Sam Jones Interview Part 1

Sam with Polaroit_1I consider Sam Jones to be one of the top photographers in the country at shooting men. And there are plenty of people who shoot men as people or fashionable or sexy but very few who shoot them “manly,” which is something I love about Sam’s photography. So, that’s a very thin category that I put him in and of course he does a lot of things very well but I’ve worked with him a lot on covers and feature stories because he was at the top of that list. I also discovered that he loves to surf, so I put him on some portrait and cover shoots with the big surfers that worked our really well for me. I also noticed something when working on set with Sam that really makes a difference when he’s shooting celebrities. He knows a lot of Hollywood insiders and not just actors, but the cinematographers, editors and sound guys who are respected by actors for their craft. He’ll get into a conversation at the beginning of a shoot with the subject and start talking about the industry, the people they both know and you can see the I’m-on-a-shoot patina start to fade away. Sam made a critically acclaimed documentary in 2002 on the band Wilco called I Am Trying to Break Your Heart and was rumored to be working on an Infinite Jest movie with David Foster Wallace at the time of his death.

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Here’s part one of the interview:

APE: Tell me how you got started and how you got into shooting actors and doing the Hollywood thing?

In college at Cal State Fullerton I was a photojournalist at our college newspaper and they had a really good daily newspaper that won the equivalent of the pac 10 competition of newspapers. That led to being a stringer for the associated press, where I worked for over 3 years covering news, sports, and entertainment. I moved to downtown LA and lived 2 miles from the bureau and just threw myself in it. I actually had one stretch where I shot for 61 days without a break.

APE: Did you know before college that you wanted to be a photographer?

No, not at all. I was in bands and always thought I was going to be a musician and make records. I was doing both but I got so busy with photography. Working for the AP was amazing, because we were photographing the national news. You weren’t sent in if it didn’t have some kind of national appeal and in LA we had the Dodgers, Raiders, Lakers, UCLA, Academy Awards, Riots, Savings and Loan Fraud, Courthouse Stakeouts; ­that whole era was just crazy. If it was national news and it happened in LA you were expected to shoot it. That was 1989 – 1992.

The Associated Press had a syndication company called AP Wide World at the time and they would syndicate the images we shot to magazines. They would take the photos that stringers made for very little money and resell them to publications like Vanity Fair. They resold some of my Los Angeles Riots images to VF, and the actor Tim Robbins saw it. He was getting ready to direct a movie called Bob Roberts at the time, and he wanted those kinds of photojournalistic pictures to publicize his movie. So, he found me and called up and asked if I knew how to shoot actors. Part of the AP job was you had to go to those 20-minutes-in-a-hotel-room-with-Harrison-Ford-and-make-a-portrait-of-him movie junkets. I was always doing that stuff so I told him yes, no problem.

So, I got hired to be a still photographer on Bob Roberts and got to shoot the movie poster and the whole thing. He had a bunch of big actors playing small rolls in that movie like Susan Sarandon, James Spader and John Cusack. During the shooting of the movie I would pull these actors aside and make large and medium format portraits of them.

APE: Wait, is it common that someone shooting a movie is going to be making portraits on the side too?

No, I don’t think that it was, but this was not a normal shoot at all. Tim wanted the film to have a very realistic feel, so he let me do a lot of my shooting, especially of press scenes, from wherever I wanted. This included being able to walk into the scene, shoot without a blimp, and even bump the cinematographer during press scrums.

APE: You were in the movie too?

Oh yeah, the back of my head is all over the movie. He wanted me to be like a press photographer who was assigned to the beat of this politician [Bob Roberts]. They would set up the scene for a press conference and Tim would go “does this look right?” I remember once telling him that the person handling the press conference should not be saying “you there” because they would know everyone by name.  I told him to use reporters first names, and they actually changed the script to reflect this advice. I was having a blast and was thinking this still photography gig is awesome.

Then I got my rude awakening. Someone referred me to New Line Cinema for another film, and they said we’ll give you a job being a still photographer on this movie but it shoots in Chicago and we can’t afford to send you there so you have to work as a local. I had to call an acquaintance that I went to school with to ask if I could sleep on his floor for $100/month. It was freezing and the crew was pretty shitty to me.

APE: So, you went from acting in a movie you were shooting and giving the director notes to just another guy on set?

Oh yeah and on the Tim Robbins movie his cinematographer was Robert Altman’s cinematographer Jean Lepine and he totally took me under his wing. I used to come in and ask him how he was lighting this scene, why are you doing this, why are you doing that, why are you changing all the bulbs out? I learned so much from him and looking back on it I was probably a total pain in the ass, but he was so nice. So the main people I talked to on set were the DP, Producer and the Actors. Then I go to this job in Chicago and I’m persona non grata. It’s winter and all the shoots are night shoots, the blimp is freezing to my face and the camera would just stop working. It pretty much sucked, and I barely got paid a living wage.

So, I did that and got another New Line job doing a film called Loaded Weapon and I’m a pretty friendly guy so I made friends with Sam Jackson and some other people in the cast and crew.  New Line says they’re going to put me up to do the poster. Then they came back to me and said Emilio Estevez doesn’t want you to shoot the poster he want’s Bonnie Schiffman to shoot it. I was a kid at the time, like 22 and I got kind of pissed off so I walked up the Emilio and said “hey man why didn’t you want me to shoot the poster.” I’m sure he was like, what is this still photographer doing talking to me? After that I decided I wasn’t going to do any more still jobs, because I basically don’t like doing jobs where I’m not wanted. With photojournalism there was a little of that, but being the still photographer on set there was a lot of that. It takes a totally different kind of personality. I think the photographers who do amazing work on films are stealth people who like not being seen and staying in the shadows getting the picture and not talking to anyone.

APE: Yeah, not asking the DP why he’s lighting something a certain way or helping the director with a scene.

Yeah, exactly. If it wasn’t clear what my calling was after that, it was clear it was not doing something behind the scenes.

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APE: So, how did you move past that?

I just started flying to New York and meeting with people. I don’t know if it was just out of stupidity, but when you call a photo editor and they say portfolio drop off day is this and pickup day is this and if you’re out of town FedEx it to here, I just figured my portfolio didn’t have much of a chance of being looked at. I decided I’m just going to go there and tell them that I’ve flown here all the way from LA just to see them. I picked my ten favorite magazines and told them I only have one portfolio and I’m only here for 3 days, so If I drop it off I won’t have it for my next meeting. It worked. Maybe they took pity on me, but I had a lot of face to face meetings, and Entertainment Weekly ended up giving me my first magazine job.

APE: How was your book at the time? Was it a decent book?

It was all 4×5 chromes in these black mattes so you had to look at them on a light table, but 4×5 chromes were impressive to look at. I had Tim Robbins, John Cusack, Susan Sarandon and Gore Vidal. It was pretty much a mixture of the film stuff and some AP portraits.

Then, I started getting little tiny jobs at magazines. My first EW job was a parking space. I had to shoot Tom Arnold’s parking space. It was the dumbest job ever. He was feuding with some other actor over a parking space.

APE: And, you crushed it [laughing].

Oh my god, I must have shot 20 rolls. I brought lights and grabbed some security guard and said ok you walk through the background. I lost sleep over the parking spot shoot thinking, I’ve got to impress them.

APE: Right, you were thinking this has to be the best parking space they’ve ever seen in their life. And it was, right?

Quarter page in the back of EW. They ended up using the shot with the security guard’s feet in it.

APE: And they called you the next week to shoot Tom Cruise?

Ha, No. I moved from parking space to Doogie Howser and that was 1/4 page as well. Then there was also a bunch of business stuff that I was shooting. There were some AP environmental business shots that I had blown up in my portfolio, like the president of Bank of America, that kind of thing. So I ended up getting work from some business magazines right off too.

APE: I think a lot of people want to know how you go from 1/4 page of a parking spot to shooting the cover?

You know what it is? The photo editor sees the whole shoot and so it’s not just the one picture in the magazine that they judge you by. I shot features for a long time before I got to shoot a cover. Even when I was doing a 1 page shot I was always trying 3, 4 and 5 setups. I was shooting like it was a cover and full feature because you never know, it could get bumped up. I think there was a couple photo editors early on at Time, EW, US and Premiere who just started making a case to their Art Director and their Editor that this photographer is working his ass off and is good and they should let him do it. That was the case with me, where someone finally said we should give him the cover, or at least I remember it being a cover try. I think back at what I made actors do for 1 page, because I was telling them it might be more pages, so we need to shoot more setups and try a bunch of ideas and we had extra clothes and locations ready. I was syndicating my pictures with Gamma Liaison at the time and because of all these setups, I actually had several syndicated covers before I was assigned an actual cover. So, those tear sheets were in my book and that helped me out as well.

APE: I recall a really big cover run you had at Esquire and GQ. You seemed to be the cover guy for those magazines.

It was funny because there was a period where I was shooting covers for both, and often in the same month. I don’t think that went over too well.

APE: I don’t think it would really. How did you pull that off.

I didn’t have a contract with either one so in my mind I figured it wasn’t a problem. I had originally thought having a contract was the way to go, especially since a lot of photographers that I admired had them, but for me, it turned out to be a better thing not to have one. I never wanted to have to shoot an assignment I wasn’t interested in, just because I was contracted to do so.

APE: It seems like a lot of actors and publicists have a list of photographers they want to work with, so how much does it help to be on an actors list? Like Clooney, I’ve seen you shoot a lot of George Clooney covers and heard you two are friends.

samjones6That cover with the hats for Esquire was the first shoot I did with him and he didn’t know me from Adam at the time but the magazine suggested me and he said ok. Then I shot him and we had a good time, so we developed a pretty good working relationship. I will say I feel lucky to have done so many shoots with him, because he is not the type of guy to demand a certain photographer. He’s a lot more low maintenance about that kind of stuff. However, he has been very loyal, and he will ask for me when he has a commercial shoot in Japan or something like that, and I’m very grateful for that.

APE: Ok, but on the other hand if I have a Clooney shoot I might hire Sam Jones because I know I’ll get more than 30 minutes, because you guys are friends.

That’s true, but there’s also the other side of that. A magazine isn’t always going to want the same photographer to shoot the same actor, and I get that. No magazine wants to be told they have to use a certain photographer. I have certainly lost out on jobs where the magazine wanted to use me, but the actor requested someone else, so it works both ways. I have, like a lot of photographers, a few actors that regularly request me, and it is great to have that security of knowing you will be asked to do a lot of shoots with that person.

APE: What about the publicists who are pushing certain photographers?

There’s publicists who really know their job and who really want to match up the right photographer with their client. If you’re an actor, one of the things you expect your publicist to do is make sure that when the cover comes out and you’re on it, that the shoot worked out. That is a publicists job, so I understand the really pushing for a photographer they trust. However, this focus can become rather narrow, and it is tough to lose a job you know you are right for because a publicist stayed with a familiar choice. Anyone that’s been taking pictures in Hollywood is so used to not getting the job for some weird reason that makes no sense. You have to accept it too. I was just on hold for two weeks for a movie poster, and had even started production on the job when the lead actor informed the studio he wanted to work with another photographer who is a good friend of his. You have to just say ok, because I’ve been in the position where I’ve done that to another photographer, so it all comes around. And then sometimes you will be in a situation where there’s several actors and publicists involved and one actor says they want to use a different photographer, where the other actors and publicists may not even know or care about the decision, so it’s crazy.

I understand the element of sucking up that goes on, I’m just not very good at it. I always try to come at it from the perspective of making great pictures, and making sure the magazine, or client gets what they need. This may mean pushing for more risky set-ups or pushing the actor a bit to try something new, which can be uncomfortable for some publicists.

APE: That’s probably removed you from a couple lists.

Yes, but also it’s kept me working in the editorial environment, where pictures need to be more than just safe and pretty. I always loved working for magazines because that’s where I started and you go out and spend a day, or a few hours, with an actor and a writer spends a day with them as well and you photograph them at that one moment in their lives where you try to get something that’s revealing, interesting and compelling about them. If the story and pictures work well together it’s still one of my favorite things to read. I always want to be able to do that.

Part 2 tomorrow.

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PicScout Joins LicenseStream In Push To License Images Anywhere

PicScout just announced a new product that will allow photographer to attach some sort of one click licensing to their images (here). This is the same as what LicenseStream has been offering for almost a year now and so there’s nothing revolutionary about it, but it will be very interesting to watch as more companies adopt this business model. There are many people who believe image licensing has a similar problem to what music had, in that people want to license images but there’s not an easy way to do that, so they steal them instead. It’s hard for me to believe this type of licensing amounts to much more than beer money, unless of course you’re handling the transactions and then those pennies add up to millions of dollars as Getty and Corbis discovered in the micro stock business. I do think that it’s good to teach people that images cost money and provide them with an easy way to license them, I don’t think this does much for professional photographers. For pros the more exclusive the image the better.

do they really need to worry about the customer experience?

There are some customer-focused older companies out there, but they’re rare. The traditional mode of business for the past 100 years has been customer-hostile, and it’s really tough for a company to “turn the aircraft carrier around” to work in a different way. It will happen, though, and when it does, you’ll see: an older company “gets religion,” gradually becomes customer-centric, and then grows to dominate its competitors like never before in its history.

via Good Experience.

More Magazine Covers Shot With Red Camera

Alexx Henry and Greg Williams are making names for themselves as Red magazine photographers.

Alexx has an Outside cover this month (here):

And Greg Williams has Esquire’s sexiest woman alive cover (here):

So, what did these two magazines do with all the awesome technology they employed in these forward thinking cover shoots. Nothing. That’s right as far as I can tell Outside made their normal cover (the photographer made all these cool futuristic looking living covers and inside spreads in his BTS video) and Esquire made a video to go with their normal cover. It’s sort of like buying a Ferrari and hitching a team of horses to it. Beyond idiotic.

Condé closes Gourmet and others

Condé Nast plans to announce this morning that it will close Gourmet magazine, a magazine of almost biblical status in the food world; it has been published since December 1940.

In addition to Gourmet… it will also close Cookie, Modern Bride, and Elegant Bride.

via Media Decoder Blog – NYTimes.com.

E-blasts are out, and direct mail is back in

Well, that’s how the panelists first explained their take on the efficacy of email marketing. They eventually acknowledged that they all still send out e-blasts, but they weren’t very enthusiastic about them as a marketing tool. Everyone talked about how art buyers and creatives spend half their day just deleting emails from their inbox without reading them because they are overwhelmed. A print piece that shows up in their stack of snail mail, on the other hand, at least guarantees that the recipient will see the image and the name.

via Stockland Martel blog.

A Cautionary Behind-The-Scenes Video Tale

This cautionary BTSV story was submitted by a reader:

On a recent national advertising shoot we used our back-up camera, my new 5D MKII, to shoot some behind-the-scenes footage of me at work. We edited it down into a 3-minute video that we posted on my Facebook Group page. It wasn’t particularly exciting, but it did the job of showing me directing models and assistants. About 4 weeks after posting it, the ad agency I worked with called outraged, demanding all the fees and expenses back from the shoot, and then threatened to sue me.

At first we weren’t sure what we did wrong–we put it up well after the campaign had come out and after the agency gave us the go ahead to use shoot images for self-promotion. We had retained copyright and owned all the images. We didn’t show any video of the agency or client discussing strategy or anything like that. Although I did not announce that we were shooting video footage, the assistant who was shooting walked around in full view of everyone on the set, with a camera quite close to most people on the set. He shot quite a lot and it is evident that the AB and AD at least knew we were shooting stills.

The agency claimed that we violated the Confidentiality Clause of the Purchase Order because the entire shoot was secret, that they did not know I was shooting video and that I had no right to shoot video. We disagree with all of this, but we took the video down. Even after we took it down, they kept demanding the money back, and we spent weeks going back and forth with lawyers. Eventually they just dropped it, presumably because they knew they had no case. We think what happened was that the client found it on YouTube since we had included their name in the title, and was upset at the agency failing to control their brand. The agency was trying to make amends, and wanted to use us a sacrifice.

We were at first concerned when they argued that we didn’t “have the right” to shoot video. In other words, was it our shoot and set or theirs? In our view, a client does not own a set unless the agreement is work-for-hire. In this case, we were the production company, we hired everyone else, we rented the location, we carried the insurance (i.e. it was our production). No one could tell us what we could and could not shoot on our set.

We also amended the P.O. to give us copyright to “All images created as part of the shoot” and the right to use them for self-promotion.Tip: Always ensure in writing that you retain rights to all “Images” with an “s” or better yet, put “All images, whether moving or still.”

We left their Confidentiality Clause intact, but as it was written, it did not make the shoot itself confidential – just trade secrets and the like. The shoot itself was our work product, not theirs, and its mere existence wasn’t a secret. Tip: Just because the agency says you violated the contract, doesn’t mean you did.

However, in the future I do think it is a great idea to talk to the A.B. about behind-the-scenes video and whether it is OK with them if you shoot it and if you can use it for self promotion on your website. You may have the right to shoot it and post it, but if a jittery client doesn’t like what they see, you may lose a client and any relationship you had with the agency.

Untitled – The Movie

This movie looks funny as hell. “What attracts me to his work is how uncomfortable it makes me feel.”

Here is how I define success

A successful artist is a person who is able to create something that manifests their truth…a perception that they feel they need to bring to the world. A successful creative person is someone who continues to create no matter what happens. I respect many artists. They are not all extremely successful in the art market, or in the art status structure. Some are, and some aren’t. Some of the ones I respect have been overlooked. But I still consider them to be successful, because they have succeeded to give the world their vision, even though the world does not always acknowledge their worth…In other words, I define a successful career as much more than just external validation.

— Jan Harrison

via Black Sheep Pen.

Bradley Peters – CPC 2009 Winner

Joerg Colberg had a contest this summer and Bradley Peters was one of the winners. The prize was an interview and it’s really a great read:

Jörg Colberg: In your “Home Theater” statement, you’re describing your work as “allowing a ‘staged’ photograph to break down and […] then [to] spiral into the spontaneous.” I just have to ask – especially given your Yale background: What’s wrong with staged photography? Why have it break down?

Bradley Peters: It’s not an issue of something being “wrong” but rather my interest in something that no one seems to speak of much these days… luck. I’m not interested in coming up with a really well defined idea and then making a picture that illustrates that concept. My photographic foundation was built in small camera, black & white street photography, I mean that’s basically the only way I shot for nearly ten years, and I’m still really interested in letting the world reveal itself in ways that I can’t imagine by myself. Without the breakdown there is very little surprise, which is important to me. I need to feel as though I learned something from the image and if the picture turns out exactly the way I wanted, I probably didn’t learn anything that I didn’t already know. In a way, I probably didn’t even need to make the picture in the first place. There was a really good interview in LA Weekly a couple years ago with John Szarkowski that I think speaks to this point:

“Some photographers think the idea is enough. I told a good story in my Getty talk, a beautiful story, to the point: Ducasse says to his friend Mallarmé — I think this is a true story — he says, ‘You know, I’ve got a lot of good ideas for poems, but the poems are never very good.” Mallarmé says, “Of course, you don’t make poems out of ideas, you make poems out of words.’ Really good, huh? Really true. So, photographers who aren’t so good think that you make photographs out of ideas. And they generally get only about halfway to the photograph and think that they’re done.”

Read more on Conscientious.

I’m a huge fan of luck and unexpected results in photography, but I think many younger photographers don’t like pictures that they didn’t intend to happen, because it feels like you have no control over the outcome. I’ve also heard the argument that because amateurs get lucky once in awhile it somehow invalidates pictures that you didn’t expect. I can tell you that photographers who take these kinds of pictures have portfolios filled with lucky shots and that’s no accident. I can also tell you that shooting this way can be extremely nerve-racking and of course from the client side of the equation you have to sell everyone on a picture that wasn’t planned for. It’s just as difficult to use luck as it is to nail everything down from beginning to end.

The Aftermath Project – War Is Only Half The Story

The Aftermath Project was the winner of the humanitarian award at last year’s Lucie Awards (here). I was there that night live blogging the event for fun and Sara Terry’s speech was certainly one of the highlights for me. Not only because of the gravitas of the Aftermath Project but also how well she conveyed the importance of photography and projects like this.

“I was a writer but had a personal crisis and words failed me for the first time in my life so I picked up a camera to communicate…”

“… the stories we hold up define who we are as a society.”

The book from last year’s project is out now (here):
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In addition to that they are now accepting applications for their fourth year of granting (2010); and will be giving out two grants, for $20,000 each. The application deadline is Nov 2nd (here).

How to Compete

It’s a dodgy game to compete on price. It’s always a race to the bottom. It’s never fun to compete by name-calling or bragging over your competitors. Instead, really earn it with us by competing in ways that will empower both you and us.

via How to Compete.

The Future Of Accountability Journalism In A World Of Declining Newspapers

Clay Shirky is fast becoming one of the top thinkers on the future of journalism and if you listen to a talk he gave at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, you will understand why. The Nieman Journalism Lab has an mp3 (here) and the transcript (here).

Some of the major points he makes if any of you want to discuss:

The marriage of advertising and accountability journalism was an accident – “There was a set of forces that made that possible. And they weren’t deep truths — the commercial success of newspapers and their linking of that to accountability journalism wasn’t a deep truth about reality. Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices.”

Advertisers were overcharged and undeserved– “Not only did they have to deliver more money to the newspapers than they would have wanted, they didn’t even get to say: ‘And don’t report on my industry, please.’”

Consumers want to aggregate their own daily media lineup – “he New York Times is being torn apart right now by its own readers. The number of people who go to the Times’ homepage as a percentage of total readership falls every year — because you don’t go to the Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. So the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience.”

The immediate future is not good -“Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption — that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top.”

Newspapers will not survive – “So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.”

The solution or at least his thoughts on what the future holds for journalism is that the bulk of what newspapers do in regards to the public good will be taken up by a multitude of smaller entities that are crowdsourced, commercially funded or non-profits. Basically all media will be broken up into many vertical channels with all kinds of different business models. The idea that an advertiser has no influence over a media company that reports on their industry is total BS so much of the accountability journalism will shift to crowdsourced and non-profit business models. Commercial works as long as the advertiser is in a different industry than the media company is reporting on and so it works really well in the smaller vertical channels. Overall–I’ve said this many times before–content providers are not in trouble it’s the content packagers who are going down.