand the process, but it can be a challenge with some of the freelancers who shoot our fashion because they seldom deal with those issues in their regular practice. They might want to make something look cool and arty, but they don’t understand the offset printing process, so we’ll take their original RAW files and then, using their processed files as examples, we’ll rework the RAW files and reprocess them to conform to a color space that the printers can actually reproduce in a printed form.

MJ: Fashion is the only area where you hire freelancers—why is that?

LZ: There are probably a lot of reasons, but one that I can think of off the top of my head is that good fashion photography is largely about a communication and connection between the photographer and the model, and we need a bigger talent pool to draw from in fashion because we are a department store. If you were a retailer who was shooting the same kind of fashion all the time, like L.L. Bean, then you would want the “look” to be very consistent. But our fashion needs are more diverse because Macy’s carries so many different kinds of fashion.

We might need to shoot a fashion catalog with kids’ clothes, but we don’t do that often enough to employ someone full-time who just has a special rapport with kids and knows stylists who are skilled at styling children’s clothes. On the other hand if you are shooting couture fashion, then you need a different kind of photographer with a different kind of team. So we hire freelancers who have unique skill sets, and they bring in their own teams of assistants and stylists. We’ll have one of our own digital techs and our studio manager on set as well just to make sure everything goes smoothly.

MJ: As an employer, what are you looking for in a young photographer that might come to you looking for a job? Do you want to see a whole portfolio of product photography?

LZ: Probably not, although it would show me that they were interested in the work. But it would probably be pretty difficult for someone fresh out of school to impress me with product photography they did for a college assignment.

What I want to see is creativity, a strong personal vision, and a solid work ethic that is evidenced in their portfolio. What I really want to see is their fine art portfolio. I can teach someone how to light a stainless steel pot, but I can’t teach them how to think outside of the box, how to be resourceful, or how to be imaginative. That has to come from somewhere in them.

Working with very small objects involves extremely shallow depth of field. Photos like this are typically composited from many individual exposures in order to get everything in focus

Macy’s Photo Studio

Macy’s Photo Studio

Macy’s Photo Studio

Case Study

HANK WILLIS THOMAS: GALLERY ARTIST

www.hankwillisthomas.com/ www.jackshainman.com/

Like a few of the younger photographers featured in this book Hank Willis Thomas is one of my ex-students. He also worked for me as one of my assistants from approximately 1998 to 2000.

I mention this because any of us who knew Hank as a 19-year-old student had no doubt that he would be successful. He had all the ingredients: he was smart and dedicated, and had an infectious, good-natured attitude that bordered on goofy. You just couldn’t help but like the guy. He was also extremely resourceful, which as a location photographer is a quality I particularly value in my assistants. Whenever we encountered a seemingly insoluble problem on a shoot Hank would just chew on it like a pitbull until it was solved. That tenacity would serve him well later in life.

So the surprise, at least for me, is not that he is so successful, but what he is successful at, and how he got there.

In the past ten years Hank Willis Thomas has established himself as one of the pre-eminent artists of his generation with over 40 solo exhibitions worldwide. In 2008, Aperture published a monograph of his work entitled Pitch Blackness. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, to name a few.

His collaborative multimedia projects like Question Bridge: Black Males and Truth Booth have traveled the world and been featured at various international film festivals including Sundance and the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Hank’s work has branched off from pure photography in the traditional sense. He is now probably better classed a conceptual artist who uses photography, though he still makes photographs when it’s appropriate to the idea. However, you can still see his photographic background in all of his work whether it is sculpture, video, or installation (as one of his old teachers it always pleases me to see that his craftsmanship is top-notch).

I caught up with Hank in his studio as he was preparing for his fifth solo exhibition at the prestigious Jack Shainman Gallery in New York’s Chelsea art district.

Hank Willis Thomas Crossroads, 2012, digital c-print and plexi with Lumisty film

Hank Willis Thomas in collaboration with Sanford Biggers.

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Interview

MJ: So I wanted to talk to you because you are one of the few people I know who is making a living purely as an artist. That’s the dream for so many young photographers but until recently it really wasn’t a possibility. For my generation the number of photographers who could actually make a living purely on fine-art sales could probably be counted on two hands.

In a way, you are living the dream of many young artists. You get up every morning and just make art. But sitting here in your studio, it’s also apparent that you have a pretty big operation here. You have two studios in midtown Manhattan, and how many employees do you have?

HWT: Four full-time, and four or five freelancers, and the studio … It’s not smart for me to carry the overhead of the studio, but I’ve been looking in Brooklyn and I can’t find anything that’s appreciably better for the money. Real estate in New York is insane.

I have hundreds of thousands of dollars in overhead. I think our operating budget was $800,000–900,000 last year. Some of that was commissions, some of it was grants, and some of it was actual art sales, but once you pay for everything, there’s not much in terms of actual profits.

MJ: One of the other people I interviewed for the book was our (mutual) accountant Rick Glass. Of course, Rick had many admonitions about the way all of us run our careers.

While Rick thoroughly disapproves of the way most artists/photographers do business I don’t know if he would disapprove of the way you are running your business. You might not be making as much “profit” as you should be, but you are establishing the value of your work and creating a unique market for the work you produce.

I think it’s obvious that your work is very expensive to produce and of course you are splitting the sale price with the gallery so even if a piece sells for a mid-five-figure amount it really doesn’t amount to a commensurate amount of profit when you consider the cost of producing the piece and running the business. And it’s very apparent when you walk into the studio that you are running a business. You are in the business of making art.

HWT: One of the things I’ve come to realize is that as you become successful you have to adjust your thinking about what you should do with your money.

My goal in the beginning was like most young photographers; to spend everything I could on my work and use the deductions to minimize my taxes. That’s the freelancer’s mentality. That’s fine in the sense that you get to make great work.

Hank Willis Thomas Football and Chain, 2011 Digital c-print

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Clipboards on the studio wall keep track of the progress of all Hank’s scheduled exhibitions for the year.

But as your career progresses you have new problems and priorities. If you want to buy an apartment in New York you have to show substantial income, so one of the goals now is that we are trying to restructure the business so that my financial stability is reflected on paper.

MJ: Yes, I think that’s one of the basic problems I’ve identified as I’ve been writing the book: We all start as amateurs; no doctor starts as an amateur. At some point it becomes a business, but we have no training in how to run a business.

HWT: Exactly. This is fundamental; the other problem is that visual artists, and dancers in particular, would gladly pay to do their job. In fact, we all pay to do for many years before we become professionals.

I’m like, “Wait, I’ve been paying to do this, and now someone wants to pay me to do it? Great! Okay, just pay me enough so I can keep doing it!” That’s where the challenge comes in.

MJ: That’s great, and you’re right. I forgot that we do pay to do it for many years before we become professionals. I had been spending every cent I had on being a photographer for decades before I ever got a job.

But the other part of the problem is that as we make more money the scale of what we want to accomplish gets bigger and bigger

HWT: And for us “profit” is the ability to do those things, not the actual money. For most business owners that’s the money that would go into your bank account or retirement plan.

We get used to living from one big check to the next, which is frightening because the art market is volatile and it can crash.

Art school does a great job of teaching you how to become successful, but no one teaches you what to do once you achieve it. How do you do any long-term planning? Businesses project themselves into the future, they set short-term goals, and then strategize about how to capitalize on reaching those goals.

Artists?! We’re like, “Wow, wasn’t that crazy? Can you believe I just did that thing? That was awesome!”

MJ: [laughing] Yes!

But I have to keep the conversation on track. Because we know each other so well I have to make sure your story is coherent to someone reading the book.

Simply put: How did you get where you are now?

HWT: I recently asked someone how he had managed to stay married for 35 years and he said he wanted to have a T-shirt made that said, “Too stupid to quit.” That might be a good example of how I got here.

I think part of being an artist, in general, is being ridiculous. It’s saying, “If I spend all my time doing this thing, that nobody else cares about, maybe somebody will eventually care about it and that might lead other people to care.”

That’s a ridiculous way to live your life!

I once asked my father how he had been able to accomplish all of the things that he had done and his answer was that he had an irrational idea of what he was capable of.

One of the things that I say to young artists now is: don’t be realistic. Being realistic is the last thing that will help your career. Being diligent and impractical is a big advantage.

Going to school for photography at the time I went was probably both the best and worst time I could have studied photography.

Hank Willis Thomas, Raise Up, 2014, bronze 112.2 × 9.84 inches (285 × 25 cm)

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

It was the worst because, by the time I graduated, everything I had learned technically about the medium was irrelevant. My favorite part of photography was the darkroom. I liked the chemicals, the burning and dodging, I liked the solitude, I liked digging through my contact sheets, and the precision of the decisive moment. It was a zen experience of having a relationship with a moment.

At school I started to think about how what was going on outside of the camera’s frame was just as important as what was going on in the frame of the camera. My work now is still influenced by all those ideas because it’s still all about framing and context.

What I learned in my undergrad experience was how to think, how to see, and how to consider the world.

But then after graduation, first when I was working with you, and later working as production assistant on feature films, I learned how to think on the fly. Nonstop.

In that environment you are just making stuff up in the moment; “You have fifteen minutes to light the shot, get this person in, get them out. Check everything, their makeup their wardrobe, make sure the aperture is correct!”

I think it’s probably akin to being an emergency room doctor; making quick decisions and having to live with the consequences of those decisions

MJ: You know it’s fascinating because one of my other assistants at that time who also worked with us went on to become a trauma surgeon. In his commencement address from medical school he spoke specifically about how his background in photography trained him to make the kind of split-second decisions that he has to make in the emergency room.

HWT: Really? I’d love to see that.

MJ: I’ll send you a copy.

HWT: I still love that part of it the most. Walking into a room, looking at the obstacles, seeing what obstacles can be used to your advantage. Sometimes you remember the lighting scenario better than you do the person who just photographed!

Honestly, I probably went to grad school because I didn’t have any ambition. I was a decent photographer but I was more comfortable just being an assistant.

I had nothing else to do so I applied to CCA and the University of New Mexico but I really didn’t know what grad school was about.

As you know, as I was in the process of applying to grad school my cousin was murdered. It shifted things for me; I had applied to grad school in a way that seems pretty frivolous in retrospect, but by the time I was accepted knew I had to change things about myself and use the experience to do something … significant.

This is a scale model of the Jack Shainman Gallery with thumbnail images showing the placement of the 101 photographs that will be included in Hank’s next gallery show

A Portrait of Two American Artists as Young Negro Scholars, 2008

Lamda Print

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

I remember photographing at his funeral and there was no picture that could encompass that emotion or that moment. That was when I stopped being a photographer in earnest.

When I ended up in grad school shortly afterward I felt like I needed to make art that meant something. I wasn’t sure what that was. But I definitely had a mission that I hadn’t had before.

MJ: It seemed like you got a lot more serious. Like maybe you had a sense of your own mortality and that you had things to accomplish in your lifetime.

HWT: Well, you said something to me that really pissed me off at the time. Something I’ll never forget …

You said, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but this is going to make you a better artist.”

MJ: [laughing] Oh God, I am such an [expletive deleted]! I really said something that insensitive? Actually, I can imagine myself saying exactly that, so I’m sure I did, but my God what a jerk I am!

But I think there are lots of stories like that in the history of art. It’s not that I think artists have to work from pain or suffering, but I do think we have things we want to accomplish and sometimes we realize that time is short. I also think that a lot of artists discover their true voice when they are speaking to one very specific person, and it’s often someone who isn’t alive.

HWT: [laughing as well] Hey, I don’t think you were wrong! I just think it probably wasn’t the right time for me to hear it.

But that statement did haunt me for a long time.

MRJ: Well, I think there’s a mythology about the tortured artist, and I don’t think your work is motivated by pain, far from it. In fact I think a lot of it is really humorous and one of its strengths is how clearly your sense of humor comes through. But I think that after Songha [Hank’s cousin] died there was big shift in how much more serious you got about your career.

HWT: I think so as well. But I also think his murder limited me as well because I think I felt pressure, a burden almost, to achieve a certain level of … respectability.

Songha was like my big brother. We were raised together. He was older than me, cooler than me. He was the front man and I was in the background, and a little sloppy. So when he passed I felt like I had to step it up.

So when I went on to grad school I was in this strange place. I was exposed to a lot of new ideas, but I was also in mourning.

Then, after a year and a half I woke up and I suddenly felt different, lighter. I realized that I had been in mourning for almost two years, and I was about to get my MFA and I felt like it was too soon. I had been in a fog for almost my entire time in grad school.

So I decided to get a second master’s degree in Critical Studies, mainly as a way to buy myself more time to work. Which basically meant that I had PhD quality time to do my work.

MJ: So you went to grad school where you did a body of work and that culminated in your first show at Jack Shainman Gallery. A lot of the work in that show was about Songha and his murder, but how did you get that show? How did you establish your gallery connection?

HWT: Well, that’s the thing about graduate school, it’s not just doing the work, it’s also about connections. Because I was there for so long a lot of my friends were already out there and they started feeding me opportunities for exposure and shows.

I had a friend who had gotten out a year ahead of me and was working as an art handler at Jack Shainman and he brought my work to Jack’s attention. It was that easy.

MJ: And it’s important to note that the gallery wasn’t quite as prestigious then as it is now. You and the gallery grew together.

HWT: That’s true, I didn’t know about the gallery until they contacted me because I was still on the West Coast. But all my early shows were through friends I had gone to graduate school with, and because I was in grad school for so long I had even more connections than most people do when they graduate.

MJ: Let me ask you about how everything connects in terms of the business and the various collaborations you are involved with. I know you and Jessica Ingram are both involved with the Cause Collective, and I know that you are involved in at least one other collaborative practice. Can you tell me how all the collaborations interface with your solo practice on a business level? Can you explain how you handle the money and how the funds are divvied up?

HWT: I’m still learning how to do that, because it is a business, and no one taught me how to run a partnership like that.

One of my professors from school, Chris Johnson, was the Arts Commissioner for the City of Oakland. He called me because there was a grant to create a site-specific work of art for the Oakland Airport and he thought I should apply for it.

The Cause Collective was started as a result of me and a bunch of friends sitting around brainstorming ideas for that project. As we talked about it I realized it would be a lot more fun for the group of us to do it together than for me to do it alone.

Another consideration was that my individual practice was all centered around black maleness, and the legacy of slavery. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that project under my name. You know, jazz musicians work as collectives all the time so there was precedent.

MJ: You didn’t want to dilute the “Hank Willis Thomas” brand …

I can understand that. I’ve worked under different assumed names all through my career and it can be liberating because one of my alter egos can feel free to do something crazy, or take a low-level job, that might be damaging to the “Mark Jenkinson” brand.

HWT: Yes, that too, but I think I also wasn’t completely confident in my own voice or my abilities to pull off a major multimedia project at the time

It really started as five friends just doing something fun and playing to our strengths. Jessica is a “doer”; she can go out, meet people and get things done that way. I’m a good problem solver, and I’m good at making connections. Ryan Alexiev is a designer and can solve the technical problems. Jorge Sanchez is an ethnographer so he brought a big piece of the conceptual component. Bayeté Ross Smith’s skills were kind of close to Jessica’s and mine.

In terms of the money, we just bought the equipment together and then divided up the money equally.

The thing is … the problem is … that up until two years ago I didn’t realize I was running a business. I was just making art. And we weren’t looking for projects; all of the projects that the Cause Collective has done were projects where people sought us out.

MJ: But not all of the multimedia projects were the result of people seeking you out. How did Question Bridge happen?

HWT: Question Bridge was a result of a fellowship I was invited to apply for from the Tribecca Film Institute.

The seeds for Question Bridge came from a project that was originally started by Chris Johnson but he couldn’t get funding for. So I reframed his original concept as a project about black males. At that point I was thirty and I still didn’t know what a black male was.

MJ: What did you think it was?

HWT: I still don’t know! It’s a social construct that some people buy into and some people don’t, but we are all affected by it.

But to bring it back to running a business and making a living as an artist, getting that grant made me realize that grants were another way to make money and fund the work.

MJ: I think we all need multiple streams of income. Almost all of us build our careers as a patchwork quilt; teaching, grants, commercial assignments, stock, and in your case gallery sales.

Let’s talk a little more about your sales at the gallery; the gallery takes 50 percent of the sale price. Having been on the other side of that partnership back when I worked at a gallery I know that the gallery needs every bit of that money because their overhead is huge.

Could you live on just your fine-art sales?

HWT: I could, but I couldn’t run a business on just gallery sales. Fine-art sales only accounts for about a third of the money that comes through the studio. The problem is that as my projects have gotten bigger I need more and more help.

If I were a proper business then I would look at the money and say, “Here are my operating costs, and here is the money I get to live on.” But I don’t think like that. My mentality is, “I have this money, now I get to go make art.” It’s something I need to work on and our accountant has been helping me with that.

MJ: Of course as I’ve been writing the book I try to keep Rick’s advice in my head: “Don’t spend money you don’t have, save for retirement.” But that’s tough because we might need a new camera or computer in order to keep making new work.

HWT: One of my big goals was to carry no debt, and I have done that. I paid off all of my student loans, credit cards, everything.

But one of the things I’ve learned in the past two years is that I do have four businesses and I’m a partner in a fifth, so I have to start running them like businesses.

MJ: There are four businesses?

HWT: There’s “Hank Willis Thomas Studio” that makes the art you see here in the studio. Then there are two collaborative practices that make public art projects. I also created a production company that does the video projects.

But there’s a problem with the way I did all of this because they are all structured as LLCs [Limited Liability Companies] which means it’s still me as an individual. I recently had to create a new a corporation in order to get away from the inherent problems of an LLC.

MJ: And what are those?

HWT: The problem comes when I get a commission for a project. Let’s say I get a commission of $100,000 in October for a big multimedia project.

MJ: Aha, I see where this is going now, but explain.

HWT: The IRS [Internal Revenue Service] considers the whole $100,000 to be my personal income, when in fact I might have allocated 80,000 for production costs and expenses, and I might not be planning to spend that money until sometime in the next calendar year. I can’t spend the money fast enough before the end of the year to defray the tax liability.

MJ: Because if you pay taxes on the whole 100,000 then that only leaves you about $60,000, which might not even be enough to cover producing the project.

This has been an ongoing conversation with my/our accountant: When do you have to consider incorporating?

HWT: Exactly, I had to incorporate, because corporations are allowed to retain value, and hold money for future development in a way that individuals or LLCs can’t.

So now I’m trying to figure out how to make all these businesses work together. The Cause Collective and Question Bridge has now done eight major public arts commissions, but they are all projects where people have come to us. In a normal business model we’d be going out and finding clients, and maybe we have to start doing that.

But then I have my own desires as a photographer and artist, and I need to make sure that the collaborative projects mesh with my own private art practice. Running the businesses definitely impacts on the time and energy that I can devote to my personal art.

One interesting business model that I’ve seen was from one of my classmates at CCA.

She realized that universities are always looking for exhibitions and she had done a fine-art photo project on black women and hair. She made the prints, framed them, and then created the exhibition as a traveling exhibition that universities can rent. It’s actually a great model that other photographers and artists could learn a lot from and use it to fund their projects.

So using that model we now lease Question Bridge as a touring company and that’s another revenue stream. Arts organizations wanted to show it and they’d ask how much it would cost. In the beginning we’d just do it at cost, but then we realized that the administrative costs associated with having the show travel were prohibitive and difficult to monetize, so we created a structure to lease the exhibition.

Again, that’s another example of the artist mentality. We’d all gladly do our job for free, but because of that mentality we don’t see the costs associated with doing the work.

MJ: It’s crazy, because people think we just wake up and make art. I have a friend who is a very successful painter. His work sells for over $150,000 per painting and he is booked for at least the next ten years with commissions.

It sounds great, but each painting takes him at least nine months to complete, and his (modest) studio costs $4000 per month. In fact he even uses these special brushes that have to be custom made in order to do the paintings and the factory will only make them once a year with a minimum order of something like $10,000 for 2000 brushes.

People just don’t realize the costs associated with what we do.

HWT: I think we need to create a new model for the blue-collar artist. The creative community is what makes America work. If you think about it, without the photographers, and the graphic designers, the American economy wouldn’t exist.

MJ: Exactly. You have built the Hank Thomas brand in the same way that Nike built the Nike brand. That’s what art schools teach, and that’s something that business schools could learn from us.

HWT: And the flip side is true. The problem is that we don’t know our worth. That’s the problem with doing something for a living that you would gladly do for free. It weakens our position to negotiate.

Here’s the thing I realized: Fine artists literally print money.

What I mean is: I make something that I hope someone else wants. Then they buy it, and if the buyer is a major collector they increase the value simply because they bought it, and they know that it is worth more than they paid for it the second that they own it.

That’s what I mean by the model of the blue-collar artist. A wealthy collector is able to buy art and enjoy the financial advantages of that art appreciating in value. As artists we should be able to share in each other’s success as artists.

MJ: A lot of us do that by trading work.

HWT: But then we feel bad if we sell the work. Personally I’d be delighted if one of my friends sold a piece that I gave them or traded with them and they were able to buy a house!

MJ: Can we talk a little about your relationship with your gallery? Because, in each of your successive shows you’ve been pushing the boundaries more and more, and the work is getting more and more ambitious. Not all dealers would support that.

I know that back when I was a dealer the owner of the gallery would sometimes get involved and push the artists to do work that was safe and would sell.

HWT: I have a great relationship with Jack; we’ve know each other for a long time now.

The best part is that if I need to create a sculpture for instance, and I can’t afford to produce it, then Jack will often front the production costs and then deduct those costs from the eventual sale.

It’s a great relationship, and it enables me to work with ambition and it allows me to push beyond my comfort zone.

MJ: That’s the best part of what you do.

I think the temptation with young artists is to retreat into the safety net of doing work that they think will sell because it looks like the work of other people who have been successful at it. The lesson that I think one can learn from your story is that you are successful because your work doesn’t look like anyone else’s. It’s a unique article.

You actually need to be uncompromising in your goals and produce work that is unique and true to yourself, but then you also have to very effective about promoting it and giving it a life that extends past its conception.

HWT: That’s what I mean when I say you have to be ridiculous and absurd.

If I stayed in my comfort zone I probably wouldn’t do much of anything. I’m trying to do something I haven’t seen before, and I don’t know how to do! That’s what is ridiculous about it. Then from a business perspective I then have to promote that work and hope that it will stand the test of time.

Tip Off, 2014, polyester resin (fiberglass). 43 × 13 × 11 inches

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.