Denver Post Has A Big Picture Photo Blog

Featuring Damon Winters photos from the Obama campaign trail (here). Theirs is called Captured and pays homage to the real Big Picture (here) which incidentally has 1028 comments on its Obama essay.

Thanks Jessie.

Magnum In Motion

Holy shit this Magnum in Motion up today is really good (here). I don’t think they’ve always been this good but maybe I’ve not been paying attention.

A Call For Change In The Publishing Industry

It’s time for change in the publishing industry.

There could not be a better time for change in the publishing industry. On the eve of new leadership for America, magazine publishers need to pull their collective heads out of their asses and stop hacking away at the quality of products they produce (and the spirit of those that produce them) and start leading this industry in a new direction.

After announcing a restructuring of their magazines and a staff cuts Anne Moore CEO of Time Inc. told publishers at a circulation conference that Time Inc.’s decision to reorganize had “nothing to do with digital and one hundred percent to do with the recession” (here).

Really Anne? Yes, advertisers are leaving because of the recession but they are also leaving because the product you produce no longer works for them, because there are new and exciting opportunities online and because you keep hacking away at the staff, frequency, page count, trim size and contributors until what’s left is not worth what you are charging. Was it ever worth what you charged them? You’ve certainly made millions off advertising to your readers but I think we’re about to find out if that was a fair deal for everyone.

This AdAge article (here) presents two scenarios for the next five years. Either, top tier magazines that somehow find a way to survive will reap huge returns when the recession ends or advertisers that are leaving now will never come back again. Without a doubt I know all the publishers are betting the former and I think they are all completely wrong.

There are two monumental changes in our industry:

1. The balance of power has gone to the consumers, contributors and even *gasp* your employees who can create, distribute and use content online practically for free.

2. The web allows you to save millions of dollars in creation and distribution costs.

Yet, I feel like many people in publishing think they’re not monumental. If a magazine is anything it’s a very expensive and complicated way to package and deliver content. Suddenly this takes zero effort and publishers are all standing around scratching their heads screaming how will we make money off this.

The changeover to the digital use and distribution of your content is going to be a mess, a complete mess, but without significant investment from existing publishers you will see your market share dwindle and eventually disappear completely. There’s nothing wrong with this really, it happens when the market changes and companies don’t see that hairpin turn in the road and just drive straight off the cliff. I’m sure there are many who will not be one bit sad to see the demise of a few publishers out there who don’t treat their employees or contributors very well.

Here are my 5 easy steps to making the transition to a new media economy:

1. Plow all of your profits back into the your company. Then get into the savings account an grab some of the profits from the 90’s when you were getting obscenely rich off your advertisers and plow some of that back into the product. Use it to make mistakes.

2. Gather all the employees you were about to fire because they don’t fit in so well with your organization or because they are too green to have mastered traditional publishing and give them promotions. Put them in charge. Gather all the people you’ve trained to say no to change and yes to whatever you say is good and fire them (ok I know this will mean there is nobody left in accounting and IT so keep a few of them around but maybe go for the junior ones).

3. Now, add staff and make everyone spend half the day doing traditional print work and half the day working on the online thing (it’s not a magazine). Make sure they try lots of crazy ideas and make lots of mistakes.

4. Invest in your contributors. You spend a tiny fraction of your production costs on the contributors yet the product without them is worthless. If you don’t start building some loyalty with your content creators they will leave you when a better deal comes along.

5. Photography is the key. Figure out how to use it. Video online is TV. We already know that works. Text online is, well, it’s great to read at a certain length but you know, it’s always going to work better printed. Photography is the perfect medium for communication online.

Change or die. It’s up to you.

All Of MTV’s Videos Online For Free

Signaling the end of an era, MTV releases all their videos online for free: http://www.mtvmusic.com

I’m sure they will try and eek some advertising revenue off them at some point but it appears the novelty of watching these things on television has finally ended.

The Election And Photography

The Obama camp did a much better job managing their photography in this election and while I don’t think you can control everything that happens I still think people underestimate what can be done with photography.

When I saw these Obama rally photos (here) I thought, how can you not believe in the power of photography to deliver a message. I was told by someone who used to help politicians with photography for a living that the way you get images like this is make the photographers stand in a certain place so the only photograph they can take is that one.

Good Morning America ran this picture (here) yesterday morning with Diane Sawyer saying “what a photograph.”

Folio Mag, Covers of the campaign (here).

Powell cites a Platon photo when endorsing Obama (here).

If the intersection of politics and photography interests you visit this site: http://www.bagnewsnotes.com

Side Note– Over on FiveThirtyEight.com: “Ever since Brett Marty started taking photographs for the site, our traffic has skyrocketed (here).”

Thanks Allison, Ryan.

SPD Photography Events in November (NYC)

On November 11th Catherine Talese is moderating a panel with 6 photography editors, the event is from 7-8.30PM and will be held at FIT.  Details (here).

On November 19th SPD is holding a photography benefit auction called LAND/SEA/AIR at Hosfelt Gallery in Chelsea.
This is going to be their biggest event all year, second only to the gala.
They’ve been working on this since the spring and everything is coming together beautifully, over 115 prints have been donated and they’re all professionally matted and framed.
Event info (here) and event online (here).

Photo Contest Pre-screen — Critical Mass

Over the last two weeks I looked at 606 different photographer submissions for the Critical Mass competition and helped narrow it down to the 180 finalists (here). As you might expect the images ran the gamut from “are you effing kidding me” to “holy crap that’s amazing.”

I tried to only vote for photographers I would hire or that I would put on a list and ultimately since I won’t be doing any hiring in the near term I’m going to share some of the photographers I found with the PE’s that read the blog. There is a tendency to vote for work that would look good on a wall or in a book (the grand prize) but I know the organizers have carefully brought in people with different backgrounds (and that’s not mine) so I tried to force myself to avoid doing this.

I made sure I voted for any photographers who had pictures of people smiling. That was like 1 or 2 votes. Everyone else was either suicidal or staring a hole through my skull (kidding, sort of.)

Pictures of houses and of people standing staring seemed to outnumber empty parking lots and shopping malls which I think is a noteworthy trend but ultimately the majority of the photographs fall in the “landscapes with shit in them” category (i.e. people and objects).

I’m a complete sucker for pictures of kids (unless engaged in a suicidal stare). I have kids as I imagine many reviewers do and it’s an easy emotional connection to make.

I can’t escape the influence of familiarity and novelty on my decisions. If I’ve seen a photographer blogged favorably and liked their work the bias was strong. Same goes for things that I’d never seen before. Also, I found myself on the fence about an image a few times and looked down to see the image title and many times it felt incredibly stupid and suddenly I’m no longer on the fence.

One thing that struck me was the incredible number of original ideas and subjects that just quite didn’t hit the mark. So much originality that if the images were only better executed it would be so compelling. I think some of those photographers just need more time working on it and developing their approach. I hope not making the cut or the top 50 doesn’t mean they will abandon the project.

Finally, when the next round comes for voting I’ll be interested to see which photographers who’s work I loved, missed the cut. Also, which photographers I voted against made the cut and suddenly I realize I made a mistake (or not). When a group of people votes on something there’s inevitably great work that’s left behind. Law of averages people.

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