Editorial Photography

More Than A Paycheck: Photography & Print

by Steve Appleford

For more than a century, photography has been the visual medium best suited to the printed page – unfolding endlessly in glossy magazines, daily newspapers and between the hard covers of books. Whether in the likes of The New York Times or the French fashion magazine Purple, generations of photographers have explored ways to fit a personal vision into the needs of an editorial product and thrived. Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, Richard Avedon and Wolfgang Tillmans are just a few of the major figures of photography who found a crucial venue within publications large and small, while exposing their work to millions of readers.

The use of photographs in print has only grown more sophisticated in recent decades, pressing beyond the old boundaries of traditional photojournalism, fashion and

Diane Arbus
Santas at the Santa Claus School, Albion, NY, 1964
Silver gelatin print
Published in Saturday Evening Post

portraiture, and extending now to online media. Some of the work has been provocative and deeply personal, and inevitably a less choreographed medium than today's commercial photography, where art directors and ad clients control the message. Periodicals and other media can also provide a unique energy and immediacy to an artist's work, in contrast to the occasional preciousness of traditional museum and gallery culture. Editorial photographers are encouraged by the best publications to emphasize their own style and mission, to find something new in the world. As the great photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark has said, "You have to shoot for yourself and photograph the way you believe it."

A classic example was Arbus, an artist whose profoundly influential work sought to reveal and explore the unseen and unfamous among us. For her, editorial work was not merely a paycheck but a means to her larger purposes. Assignments meant access to places and people that interested her. Arbus once said of her mission, "My favorite thing is to go where I've never been." Magazines helped take her there, and the lines between Arbus' fine art work and her editorial pictures were frequently blurred or missing altogether, as some of the same pictures that earned controversy and acclaim on gallery walls also appeared in the monthly pages of Esquire and Harper's Bazaar (sometimes with text she wrote herself). Several of the 31 photographs that she published in Esquire alone would become central to her personal body of work.

Years earlier, no less than Walker Evans, an historically uncompromising force in the development of American photography, found a longtime home within the pages of Fortune magazine. His acclaimed 1941 book with author James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, initially began as a magazine assignment there. And between 1945 and 1965, Evans worked on staff as an editor and photographer for the esteemed financial monthly, normally considered a towering symbol of mainstream business, not art. The publishing house of Time-Life Inc. became his ultimate patron.

More recently, the contemporary museum artists Sally Mann and Taryn Simon have published their own idiosyncratic images in The New York Times Magazine. In one instance, for Mann it meant gaining access to the human cadavers of the Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center, furthering her ongoing study of death and decay. The Sunday magazine supplement has also been a fitting, sophisticated venue for Simon's conceptual work, photographing men wrongly sent to death row or making an anthropological study of contraband at JFK International in New York. For them and others, their particular needs as artists were in perfect harmony with the demands of the nation's newspaper of record.

There has also been a long history of groundbreaking publications from outside the mainstream that provided

Walker Evans
Stahls Chain-nose Pliers: $2.49, 1955
Silver gelatin print
Published in Fortune

new generations of photographers a blank canvas to introduce new visual ideas and contexts -- a tradition that goes all the way back to Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Work at the beginning of the last century. Some of these magazines operate on a shoestring budget but remain essential partners in the pursuit of content as art. Early pictures of counterculture heroes by Rankin and the multimedia artist Doug Aitken first appeared in Ray Gun during the Nineties. Juergen Teller and second-generation provocateur Terry Richardson have regularly pushed the envelope of fashion photography and portraiture in Purple. Similarly, artists like Ed Ruscha, Tim Davis, and Philip Lorca DiCorcia have used reportage as a way of blurring aesthetic boundaries.

This wider world of editorial photography is a central concern at Otis College of Art & Design. The Fine Arts department has expanded the role of editorial work within its photography program, preparing students with both the practical and the theoretical aspects of providing vivid images for print (and online) publications. With technical skills in both digital and traditional film processes, and in a variety of camera formats, Otis students explore the business of making photographs for an editorial context while imagining ways in which mass media might be a tool for expanding what we normally think of as the discourse of fine art. Editorial photography has never been a more viable career option for young artists craving a venue, an audience and content of real substance.

Steve Appleford is a writer, photographer and editor whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone and GQ. He teaches editorial photography in the Fine Arts Department at Otis College of Art and Design.

Tim Davis
Searchlights (from Illuminations Series), 2005
C-print