George Lois Video — The Great Esquire Covers

This video of George Lois was shot by GQ’s Design Director Fred Woodward for the 2004 SPD awards. George conceived and designed all those iconic Esquire covers from the 60’s (cover archive here).

From a story on Lois and the hit show Mad Men over on Fast Company (here):

So what happened to the great advertising of the sixties? It continued into the seventies but slowly got taken over by the Saatchis and guys who were buying up agencies. Before you knew it, all the creative agencies were bought. Most advertising today is group grope. The marketing people decide what a point of view should be, then they go out and test it and they come back with all kinds of opinions about strategy. That’s fed down to the copywriter and art director who are stuck with that whole approach. It’s an art but they’ve made it a science. Every businessperson today has gone to marketing school, business school or communication classes. How are you going to teach advertising? With the way I worked, a client can give me everything they know about something and then I go away and come back with advertising that knocks them out of their chair. They finally understand what kind of a company they are.

…mostly today, I could name you brands that spent a half a billion or a billion a year on advertising and I could say to you, “Okay, give me what they say in their advertising–give me the words or the visual of what their message is, and you couldn’t tell me what the fuck they do. I could name every car in America and I couldn’t tell you what the fuck their advertising is. Every beer brand, you would confuse every commercial for every other.

Thanks, BoSacks.

Steve Fine, DOP at SI To Lecture at Art Center Tonight

Steve has assigned covers and editorial photography for more than ten years at Sports Illustrated and recently directed all the photography for the Beijing Olympics.
Lecture will begin at 7:00 pm on October 30th
Art Center College of Design
Hillside Campus
1700 Lida St.
Pasadena, CA 91103
L.A. Times Media Center

Off The Cliff We Go…

Digital Rail Road completely collapses and gives it’s contributors 24 hours to remove material before shutting off the servers. Vincent gives them a good thrashing here. I guess we now know that photoshelter made the right move to abandon the stock sales and keep the personal archive servers alive. It seems somewhat criminal what they’re doing, but in the current business environment they can get in line with all the other aholes.

Time Inc. begins the holiday bloodletting with a 600 job cut. I agree with Lee Crane and wonder if they will fire any of the decision makers who drove them here.

Corbis needs more of your royalty. After 15 years of trying to reach profitability this is your solution? Melcher has the straight dope as usual.

You can read about all the latest magazine failures and job cuts over at  Magazine Death Pool. Will they become the f*cked company of the media world as advertising takes a nose dive?

UPDATE: DRR appears to have an extension of the shutdown to 11:59PM, PST, on Friday October 31. (via, photoshelter)

The Christian Science Monitor to Abandon Print

“We have the luxury — the opportunity — of making a leap that most newspapers will have to make in the next five years,”  — John Yemma, Editor of CSM

The Monitor, which was conceived as an alternative to the yellow journalism of the early 20th century has a reputation for thoughtful writing and strong international coverage and has long maintained an outsize influence in the publishing world.

Story on NYTimes.com (here), Thanks Steve.

Photo Trade Show Hangover

I spent last week in NYC going to events, then 3 days on the floor at the PDN Photo Expo and I’m a little fried from talking shop all week so I thought I’d throw up this recap jumble for the moment.

My favorite part of flying has to be the visit to Hudson News to survey covers, scan headlines, look for trends and see in general what piques my interest. The first thing to jump out at me was the new Rolling Stone book size and paper which eerily looks very similar to Men’s Journal. I bought a copy to check out the Sebastiao Salgado essay and read a 12 page story on the death of David Foster Wallace. I also grabbed a copy of The Atlantic after reading about the redesign because I wanted to see how it feels in the hand. I was impressed. I noticed that portfolio hasn’t run one of those lovely abstract covers in awhile and hope they haven’t completely abandoned those in favor of the more traditional personality based ones. The new Radar redesign looks great… too bad they pulled the plug on it. Bon Appetit covers are grabbing my attention now because they feel grounded/authentic and I see that Craig Cutler has shot the last couple. The cover flap for literary and news magazine seems to be a new trend and is likely tied to their need to sell, sell, sell on the newsstand but remain tasteful on your nightstand. I wasn’t going to buy the new GQ because my bag was already weighing a ton but I couldn’t resist a 32 page photo essay by Jeff Riedel (I’ll have to see if he’s up for an interview about it). I also discovered a piece inside on covering the presidential campaigns for news magazines that talks about the un-objectivity of the whole affair and nasty way that the flacks influence the press.

I attended and blogged about the Lucies (here) and while there are several things I think they could do to improve it, I was moved by several of the speeches and overall it’s a much needed event in the world of photography. My very simple fix would be to give more awards to young upcoming and hot now photographers and maybe include some academy like mass voting in the process. While I think honoring some of these legendary photographers is very important and gives the event serious street cred, there is a real need to elevate hungry young photographers into the spotlight and give validation to projects that require publishers and editors to take chances on lesser known photographers. That being said, the honorees were the ones who gave speeches that reminded me of the power and importance of photography.

I had two days between that and the the start of the trade show and ended up out both nights with photographers, photo eds and agents. Everyone now begins a conversation with me by saying “this is off the record.”

Thursday I headed for the trade show and the place seemed to be packed with people. I was there to meet people, observe what it might take to have a decent booth for my website company and hand out some cool stickers I made. The serious fawning over gear is somewhat lost on me (I’m not a photographer) so, I kind of walked around observing and meeting up with different people. The most interesting phoneomenon has to be the “live photo sessions” where photographers with model(s) and lights are shooting live images in front of a crowd of people. There’s also a lot of slideshows where photographers talk about technique and how the images were made. Some of the crowds were impressive and Vincent Laforet seemed to be drawing the biggest. I can only assume the blog is partially feeding this and that is an awesome development.

After the show it was time to party and I headed out with Andrew Hetherington (his official report here) to 3 in a row. The highlight of the evening was Monte Isom’s self promo party. Yes, instead of a promo card or emailer that you track Monte has a guest list, DJ and booze. Clients are handed flash drives with his photography on it when they check in. I guarantee he sees a return on this mother of all promos and I hope he keeps it up because it’s a good event for photographers and clients to mingle and party unlike the PDN self promo event where they shut off the booze and kick you out just when I was starting to settle in.

I had some interesting conversations with industry vets much of which was concerned with the cliff we just fell off. When it comes to advertising in magazines there seems to be a lot of chasing demos going on which amounts to creating content that will attract a certain demographic age, income level, education and ratio of male vs female readers. This has really been going on since 2000 but now in earnest because of the urgency in the situation. I think demos will dominate the conversation with potential advertisers going forward along with words from the web like uniques and hits.

My argument against chasing demos is that the cost to appease these fickle readers who care very little about your core values is enormous. Both in terms of the number of people needed to produce the junk content and the watering down of the core content. If you’ve every wondered how a magazine with millions of readers can shut down it’s because of the sheer weight of trying to maintain a huge circulation of people who barely like what you produce. This is a very scary time to be in magazines as I was told by several people that no advertising is being sold in 2009. None. Everyone is making a decision after the election and waiting for some sign in the economy. Only the strong will survive. In the end chasing demos has no end game it’s just a temporary fix as numbers rule the conversation right now but eventually it will fail as we return to the value of original content and readers who are invested in the product.

Overall it was a great week in the city and I met an incredible group of people who are committed to making this industry a better place: John Harrington, David Hobby, Joerg Colberg, Mark Tucker, Kristina Snyder, David Burnett, Cameron Davidson, Eric McNatt, Chris Bartlett, Evan Kafka, Jonathan Saunders and Allegra Wilde.

ImageSpan May Change Stock Photography Forever

Whats the biggest problem facing stock photography today? Is it finding pictures or is it licensing pictures? For a certain group of clients and buyers it’s finding pictures that meet a specific criteria, which inevitably includes a level of trust that the image appears nowhere else and that the model release is solid. That market is fixed and declining so I believe the potential for growth lies in easier licensing of images. That way you can license to consumers, to people who have no clue how to do it and to people who steal images. This is where the potential exists (story here) and this is where image span has taken a step in the right direction with their license stream software (here). They allow you to attach licensing to an image and publish it anywhere. You can even publish it straight into google from their dashboard.

In the words of CEO Iain Scholnick, “Image Span hopes to do for digital content what credit card companies do for physical content. Make it easy to buy.” They even take a credit card like five percent of the transaction. Now, buying images with credit cards is not an original idea and two recent high profile failures in the industry, that were geared towards selling the pictures of any photographer around should be enough to tell you it’s a tough market to crack. Ian told me the problem with their licensing was that humans were doing the transactions. The solution is to automate it. I can certainly see how the future of stock photography is about buyers clicking on images and making instant purchases with instant delivery. But, for me it’s about the ability to distribute the content in new ways. On google, blogs and even the NY Times website. When photography travels with it’s own license the potential is endless.

Sounds pretty sweet right. You attach licenses to your images and scatter them around the internet and when people want to use them they click and make a purchase. Well, here’s where it becomes real interesting because they announced a new development today called content tracker (press release here). The images you want to license can now also be tracked and when they appear in unlicensed uses you will be notified. I was told by Ian that they create a digital fingerprint of the image from the ones and zeros and that makes it impossible to crop the tracking out. They even have one click notifications that you can send to the offending party to ask them to license, remove or properly credit the use. This closes the loop on publishing images online because it allows you to track all the uses of your images and can be a powerful deterrent in preventing theft.

I’m sure this is just the very beginning of the potential for something like this and if the investors are any indication (Bertelsmann) there’s a huge need for licensing and tracking on the corporate level but what I like best is they’ve created a solution for everyone.

Why Should Magnum Photographers Blog?

From the comments in the newly helmed Magnum blog:

“When the photographers ask you why they should participate in such a thing, what’s the answer?”

What a great question Mike. Here is my thinking in a nutshell:

If Magnum is still around in ten years, I think it will be because Magnum has learned how to become its own producer. Rather than waiting for some new online magazine to rise from the ashes of print media, Magnum has the opportunity to become its own content-provider. But to do this, Magnum needs to learn how to work in quick-moving media like this blog. I see the Magnum Blog as a kind of training camp for things to come. (Such as InSight, but more on this later).

Comment posted by Alec Soth on October 20, 2008

Live from the Lucie Awards

I will be blogging live from the Lucie Awards this evening starting at 7pm EST. There are 10 honorees who will receive awards and give speeches then 9 awards will be given out Oscar style to winners from a list of nominees in different categories (full list here).

I’ve been curious about the Lucie’s since they started so I’m excited to provide some commentary for people unable to attend and announce the winners in each category. I’m fully aware that “live blogging” a photo awards ceremony may draw comparisons to watching a fresh coat of paint drying on the wall but I’m ready to give it a shot and attempt to entertain however many people tune in.

Interviewing Candidates For A Magazine Job

There’s something strange about the magazine business, in that the people working at magazines are very good at editing or designing or copy editing and generally very bad at the very basics of running a business. Skills like leadership, managing people, managing budgets, running meetings and conducting interviews are not why most people have the position they do at a magazine. There was no learn by example happening at the places I’ve worked and most of my job interviews amounted to a casual conversation. It wasn’t until I interviewed at a big clothing company once for a job photo editing their catalog (didn’t get it) that I got hit with serious interview questions. Luckily I had a feeling it was going to happen and found this list of common questions (here) which I used to prep all weekend.

After that experience I realized how useful good interview questions are for gaining insight into what it might be like to work with someone. I feel like the point of the questions is not what your answer is so much as it is how you go about answering it and most important is that you have some kind of game plan for your career. There’s nothing worse than someone saying they have no idea where they want to be 10 years from now. Sure, it’s impossible to know but you have some kind of plan don’t you? Here are the questions I started asking all the candidates in the face to face interview:

Tell me about yourself.
Why do you want to work here?
Why do you want to leave your current job?
What are your strengths?
What are your weaknesses?
Do you have any experience with portrait, still life, outdoor sport, documentary or lifestyle photographers?
How do you handle pressure and stress?
Where do you see yourself 10 years from now?
What experience do you have working with stock photography and agencies?
What production experience do you have?
What makes you the best candidate for this job?

Pretty basic but I loved the range of answers I would get from something as simple as “what are your weaknesses.” From brutally honest to very long pause followed by disjointed thoughts to text book slick.

My weaknesses? Disdain for athority, don’t follow the rules very well, can’t stay on budget and I spend way too much time looking at pictures instead of actually working. If only they’d asked.

Martin Schoeller- Look into my Lights, You Are Getting Very Sleepy

Martin Schoeller has always been a personal favorite to work with and one thing you will notice on a shoot is the almost hypnotic rhythm he establishes with the film loaders, lights, camera adjustments and direction to the subject. It has a pace to it that lulls you into…

See for yourself here:


[qt:schoeller.mp4 320 180]

From his new book, Female Bodybuilders available at pondpress (here).

Digital Railroad Teeters on the Edge

“…it’s reasonable to expect a very short period of time for the final resolution of DRR – no less than 30 days, and a maximum of 90, but I expect they will surely want everything either closed down or transferred to a new owner by December 31st at the latest.” — John Harrington, Photo Business News (here)

McCain seeks special ‘fair use’ copyright rules

“McCain’s proposal: complaints about videos uploaded by a political campaign would be manually reviewed by a human YouTube employee before any possible removal of the remix. The process for complaints against videos uploaded by millions of other Americans would stay the same: instant removal by a computer program, and then possible reinstatement a week or two later after the video sharing site has received and manually processed a formal counter-notice.”

Story on CNET (here). What’s interesting is that the writer thinks McCain and other politicians might try and revamp copyright law if they are forced to suffer through DMCA takedown notices like the rest of us. Google is taking a hard stand on this because they would like nothing better.

Thanks Ziv.

Pentagram Redsigns The Atlantic

Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and Luke Hayman give the 151-year old general interest magazine it’s 8 redesign (see the process here).

They revert back to an old nameplate from the middle of the last century and bring back a version of the “TOC on the cover,” something that’s very common with literary magazines.

“In a magazine of ideas, writers depend on words to build their arguments, but we didn’t want The Atlantic’s pages to look like homework,” says Bierut.

“Photography has an enhanced presence, and is more journalistic and real-life in execution. The use of photoillustration or montage has been reduced: illustrations are illustrations, and photos are photos.” (*translation: photoillustrations and montage’s are lame)

As always Pentagram does an amazing job with restrained design, powerful typography and grounded photography. A redesign is always an exciting time to work at a magazine as the budgets get loosened a bit and the mantra for photography becomes “new and big.” I hope it works out for them.