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Photo: Stan Horaczek_

Sometimes it seems like kids today are born snapping photos. But if you want to help them explore photography beyond just selfies and Instagrams, it takes more than lending them your iPhone. So here are some great ways to share your passion with the young ones in your life, and maybe learn something about your own photography along the way.

1 Take your time
Don’t feel like you need to jam everything about photography into your first session with a kid. The educators we spoke with emphasized communicating bite-sized ideas that children can play with before introducing more complex concepts. Photography has a lot of technical detail that can smother a child’s enthusiasm and creativity if deployed all at once. Choose a single thing to try to communicate on a single day, and allow the knowledge to build over time. If the first day is fun, they’ll be game for a second. Niki Even, program director of San Diego’s Outside The Lens, says the goal early on is just to “get them out of selfie mode and help them start thinking like photographers.”

2. Start with the familiar
All of the educators we spoke with suggested starting with subjects with which children are intimately familiar—such as their families and their immediate environment. The two offer different challenges: One can be used as a portal into portraiture, the other will help kids find new and unexpected ways to see their bedroom, their house, or their street.

Photo: Stan Horaczek

3. Expose them to exposure
After you have a few sessions under your belt, gradually introduce the concepts of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Be sure to cover each one independently. Come up with ways to clearly demonstrate the way each one works and how it might be used, playing around with motion blur, over- and underexposing frames, and more. Digital cameras are a blessing for this, letting you quickly tweak settings to opposite extremes and display the results directly on the back of the camera.

4. Write it out
Challenging children to write or tell stories about the photos they take is a key way to broaden their understanding of the work they’ve made, and to help them think about what they might like to make in the future. All of the educational programs we looked into include writing as a part of each child’s final presentations. When confronted with a blank piece of paper, it can be difficult for children to write about their feelings, but focusing their thoughts using an image that’s important to them can help give them access to emotions that might otherwise have remained hidden.

5. Put down the camera.
It’s easy for the device itself to be distracting, especially for younger kids. Seeing results moments after you shoot something can create an overly speedy mindset. Lacy Austin, International Center of Photography‘s director of community programs in New York City, suggests having beginner students make cardboard frames and take them out into the world. “It’s a very engaging way to get the kids thinking about framing and thinking about what’s in the foreground or background,” she says. Composing without the distraction of actually capturing an image isolates this intellectual challenge, giving you a chance to introduce concepts like changing perspective, filling the frame, and the rule of thirds—without the distraction of immediate results.

Photo: Stan Horaczek

6. Give them a project.
How do you turn a kid who takes pictures into a photographer? Help the child create a small body of work. Most kids are used to taking photos when something (either extraordinary or mundane) happens to them. Turn that around and make the kid happen to the world. Help your charges come up with ideas for a photo series and brainstorm interesting ways to accomplish it. Making multiple photos as part of a single project will do a lot to focus children’s efforts.

7. Make an edit.
In this world of throwaway shots and unlimited exposures, the art of editing has never been more important. Emphasize that each of your photographic outings may yield only one or two excellent photos. When reviewing the day’s work, get them to talk about what they do or don’t like about individual shots, and encourage kids to be decisive and share reasons that back up their preferences. This is also a great time to reinforce concepts of framing and exposure, as well as to start helping them formulate ideas about storytelling and grouping shots for photo essays.

8. Teach them with film
Nothing makes kids slow down like knowing they only have 24 frames to work with. “The kids who do analog before going on to digital tend to be better shooters,” says Trina Gadsden, executive director of Seattle-based Youth In Focus. “Working with just the few frames they have makes them think of their work as a finite resource.” ICP Teen Academy’s Photo 1 course, the prerequisite for all their other classes, focuses on analog black-and-white photography. “They really respond to film,” says Bayeté Ross Smith, one of ICP’s instructors. “It has a different value because they’re putting so much more time into it. And then they have this physical object that shows what they did.”

Photo: Fotolia.com/Max Topchil

9. Don’t be afraid of the darkroom
If you can rig up a home darkroom, it’s like giving a kid superpowers—the impact on his or her understanding and connection to the medium will be immeasurable. “The first time you see an image come out of a white piece of paper, it’s magical,” says Gadsden. “You feel like you can solve world peace.” Plus, a darkroom day is a great alternative on rainy days. If your space won’t allow it, you can teach the basic principles of analog photography using a Sunprint kit.

10. Keep things light
When frustration (for either you or the child you’re working with) sets in, it’s time to take a break. The golden hour will happen when the sun sets tomorrow, too. Don’t worry about moving quickly—allow children’s photographic fascination to grow organically and it will be a pleasure to them the rest of their lives.

The post 10 Tips For Getting Kids Interested In Photography appeared first on Popular Photography.

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As one of the most sought-after names in celebrity photography, Peggy Sirota spends her days with Hollywood royalty. But when she landed in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, she did what many people do when they hit town: work in retail. In her case, it couldn’t have been a better career move. At the massive Fred Segal clothing store, she was surrounded by would-be actors and strapped for cash. A friend suggested she could pick up some extra dough by getting a camera and shooting headshots for her coworkers. “I said, ‘Sure,’” she recalls. “I didn’t know the first thing about photography, but I had confidence.”

She also had a knack for making her subjects look good. When people started referring their friends, she knew she was in love. Not with photo­graphy, but with the cash it brought in. “I didn’t think, ‘Oh I’ll be a photographer now,’” she says. “I thought, ‘This is a good way to make money.’”

Today, it’s more than a little extra cash. Sirota has become one of the biggest forces in celebrity photography, with her work regularly found on the covers of GQ, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Interview. What’s most intriguing about Sirota’s longstanding success, however, is that she’s achieved it by actively pushing against Hollywood’s prevailing norms. In a town that rewards artifice and ego, her style is refreshingly light and unpretentious, aiming to capture the immediacy of the present moment and create true, intimate connections with her subjects. What’s uncanny is her ability to do this with every subject she encounters, from Jack Nicholson to Jodie Foster, from Tiger Woods to Nolan Ryan, from George W. Bush to the Dalai Lama.

But Sirota might have ended up as just another L.A. headshot doctor had it not been for a conversation with a French documentarian who saw her photos and urged her to go further. “He said, ‘You have to do this,’” she recalls. Armed with that unshakable confidence, Sirota put together a portfolio and set about finding an agent to help her branch out into fashion. There was only one problem: her almost total lack of photographic knowledge or experience. “I didn’t know anything technically,” she says of this period. “I faked all of it. I faked everything.”

But somehow, even while she felt like she was faking it, something very real was happening. She may not have known an f-stop from a bus stop, but there was something in her photos that created a visceral response. “Everywhere I went, people were very receptive,” she says. “I found an agent quickly.”

Once she booked gigs, of course, there was still the matter of execution. “I never told anyone I didn’t know how to do something. Someone hired me to shoot on a Hasselblad, and I had never even heard of that camera. I said, ‘Yeah, of course. I can do that.’ Then I had to scramble and try to figure out how to use it.” Learning to shoot medium format on short notice, however, proved too high a technical hurdle for fakery. So she found a more direct solution. “I just hired an assistant who knew how to do it,” she says.

While many would take that experience as a cue to bone up on the technical, in Sirota it manifested as an abiding apathy. “The assistants I worked with had a lot more experience than I did,” she says of her early professional years. Her lack of interest in the technical nitty-gritty continues to this day.

“I’ve never worked with any photographer who cared so little about the gadgets,” says Wade Brands, who has worked as a first assistant and lighting technician for Sirota for the past 11 years. He says that it is precisely this indifference that makes her so satisfying to work with. The atmosphere on set is collaborative, with Sirota relying on her crew to take ownership of the tech almost entirely. “It’s sometimes difficult for a photographer to give up being totally in control,” says Brands. “But she doesn’t bring her ego to the table the way others might. She really allows people to bring their talents to bear on the final product. We’re there so she can walk on set, grab the camera, and just start hitting the button.”

Sirota herself is up front: “If I were left on my own and there were no assistants in the world, I wouldn’t be able to shoot,” she says. “I don’t know how to plug the lights in or set up the camera, but I have always known exactly how I want something to look.” Brands echoes this sentiment. “She has total creative confidence,” he says. “There’s no vacillating. She doesn’t ask for opinions. She knows exactly what she wants.”

So what does Peggy Sirota want? According to her friends, associates, and subjects, it appears she wants nothing less than to capture the emotional truth of humans being present in the moment.

As soon as someone has a camera pointed at them, they begin to manufacture their image for the lens. Sirota’s skill lies in her ability to engineer authentic moments within that deeply artificial environment, usually with people she has just met.

“I think Peggy has this magical magnet inside her,” says Drew Barrymore, whom Sirota has photographed many times over the past 23 years. “She finds the genuine joy in people.”

That sentiment is echoed by Jim Moore, who, as creative director at GQ, has watched Sirota work for more than two decades. “Right away I was hooked, and drawn into her infectious, childlike vision,” he says. “She comes in with a lot of gusto and there’s a unique way she brings the subject forward. She lets these celebrities know—in no uncertain terms—that they’re going to have fun, they’re going to play, that they’d better be ready to turn up the volume a little bit. And they do it for her, even the ones that are more reserved. She’s always the one who can squeeze water from a stone.”

Sirota points to a key period in her career when she developed her freewheeling, improvisational style. In her first few years shooting fashion in the late 1980s, she worked with several European outlets, one of which was the children’s fashion magazine Vogue Bambini. “That was probably the most significant influence on the beginning of my career,” she says. With a mandate to capture silly, happy, childlike energy from children, Sirota learned to be comfortable in the unknown; to find calm in the chaos. “That was where I discovered who I was,” she says, “through all these really silly and crazy and funny and creative stories.”

With her photographic sensibility and methods beginning to gel, Sirota gradually began branching out of fashion to celebrity, first with a small piece for Harper’s Bazaar, then landing a major gig with Nike for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. She credits Nike with raising her profile as a celebrity shooter. “It was the first time a fashion shooter was hired by a sports company to shoot their major athletes,” she says. “The art director wanted something different and took a chance on me. I had no celebrities in my book and certainly no sports.” Sirota’s campaign, featuring Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson, John McEnroe, and others, brought her publicity that extended beyond the reach of any magazine. Over the ensuing 20 years, celebrity work steadily became a larger part of Sirota’s oeuvre, and now it occupies about half of her shooting time (the other half is divided between fashion, advertising, and lifestyle).

Sirota has a reputation for being impeccably prepared and always getting results. “Every shoot we’ve done with her, we’ve come away with something memorable,” says Moore. “She bats a thousand.” Despite her remarkable reliability, though, she has no set method for creating those results other than trusting herself. “There’s no formula. It’s just being real with them,” the photographer says.

Brands attests to her unique combination of methodical and seat-of-the-pants styles. “The subject is literally walking on set and she’ll say to me under her breath, ‘What am I going to do?’ But then it happens. You can see it. She goes somewhere with that person and they create a moment together.”

The thrill of stepping into the unknown with someone else clearly excites her. “I need there to be a kind of electric thing going on,” says Sirota. “Something that’s fresh and created in the moment. Otherwise you’ve shot the job before you actually put the camera in your hand.” Moore recalls seeing this connection-building happen on a shoot with Barack Obama just before the President took office. Despite being one of the busier men in the world, Obama “didn’t look at his watch once. They were totally connected, lost in each other’s moment.”

Indeed, talking to Sirota and her crew, it’s easy to get the feeling that her priority is creating relationships with her subjects (many of whom she’s only just met), and that capturing the moments engendered by those relationships is secondary. “Photography is a means to an end for her,” says Brands. “And that end for her is seeing the emotion in people. She doesn’t ask people to do things, she wants them to give her a piece of themselves.”

As a result, even in fickle Hollywood, Sirota’s work has remarkable staying power. Her photos do not appear as artifacts of their time, but as moments in a life. In a town premised on artifice and heavy with ego, her work stands outside fashion and beyond trend. These are simple, transparent, powerful photos, each a document of a connection made between the humans behind and in front of the camera, each an attempt to tell the truth about a person by letting that person tell the truth about themselves. And no one gets at that truth like Peggy Sirota.

The post Peggy Sirota Doesn’t Play By the Rules appeared first on Popular Photography.

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On a clear spring Friday at 10 a.m., I arrive at The New York Times headquarters and proceed to the sixth floor. I’m here to meet Kathy Ryan, director of photography at The New York Times Magazine. Ryan is a coiled spring, all kinetic energy, her wiry frame topped by a shock of unruly hair. This is my fourth attempt at an in-person meeting. Naturally, it fails. Ryan must run to an emergency conference with Gail Bichler, the magazine’s art director. But Ryan urges me to join her at the staff’s weekly photo meeting in 45 minutes.

At precisely 10:45, approximately 20 people from the magazine’s photo and design teams file from the Times’ sun-drenched open-plan office into a dark room where a laptop and monitor perch on a table. “Let’s do it,” says Deputy Editor Joel Lovell. All sound in the room ceases. The meeting has begun.

The New York Times Magazine’s photo department may be the world’s most finely calibrated machine for facilitating art. Over the decades, it has commissioned and published some of the most cherished and influential imagery in the history of editorial photography. Spanning myriad genres and topics, the NYTM serves up a weekly visual smorgasbord whose generous proportions and quality of reproduction often make it seem more like a museum than a magazine.

For 27 years, the heart and soul of the photo operation has been Kathy Ryan. To her staff she is an invaluable mentor, sounding board, taskmaster, and intellect. To her counterparts at other magazines, many of whom she trained, she is a constant reminder to do better. “She puts her blood into everything she does,” says Judith Puckett-Rinella, who worked under Ryan for more than seven years and now runs limited-edition art and fashion distributor Whisper Editions.

Of course, the success of a photo team within a magazine that puts out 52 weekly issues of original photography per year draws on more than one person. “She’s a true collaborator,” Puckett-Rinella says of Ryan. “She builds people up and gives them confidence in what they do.” Current NYTM photo editor Stacey Baker agrees. “She’s incredibly inspiring,” Baker says. “She pushes people to believe that anything is possible.”

Not wasting any time, Baker launches into a presentation of fresh work she has just gotten in from Alec Soth. The photos are of a lockdown drill at a public school in Minnesota designed to prepare students in the event of a school shooting. Evidence of the times we live in, the series is slated to run as the magazine’s “Look” feature.

The photo department has already made some selections, including a shot from above of more than a dozen girls huddled together in a locker room. It quietly evokes the claustrophobic and anxious realities today’s parents and teens live with. “They were in gym class, so this is where they went,” Baker explains.

“These are great pictures. Any chance we have contact info for these kids?” Lovell asks. Baker says they can probably work that out. This symbiosis between photo and editorial emerges again and again throughout the meeting.

Looking at the finished magazine, it’s easy to underestimate how much work goes on behind the scenes for every image the NYTM photo department produces. It’s up to the individual photo editors to tend to the details of their designated projects. For the lockdown drill story, for example, Baker called Minnesota school districts for several weeks before finding a superintendent willing to let Soth sit in. It takes a certain type of person to persevere after the first 100 phone calls don’t pan out, believing number 101 might yield a yes.

Judging from the background of those in her department, though, Ryan seems to understand that such qualities don’t necessarily come from direct job experience. Her current team comprises a former film-industry script developer (Joanna Milter) and an ex–administrative assistant (Clinton Cargill); Baker was a lawyer, and the fourth, Amy Kellner, was a managing editor at Vice magazine.

Former employee Jody Quon worked in fashion PR before joining Ryan’s team. After Quon’s six-month freelance stint for the NYTM’s fashion editor, Ryan offered her a job. Quon laughs as she recalls trying to talk her out of it. “I told her I didn’t think it was the right fit, that I knew nothing about what her department did. I told her I didn’t know anything about photography and I had no relationships. She said, ‘Don’t worry. You’re very organized and you know how to get things done.’ I ended up working for her for 11 years—some of the most extraordinary years of my career.” Quon is now photo director at New York magazine.

“Choosing photo editors comes down to two aspects: the creative and the practical,” Ryan explains. “They have to understand great pictures, and they need to be able to organize a lot of information very quickly. I didn’t set out to find people who weren’t photo editors, but if they’re not photo editors I don’t consider it a hindrance.”

Says Cargill, “Kathy has a track record of not being afraid to hire someone who doesn’t have the direct set of experience that correlates to whatever you think the job is. She’s very much about people who aren’t afraid of the impossible.”

Ryan’s soft spot for the road-less-traveled set may stem from the path she took to her current post. Despite a lack of formal photographic training (she was an art and art history double major at Rutgers’ Douglass College), she landed a job as photo researcher at Sygma. “My initial intention had been to be a painter,” she says. “But I quickly realized I wanted to work with pictures in the world.” Her main job at the agency consisted of licensing and delivering Sygma photos to news outlets across the country, including The New York Times.

As a result, she spoke to Peter Howe, then the NYTM’s picture editor, every week. Howe saw something in her, and when a deputy photo editor position opened at the magazine, he urged her to apply. It was Ryan’s second job in the photo industry.

Her third came two and a half years later, when Howe decamped for Life and Ryan became the NYTM’s head of photography. More than a quarter-century later, she has yet to move on. Some might find this kind of career confined or lacking in 
ambition. It is anything but.

Next on the agenda is a series of photos by Paolo Pellegrin depicting the burial of identified victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims were murdered and dumped in mass graves. Many victims are identified and formally buried each year. To get the images, 
Pellegrin journeyed to Bosnia three times over the course of two years, once on his own dime.

“This story has an unusually long shelf life,” Ryan says. “We’re going to show a tight edit of the work you’ve seen and then the new work he just shot last week.”

The room is completely silent as the screen shows the anguished, staring faces of hijab-wearing women; the only sound is Baker’s spare narration. “This one is a ceremony for victims in Visoko, Bosnia,” she says.

One surreal and exquisite photo looks like a series of human bodies that have been turned to sand, their features sheared away by time. Ryan explains that these bodies were exceptionally well preserved due to the high clay content of the soil in the mass grave. “In some cases they still have skin and flesh intact,” she notes. “Forensic pathologists can use that to help in DNA testing to match them to survivors.”

“God, these are incredible,” Lovell whispers as photo after photo ticks by. “Paolo at his best,” Ryan says.

“Let’s put this on the lineup for 10 pages,” Lovell adds.

“Thank you, that’s great,” Ryan says.

Since Ryan’s tenure began in 1987, the NYTM has consistently broken new artists and found new ways to use established ones. Its pages have given wide creative license to rising art stars such as Ryan McGinley and Taryn Simon early in their careers. “The whole point of a magazine is to be surprising and lively and cutting-edge, and the way to do that is by using new photographers,” Ryan says. “If someone has a spark and we publish them and they go on to build an impressive career, that’s even better.” Meanwhile, in both portraiture and photojournalism, the NYTM regularly draws on the talents of masters like Nadav Kander, Dan Winters, Massimo Vitali, Nan Goldin, and Alec Soth.

In 1993 Ryan gained a powerful ally when Adam Moss was named the magazine’s editorial director (he is now editor-in-chief of New York magazine). Moss brought to the title a modern magazine approach that included a more graphical style and a significantly greater emphasis on photography.

In 1997 Moss, Ryan, and Creative Director Janet Froelich hatched the NYTM’s first Special Photography Issue, a watershed moment for the magazine’s and Ryan’s sensibilities coming into their own. Ryan and her team assembled a broad bevy of photo talent, including Jack Pierson, Abelardo Morell, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Larry Towell, Thomas Demand, Lars Tunbjörk, Chuck Close, and Annie Leibovitz. Their subject: Times Square.

It’s hard to imagine a more resonant topic for that moment. Times Square takes its name, after all, from the paper itself. The fabled intersection was on the brink of significant change, with the grimy world of pimps, hustlers, and porn palaces giving way to a clean, well-lit consumerist playground. Leibovitz, known for her celeb portraits, was assigned to shoot women living in single-room occupancy hotels in the square. Pierson produced a dreamy, painterly, rained-out cover shot.

The New York Times Magazine Photographs, the acclaimed retrospective book that came out in 2011, calls the Times Square issue “a pivotal moment in the Magazine’s evolution, in which the boundary between art and journalism was elided.”

Indeed, the success of the project seemed to embolden Ryan and her team. In the years that followed, the photo department became known for aggressive cross-assigning—tasking photographers well known in one genre with photographing in another; for instance, hiring landscape photographer Simon Norfolk to shoot refugee camps in Chad and Pakistan or cinematic pictorialist Gregory Crewdson to make a haunting portrait of Gwyneth Paltrow. “Kathy is constantly thinking and changing the way we see pictures,” Baker says.

“Amy, let’s go to Patricia Lockwood now,” says Ryan. “Tell us about that.”

After the brutal Bosnia photos, it’s a relief to be looking at a calm, happy woman in and around her tasteful home on a picture-perfect Kansas day.

“This is the poet slash comedian who lives in 
Lawrence, Kansas,” Kellner explains. “Mark 
Peckmezian shot this on film. She’s pretty cool looking.”

“I love these,” Ryan says. “This is his first time shooting for us, right? Amy thought to use him and he’s really wonderful.”

“That’s her writing area,” Kellner mentions as a cozy nook appears on screen. “We tried to get secondary stuff, but she doesn’t have any handwritten journals; it’s all on her laptop. She didn’t have any family photos because her dad is a priest.”

“What kind of priest is that?” Lovell asks. “The kind that doesn’t show up on film?” The room erupts with laughter.

“I phrased it wrong,” Kellner says. “Her dad figures into the story because he was a priest but he’s also funny, but she didn’t have any photos of him.”

“I liked the first version of that story better,” someone quips, drawing another big laugh. This seems like the broad, supportive laughter of a group of people happy to no longer be looking at war dead. Peckmezian’s vibrant pictures look like they’ll light up any page they land on.

“We are trying to hit a home run every time out,” Ryan says. “We don’t always hit it, but we try. Even if something doesn’t pan out, it’s much better to risk it all aiming for something special. There’s no excuse for not being as ambitious as you can.”

Cargill echoes this last sentiment. “Every story here is a chance to be incredible,” he says. “The pressure to do something great was scary to me when I started, but that’s all part of the process. It’s always scary.”

And no one bats 1.000. Several staff members groan at the mention of an ill-starred shoot they tried a few years back with the New York Mets. “We had 750 Mets fans in the stadium,” Ryan says. “We wanted to do a classic photo with everyone holding up signs to form an image that said ‘Viva Los Mets.’ But the reality is that Mets fans are not the people to do it. When you see those pictures that work, they use military guys or people in North Korea. You need them to be in a frame of mind to take orders.”

Instead the staff wrestled fruitlessly with an unruly crowd, 100-degree weather, and overhead airplane noise. “We had to scrap it,” Ryan says. “It just didn’t work on a colossal level.” Still, this failed shoot has become enshrined in department lore as not a mark of shame but a badge of honor, proof that what they do every day is as likely to fail as it is to succeed. Or as Cargill puts it, “You failed, but you dreamed big, and there’s no fault in that.”

It’s Cargill’s turn to present. For three days Sebastián Liste has been in Rio de Janeiro shooting baile funk parties in the favelas for a piece in the magazine’s World Cup issue. The screen shows a dancehall stuffed with young people dancing and performers onstage.

“It’s a big crazy dance party,” Cargill explains, “but also there’s drugs and they kill people. He followed a few different artists who perform at these parties.”

The photos roll on: an attractive young woman applying makeup; a group of dancers backstage; children mugging for the camera, all jangly limbs and teeth.

“These are great,” Lovell says. “Can he get shots of the cop presence?”

“He can try to do that,” Cargill explains. “Someone was shot leaving this party, though. He said it would not be a good idea to be with the performers and also photograph the cops or talk to them at the same venue. He said he could go to a different favela and meet the cops there.”

“Somebody should interview those kids and get them to talk about their lives,” Lovell suggests.

“We can get back to them,” Cargill says. “There’s usually a party every weekend.”

Ryan says she and her team are in a constant state of reinvention. Her talented photo editors tend to move on and run other magazine photo departments. The Times itself is undergoing changes at the top, with Dean Baquet replacing Jill Abramson as executive editor in May, the same month that 
Jake Silverstein took the reins as the NYTM’s 
editor-in-chief following his lauded editorship at Texas Monthly. Ryan, for one, is thrilled about her new collaborator. “We’ll be 
embarking on a redesign, and I’m very excited about that process of reinvention,” she says.

This is a staff trained to take change in stride; indeed, challenges are just invitations to try harder. “You learn to deal with whatever is thrown at you,” says Kellner, “whether it’s getting someone to Haiti tomorrow morning or needing to rent a helicopter in South Korea. You just have to figure it out.”

The pictures stop clicking. “I think that’s it for what we’re showing,” Ryan says. “Thanks, everybody.”

It’s over. The room, which to this point has sustained a taut, unbroken focus, breaks into a shuffle of notebooks and chairs. I look at my watch. Our journey from school drills to mass graves to pastoral Kansas to a wild and crazy dance party has taken almost exactly 15 minutes. It might be the most efficient meeting I have ever attended.

By the time I realize what is happening, the team is gone, the room empty and silent. After all, next week’s photos are not going to make themselves.

The post Behind the Scenes With New York Times Magazine Photo Editor, Kathy Ryan appeared first on Popular Photography.

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On November 4, 1984, Mark Seliger, all long limbs, wide eyes, and 24-year-old energy, arrived in New York City, where he began an extended stay at his brother’s place in Brooklyn…

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Perhaps one of the best tickets to a job in photography is to intern or assist for a professional. Mark Seliger, who’s photographed everyone from Kurt Cobain to President Obama, is one of the best. Seliger himself has approached his entire career as a learning experience.

From Fred Damon, the journeyman Seliger interned for during high school in Houston, to John Madere, a corporate and advertising shooter in New York, Seliger credits his apprenticeships with teaching him what he needed to know to launch his career. “It was much better than grad school,” he says of the experience.

Over the years Seliger’s own studio has been something of an incubator for young photographers, giving each what he or she seemed to need, whether that was relentless hours of work or understanding how to roll with the punches when things go wrong. Just as Seliger was shaped by Fred Damon and the countless photogs he assisted in his early days in the city, so has he has gone on to help mold the next generation of photographic talent. Here are six who owe their careers in part to their work with this mentor.

[Related: The Iconic Portraiture of Mark Seliger]

Patrick Randak

Current job: Principal, Patrick Randak Photography

Former positions at Seliger Studios: Intern, second assistant, first assistant (2005–2010)

“I went to Brooks Institute, which is a great photo school, but it’s all theory until you get out there in the world. Mark spent five years grooming me, and it was a big sacrifice for him to not go with a guy who had more experience. But the last three years I was in his studio were great, and he had someone he trusted implicitly, and who knew the way he worked backward and forward.

Mark’s most amazing ability is to connect with the subject and to deliver what he wants. It doesn’t matter if it’s a homeless guy or the president of the United States. Mark has an amazing bag of tricks to connect with whoever is in front of him. That energy and presence was what I learned the most from. It was amazing to see someone maintain that level of inspiration and commitment to their craft.”

Brenda Ferrell

Current job: Location Manager, Producer and Photographer. Owner, Scout Monster & Dirt Pony

Position at Seliger Studios: Freelance producer and location manager (started in 1997)

“I met Mark in a week-long workshop in 1997. It was fascinating to see his process and hear his stories. When he mentioned he was going to be in Los Angeles the following week to shoot Courtney Love for Rolling Stone, I begged and begged to be on the shoot. He let me come as a production assistant.

Mark is one of my best clients, but he’s also a mentor and a friend. He’s like family to me. He helped shape my life to be what it is today. I’ve never met anyone else who works as hard as he does. I honestly don’t know when he sleeps. He’s on a plane all the time. He’ll fly to Europe and be there for one day, then fly back.

I think he saw my passion and my willingness to learn, my willingness to do whatever it took. When I got the phone call that he was going to be in L.A., I dropped everything and made myself 1,000 percent available to him. I knew it was important.

Mark also taught me you can be in the photography business without being a photographer. I’m equally passionate and satisfied with being a producer and location manager as I am being a photographer.”

Bryan Meador

Current job: Archivist and post-production manager, Seliger Studios

Former position at Seliger Studios: Intern, assistant archivist (started in 2012)

“I was a student at Parsons, where I studied communication design. I thought I wanted to be a graphic designer. During school, I shifted gears toward photography, and by the end of it I was thoroughly confused. It really was fortuitous that Mark and I came together when we did. I fell into this position organically. I didn’t understand the breadth of what it is to be a photographer. I was really unaware that being an archivist was even a possibility.

Mark is a very socially intelligent person. I think it’s definitely a part of why he’s able to produce the kind of portraiture that he does so consistently. He’s really able to get in there and unlock people, to get them to show a bit more of themselves than they normally would. And that absolutely transfers over to the employees here at the studio. He can recognize that yes, you can do that, and here’s how we can get you there. It’s an amazing quality.”

Jennifer Hutz

Current job: Owner, Jennifer Hutz, Inc.

Former position at Seliger Studios: Intern, production assistant, producer (2001–2006)

“He expects a lot out of you. Working for him is really intense. I met Mark on a commercial shoot he was directing. I didn’t even know who he was, but somebody told me I should offer to be an unpaid intern just to get to New York City.

He leads by example, just in terms of his schedule. I think 80 percent of his assistants thought they wanted to be photographers when they started with him. But to be a professional photographer, it’s more than a full-time job; it’s your entire life. People either came for a very short period or stayed for a long time. I ended up wanting to retire from producing because with Mark I did everything I wanted to do.”

Nathan Podshadley

Current job: First assistant, Seliger Studios

Former position at Seliger Studios: Intern (started in 2013)

“School was totally applicable, and I think studying photography is great. But what I’ve learned from Mark as a mentor and boss is immeasurable. It’s about the reality of booking crews, booking locations, making sure we have all the power we need; knowing where the sun falls at what time of day at a certain location, when to get in, when to get out. And when things go wrong it’s always on me to get it fixed in the heat of the moment.

Most of what I’m trying to learn is the way he interacts with people. It’s a very difficult job. Mark knows how to turn someone around who walks on set tired or not in the best mood. It might take hours, but once he gets them there, it’s smooth sailing.

Mark has a lot to teach and I still have a lot to learn. It can be super stressful, but at the end of the day, we break it down and talk about it and we always get it worked out. And you get to meet amazing people. When I turned 24, we were in Dublin, Ireland, shooting U2. That night we had dinner with the band. I’m going to have cool stories to tell the grandkids.”

Rocky Kenworthy

Current job: Founder, Dot Editions

Former position at Seliger Studios: First assistant (1989–1991)

“I worked for Mark assisting for about a year, and it was life changing. He was a really hard worker and he never accepted “no.” He often paid more of his own money than he was paid for the shoot. I really learned about dedication.

I remember a period working on a story for Rolling Stone called “Heavy Metal Nation.” We’d fly out to California and work for 10 nights, then fly back to New York on a redeye and start the whole thing over. They were long hours, but that’s what it took to do the job. You don’t look at it like you’re getting paid X amount for X hours. You’re making contacts, you’re meeting people. There’s no school for that. You simply have to immerse yourself in it as an apprentice. You’re there to learn from him and you have to put in hours. Mark doesn’t look at a clock. He’s there till the job is complete.

You’ve got to take advantage of little opportunities that might not seem like they’re going to have much payoff right away. Make an effort to work with really great people. You’re not going to learn just the craft of what they’re doing; it’s the whole process. Then you can build on that for yourself.

Flexibility is key. If you’re not fulfilled in what you’re doing, you’ve got to discover some- thing new you like doing. When I got out and showed my shooting portfolio, I would be hired for things that were completely different from what I was working on. As an artist I wanted to produce my own work, so I decided I was going to do that while focusing on printing and retouching as a career. It wasn’t an intentional thing; I just found I enjoyed doing it.”

The post Sorcerer’s Apprentices: Pros Share What They Learned from the Legendary Mark Seliger appeared first on Popular Photography.

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On November 4, 1984, Mark Seliger, all long limbs, wide eyes, and 24-year-old energy, arrived in New York City, where he began an extended stay at his brother’s place in Brooklyn. “I would get up in the morning, get on the train at 6 a.m., make it into the city, and have a coffee,” he says. “Then I’d start plugging dimes into the phone booth.” Every dime was a cold call to a photographer. He’d keep at it until one of them agreed to let him come and assist.

[Related: 6 Former Mark Seliger Interns and Assistants on How He Jumpstarted Their Careers]

Seliger is known for a work ethic that borders on terrifying. His is the kind of intensity that can’t be forced—not continuously for 30 years, anyway. And while that kind of drive can only come from inside, it’s hard not to see in it echoes of Fred Damon, the photographer Seliger did printing for during and after his senior year in high school. Damon, a veteran of Houston’s grip-and-grin circuit, would shoot anything: dinners, industrial work, conventions. If the money was green, he was there.

“Fred was a hard-working photographer in every sense of the word,” Seliger says. When the guy wasn’t shooting he was talking about shooting. Until 2 a.m. sometimes, when he’d fall asleep in his chair, a lit cigar in his hand. As far as the teenager knew, this was just the way photography got done. “I didn’t know there was life outside of what Fred Damon did,” he says.

Today, Seliger shoots for the world’s top culture and fashion magazines. His art pieces hang in galleries, and he is responsible for some of the most iconic celebrity portraits of our time. Look closely and you can see Fred Damon whispering in his ear: Get out there and do the work. Do it until you fall asleep in your chair. Then get up and do some more.

After studying photography in college and a brief stint assisting in Houston, Seliger’s horizons remained small. “I thought I was going to stay in Texas and do annual reports,” he recalls, figuring he’d creatively satisfy himself with personal side projects in his off hours. He had no idea that the wider world of editorial, fashion, or fine art photography existed.

But as he mastered the local scene, the feeling he was moving in the wrong direction grew. “I was at a dead end,” he says. “I didn’t know what else to do.” When a college friend and a coworker both suggested he go to New York for six months, he figured, why not?

An avalanche of dimes later, Seliger had assisted a crazy-quilt assortment of New York City photographers. Boredom wasn’t an issue. “I had a master list, and went and saw whoever would let me,” he says. “Everybody from still life to editorial.” As they worked, he absorbed every detail. Some were extremely technical. Others emphasized aesthetics but couldn’t set up an umbrella to save their lives. They all had something to show him.

Seliger eventually settled into a long-term assisting gig with John Madere, a corporate and advertising shooter and utter perfectionist. Under Madere, Seliger learned “to be persnickety and particular” as well as how to manage clients and stay on top of billing. “It was much better than grad school,” he says of the experience. After a year and a half, however, that old restless feeling crept back in. He was ready to go out on his own.

Daunting though it was, it was time for Seliger to start showing his work. To strengthen his resolve, he eventually stopped assisting completely. It was succeed or starve, and the city didn’t seem to care much about which way it went.

Seliger put together a portfolio and began dropping it off at magazines around the city. It was 1986, and he remembers picking up his portfolio from Avenue magazine down to the exact wording of the note that came back with it: “‘We appreciate your consideration for dropping your work off at the magazine, but I don’t see a sense of personal style here,'” he recites from memory. Its sting is still apparent three decades later. “I had to reread that to make sure I understood what I was seeing. Then I went home, ate five chocolate doughnuts, and sat in the corner.”

The next day he was back on the train. This time he dropped his book off at Forbes, where it found a more receptive audience. “The photo editor sent me the kindest note,” he says, something like “I love your work, and you’d be great here.” The same afternoon he got it, someone called him with an assignment to shoot an executive from Porsche’s U.S. operation.

While the job went well and led to more work for Forbes and other business mags, success became a matter of dogged pursuit. “It was not uncommon to have a couple weeks go by where I dropped off my portfolio every day and never heard the phone ring,” Seliger says. But he didn’t give up. He steadily connected with more and more photo editors, and less than a year after going out on his own, Seliger was making a living from editorial photography. And the mainstream entertainment magazines were beginning to take notice.

“When I found my way into pop culture, it was just an endless sea,” Seliger says of this period. “Suddenly I could do everything from music to actors to models, everything you could possibly imagine.” And imagine he did. Throughout the late 1980s, Seliger turned in stellar shoot after spectacular shoot, blending pathos with humor and a wellspring of humanity to blaze a trail through the upper ranks of the elite magazine world. Visual consultant Laurie Kratochvil, Rolling Stone‘s director of photography at the time, recalls seeing his portfolio after he dropped it off the first time. “I just really enjoyed the way he perceived things,” she recalls. “They seemed spontaneous, not like a forced setup. And they were very well executed technically. Not overlit or overproduced. I said, ‘Hold on to this book. I want to meet this guy.'”

Seliger’s first assignment for Kratochvil demonstrated the meticulousness that was rapidly propelling him to the top of his profession. “When I gave him his first assignment, he did a dress rehearsal,” says Kratochvil. “He did the assignment before he did the assignment! His work ethic was as high as his creative level. It’s very unusual to see that. I think Mark had always wanted to work for Rolling Stone and he wasn’t going to let this opportunity escape.”

Over the following five years, Seliger shot more than a dozen Rolling Stone covers. The magazine realized this unbroken string of hits was no accident, and in 1992 Seliger was signed to a position as a staff photographer. “When you get a talent like Mark’s you just want to feed it,” says Jann Wenner, the magazine’s founder, editor, and publisher. “You just want to give it opportunities and let it grow.”

When Seliger joined RS, his desire to learn continued unabated, and joining the magazine full-time enabled him to turn growth into an art form all its own. His work over the next 10 years put the industry’s collective jaw on the floor in its creative trajectory, sheer proliferation, and impact. The photographer estimates he did at least 100 assignments a year for Wenner Media magazines:* Rolling Stone*, Us Weekly, and Men’s Journal.

“Rough patches happen to everybody—writers, painters, photographers,” says Jodi Peckman, Rolling Stone‘s creative director. “But if Mark has them, we don’t know about it.” Peckman accompanied Seliger on many of the shoots during this period. “His technical chops are top notch, but he’s an ideas guy too. It was clear from the very beginning that he was going to be not only a great cover shooter, but a great prolonged cover shooter,” she says. “If you send Mark back to the same subject, he’ll get something new. You can’t do that with too many photographers. From the beginning he had different styles. But somehow they’re cohesive and they work together.”

Indeed, from the beginning Seliger has shown an uncanny ability to build the ideal shoot for each subject using a mix of highly detailed planning and preparation as well as a willingness to go with the flow on the day of. “He has a way of talking people into things,” says Kratochvil, recalling a shoot with Dana Carvey where Seliger’s idea was to shoot the comedian with a goldfish tail hanging out of his mouth. When Seliger approached Carvey with the idea, the comedian replied, “I’ll do it if you’ll do it.” Seliger didn’t hesitate. And another classic cover was born.

Of course, not every celebrity is ready to eat a goldfish. Or, say, listen to you at all. After a long string of successes, achieved by driving hard at his subjects and controlling so many details of his shoots, Seliger was memorably brought up short while shooting Nirvana in Australia for the band’s first Rolling Stone cover. “I found a great location in the back country west of Melbourne,” he recalls. Then, before the shoot Seliger made the mistake of telling the band to please not wear shirts with any writing on them. Famously, Cobain showed up wearing a shirt that read corporate magazines still suck, along with a chunky pair of plastic sunglasses.

“I said, ‘Can we take a couple without the shirt and glasses?'” Cobain refused, Seliger says. “He finally did two frames without the glasses, but he crossed his eyes. I was so mad at myself for bringing it up to them. I couldn’t let it go.” However, when he returned with the film, Rolling Stone was ecstatic.

“I messed up, but the gods smiled on me. They gave me a pass, and the band was open the next time I shot them. The first cover showed a sense of reluctance and irreverence that was the beginning of something. It was the ’90s. It was noise. After that I started to think about artists very differently I stopped controlling things as much.”

The gods would smile again, as if to show Seliger he was on the right track. Cobain seemed to appreciate that the photographer hadn’t balked at his shenanigans. The next time Seliger shot the band, after the debut of In Utero, the vibe was far more cooperative. In a nod to the previous shoot, Seliger suggested the band wear Brooks Brothers suits for the shoot and they complied. “Then Kurt sat very quietly for me and gave me that Polaroid,” Seliger says, referring to the devastating portrait (page 45) taken just before his death. “There is an honesty and a total melancholy present there. It was a great gift from him and an important lesson for me to learn. That photo was a game changer for me.” While he remained (and remains) meticulous and prepared to a fault, from that point on, collaboration trumped control.

Seliger’s cheekiness didn’t leave completely, of course. He recalls a gamble that paid off during a Rolling Stone shoot in 2010 with President Obama. The magazine needed a conventional cover shot, but Seliger also wanted one “to take home” (something he tries for at every shoot). In this case, his heart was set on a photo of both the front and the back of the president’s head. “When you have five hours you can try different things,” he says. But “when you’re shooting the president of the United States in the White House you have six and a half minutes.” Working in front of Obama’s staff, along with Jann Wenner, a couple of writers, and Seliger’s editor, he shot the cover in about five minutes, then grabbed his Pentax and took the president over to a white background he had set up. “I told him I wanted to do a diptych, so I shot a couple frames from the front, then asked him to turn around,” Seliger says. “After about five frames he said, ‘OK, that’s enough art.'” The whole episode took a minute and a half, but the photo may outlive them both.

In 2002 Seliger left his position at Rolling Stone and began shooting for other magazines: Vanity Fair, GQ. He also began shooting more in fashion and advertising. Those who might mistake this for dabbling are directed to the exceptional work he’s been quietly pumping out for German, Italian, and Spanish Vogue, Ray-Ban, or Levi’s. Or if you prefer, the movie posters for “Anchorman,” “Superbad,” or “The Interview.” It’s as if, after a couple decades of hitting home runs, he decided he’d show up at the stadium Monday night and throw a few touchdown passes, then drop in at the Staples Center to start for the Los Angeles Lakers.

Through it all, Seliger’s personal work has remained not only an intense focus for him but has drawn the kind of outside interest and acclaim most photographers only dream of. Any photographer who maintains such a grueling commercial pace could be forgiven if they wanted to leave their day job at the office. But Seliger sees his personal work as key to his continued growth. “Mark is absolutely crazy like that,” says photographer Patrick Randak, Seliger’s former first assistant, of his old boss’s seemingly inexhaustible creative energy. “If it isn’t a book project, it’s a fine art project or Rusty Truck [Seliger’s alt-country band]. The guy goes a mile a minute. There’s no rest for the weary.”

His monograph When They Came to Take My Father was released in 1996 and features Seliger’s photographs and narratives from holocaust survivors. In My Stairwell (2005) is a collection of stripped-down portraits of cultural figures and artists that Seliger captured over a period of years in the exposed-brick stairwell of his West Village studio. In 2006 he rented a space in the building next door and built a darkroom so he could experiment with making platinum/palladium prints. Then he started a nonprofit gallery, 401 Projects, in the same space with two collaborators. In 2013 Ovation debuted “Capture With Mark Seliger,” a TV show that pairs pro photographers with celebrities who are also photo enthusiasts and explores their work.

Getting closer to darkroom printing, he says, led directly to his next set of personal work, 2010’s book Listen. As he explored, he found himself in need of subject matter that would do justice to the tonal depth platinum/palladiums can achieve. Where his portrait work is about high-level planning and high-wire interpersonal work, the landscape, still life, and nude work in Listen has more to do with serendipity and patience. “A lot of those photos were about slowing down,” he says. “They were about being present and allowing something to come to you rather than you going to it.”

Kratochvil says she’s noticed the shift in his shooting over the past 10 years and ascribes it to an increasing confidence and the calm that generates. “I think he feels a lot more secure about stripping away all the razzamatazz and getting down to basics,” she says. “I think he felt a need to make his pictures simpler—when he did that they got even stronger.”

Seliger recalls when his thinking about the Listen photos gelled. On an unseasonably warm New Year’s Day he was out near his studio when a fog began rolling in around the pylons of a disused pier on the Hudson: “I was just standing there with my Toyo 4×5 looking at the scene unrolling in front of me as the fog was changing. I was watching it very quietly, only shooting every 15 seconds or so. When I looked behind me there were 10 people there. It really affected me that we were all watching the same thing, and it made me want to go and search out these photographs. I thought if these people were enjoying the same thing I was enjoying, it would make a great photographic project.”

Close up, Seliger’s platinum/palladium prints have a luminous, tactile, almost three-dimensional quality, as if the viewer might walk into them. This is not the kind of work that just happens. It is the product of an artist whose primary goal is not to impress, or even to express, but to grow. His focus has remained constant, not on the surfeit of accolades he’s inspired or his financial well-being, but on working as hard as he can while also letting go. It requires that most delicate balance of relaxed attention, maintaining what Zen students call “beginner’s mind.” Where others might feel they have arrived, as far as Mark Seliger is concerned, the journey still very much lies ahead. “He’s still as curious, still as hungry, as he was when I first met him in 1987,” says longtime collaborator (and GQ design director) Fred Woodward. “He’s still most excited about the next picture.”

The post Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: Mark Seliger’s Portraits appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Claudio Palmisano, of 10b Photography, based in Rome, processed the images in this story for the journalists who shot them. He provided us with the flat, original RAW files he began with and the final, transformed images that resulted. This image by Yuri Kozyrev was captured in Cairo, Egypt, February 11, 2011.

Claudio Palmisano, of 10b Photography, based in Rome, processed the images in this story for the journalists who shot them. He provided us with the flat, original RAW files he began with and the final, transformed images that resulted. This image by Yuri Kozyrev was captured in Cairo, Egypt, February 11, 2011.

Palmisano adds custom textures, or “grain,” for every photographer he works with. This image by Francesco Zizola was captured in South Sudan, March 23, 2011.

Palmisano adds custom textures, or “grain,” for every photographer he works with. This image by Francesco Zizola was captured in South Sudan, March 23, 2011.

Palmisano makes small (or “sometimes huge”) zonal density adjustments to help move a viewer’s eye around the scene, which was photographed by Yuri Kozyrev near Cairo’s Tahrir Square, November 23, 2011.

Palmisano makes small (or “sometimes huge”) zonal density adjustments to help move a viewer’s eye around the scene, which was photographed by Yuri Kozyrev near Cairo’s Tahrir Square, November 23, 2011.

Palmisano says: “Color perception is relative and not absolute.” Above: Baglar, Diyarbakir, Turkey, February 10, 2012.

Palmisano says: “Color perception is relative and not absolute.” Above: Baglar, Diyarbakir, Turkey, February 10, 2012.

Photojournalism in the digital age is fraught with peril. And it brings questions of objectivity, truth, ethics, and deception into sharp relief. While news photography remains vital to our understanding of the world, confusion in both the public consciousness and among photographers about the use of Adobe Photoshop and other editing tools in retouching photos threatens to erode its credibility and destroy its power to illuminate. Photographers, photo editors, and other defenders of the faith have made it their mission to uphold a rigid set of journalistic standards regarding image processing and manipulation. Trouble is, not everyone agrees on what those standards should be.

“I don’t think we’ve really comprehended the scale of the digital revolution,” says writer/researcher David Campbell, secretary for the World Press Photo Contest. He points out that every digital photo ever made has been processed, even if its creator never even glanced sideways at the cloning tool. “Digital is fundamentally different from analog because there is no original image,” Campbell says. “The RAW file is just data. To even see an image requires processing. The question is not whether you should allow processing, but that it should be transparent and show just how the processing was done.”

Campbell and World Press Photo are particularly interested parties in this arena. In 2013 Paul Hansen, a winner of a World Press Photo of the Years 2012 award, was accused of manipulating the content of his photo “Gaza Burial.” Though Hansen’s photo was ultimately cleared and the prize stood, the controversy was heated enough, and spoke so deeply to the basic credibility of the medium and the contest, that the organization commissioned Campbell to speak to as many media outlets as possible and create a best practices report on photojournalism and photo manipulation (it’s due to be completed this fall, but wasn’t yet available at press time).

Campbell says that news and documentary organizations have built some consensus about what is not acceptable. “Material alteration to the image by including or excluding a certain item” seems to be a standard everyone can agree on, as illustrated by the story of Narciso Contreras, an accomplished conflict photographer who, while working for the Associated Press, used software to remove a colleague’s video camera from a photo of a Syrian opposition fighter in the midst of battle. When he brought the incident to the AP’s attention, the newswire severed ties with Contreras, saying it will remove his work from its publicly available photo archives, including photos from Syria that, along with the work of other photographers, helped net the AP a 2013 Pulitzer Prize. The story is heartbreaking—Contreras is a hard-working and talented photographer who was probably operating under extreme duress—but in the end his case was not controversial. There is a bright line around adding or removing content, and Contreras very clearly crossed it.

When it comes to the subtler edges of post-processing, however, one finds strikingly little agreement across the industry. Campbell says that looking to the darkroom era for guidance provides little clarity. “People often say they accept changes in line with what would have previously been done in the darkroom, but that thinking is flawed,” he says. You can do anything you want in the darkroom, and people did. It can hardly be the basis for what’s acceptable and what isn’t.”

Indeed, analog malfeasance was common. “There was an old trick in the newspaper days for photographing golfers,” says Australian Ashley Gilbertson, a photojournalist with the VII agency. “You could never get the golf ball right in the front of your lens, so it looked like the golfer was smacking the ball toward you. I remember hearing stories back home about photographers using a 20-cent coin as a burning tool to make it look like the ball was coming into frame.” Even absent that level of creative shenanigans in the darkroom, Gilbertson never understood the attitude that “everything’s OK as long as you do it in camera,” he says. “That means cross-processing film and light leaks are all OK, but playing with saturation in Photoshop isn’t.” Indeed, Gilbertson says he used a much heavier hand in his darkroom days, dodging and burning significantly to create drama in his photographs. Now, however, “I have a much softer touch because our industry has come under much more scrutiny than ever before.”

Every photographer we spoke with for this piece referenced the dangers of eroding the public’s trust in documentary images. Stanley Greene, a photojournalist and one of the founders of the NOOR collective, put it clearly, saying that photo manipulation takes photojournalists “down a dark road,” and that “we are the messengers, we are the seekers of the truths, we must be the ones that show the light in the darkest corners of the world. When viewers can no longer trust the picture or the photographer taking it, we are nothing but tricksters.”

Fred Ritchin, a professor of photography and imaging at New York University and author of several journalism books on the future of imaging, says this controversy makes today a “difficult and very painful time to be a photojournalist,” and that the lack of standards across different publications has the potential to create an environment in which “people may not take seriously certain events or things going on around the world.” He continues, “If you walk into a bookstore and ask for nonfiction or fiction, you know what the difference is and what you’ll get. But at this point we don’t really know what’s a fiction photo or a nonfiction photo.”

Blaming Photoshop for the fact that photojournalism is viewed with a suspicious eye is to create a double standard, says award-winning conflict photographer and VII cofounder Ron Haviv. It also reveals a naïve and misplaced distrust. “When I shot slide film, I chose film and filters based on the look I wanted to present in the final product,” he says. “The tradition of photojournalism has always taken into account aesthetic value, whether we do it with a computer or with film choices or in the darkroom. I might choose a certain film stock because I want punchy, cartoonlike colors. But if I do it on a computer it’s seen as going too far.”

But Haviv argues that the strong awareness of Photoshop among the general public is a good thing. “The audience is in on it now,” he says. “No one had any idea what photographers did in the darkroom. Now people are trying to find the cutoff point of what is and is not acceptable, though it’s a false pursuit. People talk about objectivity and photojournalism. But there’s nothing objective about photography. I’m not lying to you, but it’s not objective. I’m asking the viewer to trust me that this is a fair representation of reality.”

Digital photojournalism does have one ace up its sleeve: data. Every digital photo leaves a trail when it passes through a camera or is processed by a piece of software—it’s one of the defining differences between analog and digital photojournalism. It’s now incumbent on photographers to make sure they can precisely document the process they went through to arrive at the final version of any photo they want to be considered documentary. Campbell notes that precise nomenclature is also very important when designating what has been done to a file. “Manipulation,” he says, “refers to moving actual pixels (with the exception of removing sensor dust), while ‘processing’ is everything done to turn data into an image. Verification, of course, is key to understanding whether any of these techniques has been applied in the first place.”

“Professionals are going to need to make their work verifiable,” he says. “And verification may involve image makers having a digital trail for all to see. You should be able to see every Photoshop change, every Lightroom change, as well as geotagging for where the image was taken and who was involved in making it. The more you let readers see how the sausage is produced, the more confidence they have in the sausage. The more verifiable an image is, the more authentic it will be regarded as.”

The question of how to make that information transparent remains. Since as early as 1994, Ritchin has advocated adopting an icon that would run underneath images. For online photos, when clicked it would list all the processing the image had been through.

Still, the debate over how far is too far isn’t going away anytime soon. “At NOOR, we have a code of ethics that we all agree on, a basic tenet being that there’s no adding, no taking out,” says Evelien Kunst, NOOR’s managing director. “But there are nuances that we debate, and even among the NOOR photographers there are different standpoints.” If a 12-person photo collective has trouble agreeing on these distinctions, is there any hope for the rest of us?

In some sense, the enhanced verification of the digital age may, in the end, negate the need for universal answers. In fact, it’s possible that the messy, unclear legacy of digital post-processing is the greatest gift photojournalism has ever received. The struggle for clarity around our documentary images reminds us that no photojournalist has a monopoly on truth, that everyone has a viewpoint and an aesthetic. “Even having no aesthetic is an aesthetic,” Haviv says.

The birth of Photoshop may have marked the death of our photographic innocence, but innocence is overrated. Thirty years ago it was easy to believe that photographs were true representations of reality. But we know now that was never the case. Living in a world where reality is a fluid concept may feel more uncertain, but if we can trust our photojournalists and continue to be able to verify their work, photojournalism may find itself unshackled from its previous constraints and able to explore new avenues of expression. As Gilbertson puts it, “depending on what side of the bed I wake up on, I might think one way of processing a photo is better than another. But the underlying content is what never changes.”

BOUNDARY ISSUES
A survey of some of the guidelines used by various news organizations, from minimalist to maximalist

FROM NATIONAL PRESS PHOTOGRAPHERS ASSOCIATION CODE OF ETHICS
_www.nppa.org/code-of-ethic_s

Editing should maintain the integrity of the photographic images’ content and context. Do not manipulate images or add or alter sound in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects

EXCERPT FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS’S “NEWS VALUES”
www.ap.org/company/news-values

The content of a photograph must not be altered in Photoshop or by any other means. No element should be digitally added to or subtracted from any photograph. The faces or identities of individuals must not be obscured by Photoshop or any other editing tool. Only retouching or the use of the cloning tool to eliminate dust on camera sensors and scratches on scanned negatives or scanned prints are acceptable.

Minor adjustments in Photoshop are acceptable. These include cropping, dodging and burning, conversion into grayscale, and normal toning and color adjustments that should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction (analogous to the burning and dodging previously used in darkroom processing of images) and that restore the authentic nature of the photograph. Changes in density, contrast, color and saturation levels that substantially alter the original scene are not acceptable. Backgrounds should not be digitally blurred or eliminated by burning down or by aggressive ton- ing. The removal of “red eye” from photographs is not permissible.

FROM GETTY IMAGES’S EDITORIAL POLICY
www.gettyimages.com/corporate/editorialpolicy.aspx

We believe that photographs are the visual communication of a story and should be held to an equal level of accountability, responsibility and integrity as the written word in journalism. Images illustrate and reflect the events of our world today and therefore have a responsibility to be delivered to the customer with accuracy and impartiality.

FROM REUTERS’S BRIEF GUIDE TO STANDARDS, PHOTOSHOP AND CAPTIONS
www.handbook.reuters.com

Materially altering a picture in Photoshop or any other image editing soft- ware will lead to dismissal. Rules: No additions or deletions to the subject matter of the original image. (thus changing the original content and journalistic integrity of an image) No excessive lightening, darkening or blurring of the image. (thus misleading the viewer by disguising certain elements of an image) No excessive colour manipulation. (thus dramatically changing the original lighting conditions of an image)

Allowed: Cropping, adjustment of Levels to histogram limits, minor colour correction, sharpening at 300%, 0.3, 0, careful use of lasso tool, subtle use of burn tool, sdjustment of highlights and shadows, eye dropper to check/set gray

Not Allowed: Additions or deletions to image, cloning & Healing tool (ex- cept dust), airbrush, brush, paint, selective area sharpening, excessive lighten- ing/darkening, excessive colour tone change, auto levels, blurring, eraser tool, quick mask, in-camera sharpening, in-camera saturation styles.

WORLD PRESS PRESS PHOTO SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
www.worldpressphoto.org

The content of the images must not be altered. Only retouching which con- forms to currently accepted standards in the industry is allowed.

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Photojournalism in the digital age is fraught with peril. And it brings questions of objectivity, truth, ethics, and deception into sharp relief. While news photography remains vital to our understanding of the world, confusion in both the public consciousness and among photographers about the use of Adobe Photoshop and other editing tools threatens to erode its credibility and destroy its power to illuminate. Photographers, photo editors, and other defenders of the faith have made it their mission to uphold a rigid set of journalistic standards regarding image processing and manipulation. Trouble is, not everyone agrees on what those standards should be.

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In early 2011, Denver Post photographer Craig F. Walker and his editor sat down to figure out a direction for Walker’s next long-term project. They wanted something relevant to our times, with both local and national repercussions. They hit on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. “We felt strongly that this was something that our nation as a whole was going to be dealing with for generations,” Walker says.

In trying to build a photo project around the topic, Walker reached out to several veterans groups, finally connecting with Stacy Bare, a former PTSD sufferer, who organized hikes for veterans. Bare had recently met Brian Scott Ostrom after noticing his truck in a parking lot. It stuck out for two reasons. First was a Marine Corps license plate. Second, the plate read “IED” (Improvised Explosive Device). Bare left his card on Ostrom’s windshield with his phone number. Walker and Ostrom met on a veterans’ hike a few weeks later. The two hit it off, their conversation extending to a coffee shop, where Walker asked Ostrom if he’d be willing to participate in a photo essay on PTSD. Ostrom agreed.

Things looked promising. Ostrom seemed to understand the project, what was involved and the mutual respect and trust it would require. A few days later, Walker called Ostrom, but didn’t hear back. “After a couple days I figured maybe he’d had a change of heart. Maybe it wasn’t right.” The next day, however, Ostrom called Walker to explain. He’d been in a mental health facility for the previous 72 hours after a suicide attempt (his second). “He was apologetic,” says Walker. “I told him he had no reason to apologize. That experience confirmed for both of us that this story needed to be told.”

Ostrom had originally signed up for the Marines after tiring of a dead-end job and seeing his friends venture into drugs. In 2003, while he was in basic training, the U.S. invaded Iraq. His first tour was relatively routine. His second tour dropped him in Fallujah, one of the hottest of the war’s hot zones. In that relentlessly violent environment, Ostrom served with pride and completed the missions he was assigned.

But that period left scars that stuck with him. As with many PTSD sufferers, the effects were minor at first but became more acute over time. “He carried a guilt for things he did and things he didn’t do,” says Walker. These haunted him in the form of panic attacks, rages and severe depression.

In an act of surpassing courage, for nine months Ostrom gave Walker complete access to his life as he tried to reintegrate into society, struggling with panic attacks, housing, legal troubles and relationship woes. “It was a commitment for him to open his doors like that,” says Walker. “It meant he had to call me when things were bad. I told him, ‘If you’re in the middle of a panic attack or have a hard time dealing with PTSD, I need to be there to share it with you. We wanted to show the dark places PTSD takes people. I’m a photographer. I can’t show it if I’m not there.”

Thankfully, Ostrom called. He called when the police were at his house and he called when his girlfriend left with his anxiety medication after a fight. He called when he couldn’t control his thoughts and when he couldn’t get out of bed and when he was worried about ending up homeless and talking to himself on a street corner. Each time, Walker made the 45-minute drive to Ostrom’s house to see what was going on and capture it as best he could with his camera.

Given the emotionally charged nature of the project, one of the biggest challenges Walker faced was not becoming part of the story. The two are close now that the project is finished, but during those nine months, Walker says, he had to be studiously aware of Ostrom’s status as subject. “I wasn’t there to be his friend. I couldn’t offer him advice. Once, when he had a DUI, he asked if I could give him a ride somewhere. I told him, ‘No. It would change your story. It would alter your life. I’ll come with you and take the bus wherever you want to go, but if I alter the story by giving you a ride, I’ve crossed that line from a neutral, respectful, trusted observer into a friend and helper.’ I didn’t want to misguide him about what we were doing. There is a line, and it’s important to the story that we not cross it. For me to interfere or alter what was going on would do an injustice to Scott because he’s putting himself out there and sharing his story. It’s my job to let it play out, and tell it right, no matter how painful it is. And he understood that. The second time he asked me for a ride, I just kind of looked at him. He laughed.”

Last April, a year to the day after he met Scott Ostrom, Craig Walker was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for an 18-picture excerpt from the project (you can view the entire 49-photo series online here). But while Walker says winning the Pulitzer (his second) is “amazing and overwhelming,” he says the main reason he’s happy about the win is the same reason he started the project in the first place—it increases awareness of one of the most difficult and troubling problems of our time. Because of this series, Walker says, “more people become aware of what many of our veterans are dealing with. Scott and I have been contacted by people all over the world. Across generations, from Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam or World War II, even people whose parents were in WWII. You hear all these phrases—shell shock, ‘he was never the same after the war.’ It’s all the same thing. It’s really special that this story is reaching out on so many different levels, both generational and geographical.” We couldn’t agree more.

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“I’ve always been fascinated by the way people attack things,” says Hank O’Neal. That fascination first manifested in the 1960s and ’70s, when he worked for the CIA doing research to foil attacks on the U.S. After leaving the agency in the mid-’70s, O’Neal channeled his obsession into street art.

“The first pictures I did on the graffiti project were in 1976,” he explains. “There was a Tareyton cigarette ad all over the subway and for some reason it made everyone angry. There’d be 20 ads up for soap suds or beer, but the only ones that would be defaced would be these cigarette ads. I went from station to station and took three or four hundred photographs of the ways people had attacked this one ad. That’s when I started paying attention to things on walls.”

Over the next 35 years, the 71-year old photographer (whose street moniker is XCIA) snapped more than 20,000 pictures of New York City’s vibrant street art, capturing luminaries from Haring and Basquiat to Banksy and J.R. along with thousands of other talented artists.

O’Neal, who also produces jazz records and has edited numerous photo books, attributes his street aesthetics and diligence to principles instilled in him by photographic legend Berenice Abbott during their 19-year working relationship. O’Neal met Abbott serendipitously in 1972, through Genevieve Naylor.

“I met Genevieve because of a book I was working on,” O’Neal says. “One day I called her and she mentioned that she was staying with Berenice at her house in Maine. I was a fan, and asked if Berenice would sell me some photos. We hit it off. The next time I visited, I brought a Polaroid SX-70 camera with me. Berenice said, ‘If you ever get a real camera, come back and I’ll show you how to use it.’ So I did. She set me up with this big Deardorff and told me to take a picture of the doorknocker of her house. When she saw what I did she said, ‘You’ll have to do a darn sight better than that, buster!’”

Those words became something of a mantra to O’Neal, pushing him to constantly improve his work. “One of the most important things she said to me was ‘Hank, the worst thing in the world is to go out and take photos willy-nilly. You have to have a project.’ So I started projects.”

Though he’s had many over the years, his most enduring is the street art project. Graffiti’s ephemeral nature attracted him immediately. “99.9% of the stuff I’ve shot doesn’t exist anymore,” he says. “It’s no different from recording Dizzy Gillespie playing. If you don’t make a picture of it, it’s gone forever.” He continues, “But that’s what’s exciting about street art—it’s endlessly reinventing itself. I can go to the same spot every week and see completely different things.”

O’Neal sees in street art the collaborative elements of a jam session. “I love to see that interplay. People just add things on top of things and create these layers and it’s always changing.”

His enthusiasm for this art form (which is, in most cases, flatly illegal), seems incongruous for someone of his generation, yet his enthusiasm is electric, and highly infectious. “Some of these kids are vandals, sure, but the energy that so many of them have is incredible,” he says. “I believe that some of the things that these kids are putting up on walls is more exciting and intellectually interesting on a thousand different levels than what’s up on the walls in most museums and galleries. Because it’s not over-conceptualized, they’re acts of pure artistry, and often made under really tough conditions. And there’s always an element of risk and danger because some people don’t want it to be done.”

XCIA’s Street Art Project, a book featuring his work from the ’80s through today (Siman Media Works, $40 in print, $13 for iPad). If you’re ever in New York City, you might see him shooting. But given his CIA roots, he tends to blend. In fact, you might not notice even if he’s right in front of you. “I am mister whitebread,” he says, “so nobody pays any attention to me. It’s a wonderful asset.” AP

CLOSE-UP: Hank O’Neal (aka XCIA)

hankoneal.com
Lives In New York, NY
Other Projects In the 40-odd years since Berenice Abbott taught him to “always have a project,” O’Neal has done 68 different ones, ranging from photos of jazz concerts to studies of an auto graveyard in Maine to 170 formal medium-format portraits of people with whom O’Neal has collaborated.
In the Bag For graffiti work, O’Neal carries a Canon PowerShot S95 and a Canon T3i. For other material he uses a Leica. a Rolleiflex and a Deardorff.

Publisher Siman will be releasing an image per day of the book this month. Check them out on Facebook and Twitter.

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