Canon Professional Network

As director of photography at one of the world's most famous news-led magazines, MaryAnne Golon can influence more than most how we see the world. She talks to John McDermott about working at Time magazine and dealing with such a responsibility in these extraordinary times.

Have there ever been occasions when you were uncomfortable about publishing a photograph?

Plenty of times. You have to remember that as a picture editor, as a professional, I'm hardened to seeing things that are heavy-duty. It's probably a bit like the trauma surgeon – other people might faint in the same situation. Even so, there have been pictures that horrified me.
There was a picture I particularly remember by Tony O'Brien who was working in Iraq during the first Gulf War with a reporter from Life. He'd photographed the back of a tractor-trailer full of bloody, dead bodies. Nobody knows how or why they got there. And nobody could not be shocked by the pictures from Sierra Leone when they were going around just hacking off people's limbs, or Rwanda with rivers full of dead bodies, or now in Darfur.

Do you feel a professional obligation to show pictures like that in order to properly tell the story?

Absolutely. There was a photograph of a boy in Iraq, before Baghdad was "liberated". Our photographer, Yuri Kozyrev, had made friends with an emergency room doctor in Baghdad who told him about a boy named Ali.
Ali had lost both arms and his entire family when his house was hit by a bomb. Yuri photographed the boy and there was a tremendous editorial discussion over the real circumstances of the house being bombed. In the picture he's being watched over in the hospital by a lone woman, a distant aunt, in a long black abbayah. It was a beautiful picture of a horrible thing, this badly-burned little boy with no arms being comforted by the woman.

: Time ran Yuri Kozyrev's picture of an Iraqi boy called Ali. The boy's plight became a worldwide news story.

We had a huge conversation about it. When a picture appears in Time magazine it has a huge impact. Because of this picture Ali became famous. All these other people went over there and tried to photograph him in every way imaginable – this kid who is in such pain, probably without even proper medication. And we were thinking, "Oh God, what have we done?". But what happened was that so many people were making donations to international organisations for that specific boy, and so many people wanted to help him, that he was moved out of Baghdad to Kuwait and eventually to London. You could say that the boy was saved, but the process of getting him there was none too pleasant. There are more ramifications to running pictures than meet the eye.

When deciding on the covers for Time what matters most, newsworthiness or having an image that might best stimulate newsstand sales?

The cover is an advertisement for the magazine, and that's pretty much industry standard. You want the cover to draw in your readers. It's not about newsworthiness. Sure, certain things have to go on the cover – if somebody tries to shoot the President it's going on the cover. But that isn't going to be week to week.
There is more and more pressure to create movement on the newsstand. Newsstand sales, for Time, represent a minute portion of our sales. We are primarily a subscription magazine, but you want to draw people who are not subscribers and you hope they come from people who buy the magazine off the newsstand. And newsstand sales are still an important litmus test of what people like and buy.

Is the integrity of images in the digital world of greater concern to you now and does Time have any special procedures in place to ensure that images haven't been manipulated?

Because we're such a gigantic news organisation we have contractual relationships with other gigantic news organisations like Reuters and the Associated Press. Part of the process is our making sure that they have the proper controls and procedures in place. Many of these kinds of controversies in recent years have resulted from pictures picked up from stringers that have then been picked up by newspapers. But if you look back at Time you'll see that we've never run any of those images. And in a lot of these cases they are so obviously manipulated, so poorly done, that anyone with a professional eye knows that right away. The unfortunate thing is that there isn't a higher level of 'professional eye' that could keep that stuff from ever getting put on the wire and published.

: Time's black-bordered cover on the first issue after 11 September, 2001.

How did Time respond to catastrophic events like September 11th and Hurricane Katrina?

If there is a catastrophic event, one of the things that's comforting is that people trust Time. People want to read the magazine and want to keep it as a record. I hope that I never again have to deal with something so close to home as 9/11.
We live and work in New York and to have this incredible devastation to our own city, and to be working like crazy, then as a human being to not even be able to process what's happening outside your window because you're too busy working…the human instinct is to want to help.
I remember having a pep-talk with a bunch of teary-eyed people – everybody was freaking out. Basically I said, "We're not rescue workers, we're not trained to do that. But we're trained to do something else, we're trained to do this and we have a tremendous responsibility to let people know what happened. And even though we are all exhausted and upset we have to just buck up and do our jobs".
I don't mean to sound cold or callous, because I'm neither. But the thing is, I knew how important it was for us to do that issue. Then, later on, it's devastating to be rewarded for doing well in a horrible situation. How can you celebrate a National Magazine Award that we got for our 9/11 coverage? Everyone is extremely proud of the fact that we did well under incredible extraordinary pressure and circumstances. We just did what we were trained to do, which is get the story out. There's a record there for people who weren't there or didn't experience it through television. And we continued to explain the story in the weeks that followed.

: The faces of stunned onlookers on 11 September, 2001.

We saw a huge spike in our newsstand circulation in those weeks after 9/11 and I see that as a validation of the magazine that people were looking to Time to explain to them what was happening, what terrorism is about and how are we going to fight this thing.

How big a part of your job is coverage of the White House and what are your biggest challenges there?

We're part of the White House magazine pool. I'd say that's the biggest challenge, at least from a business standpoint. From a journalism standpoint it's the fact that it's so controlled. It's very difficult to do anything different. There's a core of people there who are sort of corralled behind ropes and barricades and that's our view of the White House. Even so, they're a damn sight closer than the rest of us and it still seems important for us to be there and to keep an eye on the Administration.

Are there ever times when the Administration allows you to get behind the scenes to do something different or exclusive?

Yes, and when it happens we play it up big in the magazine. How often do we get an exclusive with the President of the United States? Almost never. We do this as frequently as they will allow us. Our two White House photographers – Brooks Kraft and Chris Morris – shoot those things for us.

: Chris Morris's original take on the view from inside the Bush Administration.

Iraq has become exceptionally dangerous for journalists and photographers. How has that affected your coverage? Do you still always have somebody there?

We've been committed to the Iraq story pretty much from the beginning. We have a bureau there, in a house just outside the Green Zone. We have a security staff to protect our journalists and we do our best to continue to try to tell the story there in the first person. Our bureau staff is all Iraqi and many of them are also able to do some reporting. A lot of the international agencies such as Reuters, AP, Getty Images have been training more local staff as photographers. It's certainly gotten a lot harder for anyone who looks European or American to work there.

How do you deal with knowing that people you send over there, like Yuri Kozyrev who has done multiple tours in Iraq, might be at risk.

It's not my choice. Yuri, for example, is someone who thrives on covering the most horrible places in the world. He goes on vacation and photographs Siberian prison trains! If he weren't working for me in Iraq he'd be working there for somebody else. That doesn't mean I don't worry or care about him. I deeply care about him. He's become an important friend to me, not just a colleague. But it's his choice. And he knows the risk. But I do see it as my personal responsibility, in the case of anybody who is working for us in a conflict zone, to keep track of them, to know how their head is, when they're tired and when it's time for them to pull out.
We rotate photographers every six weeks and that's a long time. And if they're over there for six weeks they have to stay away at least that long before we'll send them back. But this is a 'volunteer army', so to speak, and these are people, not unlike the military, who've made a choice to do a job where you have to deal with the constant tension, the heart-pounding, the adrenalin and the risk.

: An issue from April 2007 showing Yuri Kozyrev's image of US soldiers tending to an injured member of Charlie Company.

In an age when news images are available online instantly, many printed publications are struggling to survive. How are you dealing with the challenge of making a weekly news magazine that people feel they must still read?

The way we can keep the magazine relevant and interesting is to go beyond the one-paragraph web story or the one-hit wire service photo to bring a deeper understanding to what's underneath a story. The internet is not a place where people are going for long, in-depth stories.
There is also a different way of experiencing photography on the internet compared to a newspaper, a magazine or a book. In print you can hold it, you can go back to it and you feel like you have a degree of control over what you're seeing.
I'm sure in time that will go like everything else in technology and the printed page become a thin, flexible LED screen. But there's still that idea of holding something. People still want to read and experience books as books. They don't want to do it by looking at a back-lit screen.

How do you feel about the trend towards more 'celebrity-style portraiture', often at the expense of traditional photojournalism?

One of the things that's really hard to make interesting is business editorial. So if it can help you to bring to life concepts and ideas for those readers, then great. Fortune and the whole financial magazine group here have done a really good job with that. For Time it's been a great departure for us to start doing many of our portraits of world leaders and political figures in that stylised fashion. I think it's just been a response to a weariness with conventional political coverage which has tended to be controlled photo opportunities and set scenes.

: Time's portrait of Apple boss Steve Jobs.

So what shape is photojournalism in today?

I don't want to jump on the bandwagon of people saying that photojournalism is dead, but it has never been in worse shape than it is right now. The internet is the fastest, quickest most amazing way to reach the public that we've ever had and that's all very exciting. It represents a much larger market for photojournalism than we've ever had before. But in terms of traditional outlets, in how images get displayed and support for long-term projects, the market has really contracted. Time is still one of the places that embraces photojournalism and we want to be able to do it whenever we can. I think it's just becoming harder and harder to support longer-term projects given the amount of space we're devoting to it.

Has the growth of agencies doing stories on their own and bringing them to you been a helpful development?

Of course it's helpful. If people are actually going to develop stories and deliver them in a gift-wrapped box, so to speak, that's fantastic. But I don't see that being the case. I think it's more that the photographers themselves are still doing things on their own and using the agencies to market them. Photojournalism has always been an industry, not for people who are interested in making money, but for people who have a great love of what they do. We all know that if we wanted to become rich we would have gone into investment banking or become doctors or lawyers. But we didn't because we all fell in love with this magical thing, story-telling.

So what took you down the path of photography?

The same thing that has taken everybody who goes down this path. As the British say, I was 'gobsmacked'. It took me and I fell completely in love. It's about having a passion and an enthusiasm for photojournalism and believing in it. But it becomes harder and harder in this day and age to be the good corporate citizen and say everything is fine, because I've watched what's happened over the past 20 years and anyone who has done that knows it's not, that things are dramatically different today.

Time is known for having had long-term relationships with a number of distinguished photographers – from people like Carl Mydans, Ralph Morse and Dirck Halstead to more contemporary shooters like James Nachtwey, David Burnett, Diana Walker and Christopher Morris. How important is it to you to be able to rely on talent like that? And do you feel a special responsibility to see that their work is used well?

They're of paramount importance. This entire industry is built on relationships. I think there is a very deep loyalty between the photographers you mention and the magazine. We're loyal to each other. Providing them with some sort of a 'professional home' over a long period of time is a wonderful thing to be able to do. It's about being able to keep them happy and giving them enough work, or not too much work, and them feeling they can still do the things they want to be doing. Do we treat them differently? Of course. If you're someone who does a one-day assignment for us once in a while you're not going to have the same kind of relationship that we have with someone who's done 5,000 assignments for us over a 20-year period.

: Time's use of a James Nachtwey image showing the remains of the World Trade Center in September 2001.

What makes a good picture editor?

That's a difficult question. I suppose, being a jack-of-all-trades, but above all knowing what is a good picture and what is a bad picture and why. You'd be surprised at how few photo editors working in the business today can actually make that distinction.
You need to be incredibly organised and you have to be able to juggle many different things at once. You have to be a friend, a psychiatrist, a fix-it person and a sales person. You have to know sales because you have to sell to everyone all the time. You have to sell editors on stories and pictures, and you have to sell photographers and agencies on assignments. When I'm told that editorial people have no idea about sales I just laugh out loud because selling ideas and garnering support is about 80% of what I do. Jim Nachtwey always refers to us as his champion and without a champion or a guardian angel you're in big trouble in this business.

Have you had any particularly outrageous attempts by celebrities or politicians to impose unacceptable conditions on photo shoots?

Oh sure. We've turned people down who've tried to dictate requirements on our photographers. We don't have any staff photographers - all those who shoot for us, even our small group of contract photographers, are completely freelance. So in engaging them to shoot for the magazine we can't oblige them to agree to absurd terms. If a subject says, for example, "I don't want this picture of me in this room to appear anywhere except in Time", then the photographer can either agree or say no. It's up to them. We buy one-time reproduction rights on most assignments and the photographer has to consider the effect of such restrictions on his or her ability to resell the pictures from that assignment in other markets.
But fortunately, it's really the exception rather than the rule. That's totally leaving out celebrities and entertainment journalism, but that is such a very small part of what we do that it's not even worth mentioning. We mostly deal with political and business leaders.

: A cover from June 2007 featuring the Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Has digital technology made your job any easier?

Oh, absolutely. It's made it easier in a thousand ways. There was a bumpy period we all went through when changing from the old world to the new. But now the technology is good and the programs we use for uploading, captioning and archiving are much more efficient than the old analog way of dealing with boxes of film and worrying about things getting lost and all sorts of other problems we used to have.

Is there also a way in which it's made it more difficult?

Oh, absolutely. Technology, and not just in photography, has made it so there's no such thing as a weekend any more. There is no night where you're not tethered to a Blackberry. It's all about compromising. For example, I bemoan all the time the loss of being an editor. When I began in this business I got entire 'takes', roll after roll of unprocessed film, and I edited it. I worked with the photographers to pull their stories together. I got to know the photographers.
There's a very strange dynamic between a really good picture editor and a really good photographer. When you're editing the film in sequential order you're walking with the photographer and you can talk about what they saw, what they didn't see, how they worked a situation, how they didn't, and you really start to understand how they see and you become a much better editor.
I'm very proud of the fact that there are a lot of photographers that I still work with today – like Christopher Morris, Tony Suau and Jim Nachtwey – that I worked with in the analog era. And it made me better able to understand them as photographers. Now, what I typically get are 10 JPEGs. How can you tell anything about how they think, about how they work a story? It's a great loss from a photo editing perspective.

: Time's treatment of a James Nachtwey image taken in Darfur.

So a lot of that editing process has shifted to the photographer?

Yes. And I think a lot of photographers are very pleased about that because before they didn't have any reasonable level of control over their work. They'd just send in the unprocessed film and then it would be, "Oh my God, why do they always pick the wrong picture?". How many times have we heard that! But it's also created a much bigger workload for the photographers and I think it's almost been crushing for them. With the new technology they're not only photographers but they've had to become editors and technology specialists too. What I think they should be focusing on is what they've always focused on – taking great pictures.

Do you use film anymore?

There are still certain projects where we use it but they are few and far between now. But I still love working with film. It's a tactile experience that's difficult to explain. Most people have no idea what it's like to hold a slide in a cardboard mount or to look through a loupe at a beautiful transparency on a light table. Rolling a mouse over something that enlarges the images on a monitor isn't the same thing.
In 2001, after September 11th, the cover we did was from a two-and-a-quarter transparency. I remember getting the image and running down to the editor's office and saying, "here's the cover!". What a different time that was!

What's the best part of your job?

The best part of my job by far is meeting and working with the photographers. I think photographers are an amazing breed and certainly the kinds of photographers I work with are really interesting characters. They're interested in lots of different things and you're able to vicariously visit their worlds by working with them. And that certainly beats the heck out of the 24th floor of the Time & Life Building!

: A spread from one of Time's post-Hurricane Katrina issues from September 2005.

What is the most challenging aspect of your job?

The photographers! Ha! No, they're fabulous. I actually think the worst part of what I do is trying, continually, to get photography the respect it deserves. It's amazing to me – and this is my personal opinion, not that of Time magazine – that photography, although it is omnipresent in our world, still does not get its due. It is not seen as being as important as other things. It's been a lifelong struggle for me to get it some respect, enough money to work with and enough space to give to the pictures.

Have you had any special mentors who've influenced you?

The editor of Time when I came on staff was Ray Cave, who was a huge inspiration to me. He was the one who moved the magazine out of black and white and into colour and who really embraced photography. Now I look back at those issues and laugh because, while we thought of him as this great champion of photography, the pictures were still really small.
Michelle Stephenson, my predecessor as director of photography, is one of the most important people in my professional life. She's been my boss, my friend, my sister, my mother, my psychiatrist, my champion and a thousand other things. She's been incredibly important to me in my career.
I'd also include some of the photographers, starting with Jim Nachtwey. Although I'm younger than Jim and I actually grew up right beside him as his career was skyrocketing. We go back to 1983. David Burnett and Robert Pledge who co-founded Contact Press Images have been very important to me, as is Eliane Laffont who used to run Sygma in New York, then Corbis, and is now with Hachette Filipacchi. These are all people who supported and helped me and also kicked me in the ass when necessary.

: A David Burnett image from Time's 'The Myth About Boys' issue in August 2007.

Does it seem to you that there are more good photographers around now than ever?

Absolutely. You can go on the internet now and study photography in a way that you could never study it before. You can go online and see stories being developed by very famous photographers at Magnum and VII. It's very instructive and you can't help but absorb what it is that makes something good.
On another level of technology, the cameras today are amazing. I'm not saying that anybody can pick up a camera and be a great photographer, but it sure has gotten a lot easier because of technology.
At one point, six or seven years ago, Jim Nachtwey went 'full digital' on an assignment for us in Afghanistan. Whenever we would present digital images people would be disappointed because the quality wasn't as good as film. Now I'd defy anyone but a real expert to tell the difference. But back then digital just wasn't up to speed. Anyway, we put together a presentation of Jim's stuff and showed it on the digital projector. The lights went down and there were gasps from the editors because the work was just so strong. At one point the editor asked, "Is this digital?" And I said, "No. This is Nachtwey."

How do you find new photographers? Do you have the time to look at portfolios?

Time's picture editor Alice Gabriner and I have talked frequently about how we cannot believe how good a lot of these young photographers are. Sometimes you find yourself looking at their work with your mouth hanging open and saying, "Wow!" These days I personally can't do quite as much now as some of my colleagues. But I do look at what photographers are doing for other publications on the internet.
I also volunteer as a teacher on my vacations, something I've been doing for about 15 years. I was on the board of the Eddie Adams Workshop for a number of years and I've been teaching the University of Missouri Workshop for the past seven years. From 2000 to 2005 I taught at World Press Photo's Joop Swart Masterclass in Amsterdam. The kids there are the best of the best of the best, since they're all nominated by committees in their countries and then chosen by the WPP judges. I go to Visa Pour l'Image almost every year. I go to the ICP (International Center of Photography) Career Days in New York and I speak to professional organisations.
Everybody wants to come in and show their work, but we've got to put out a magazine and there's no way to accommodate the 50 or more photographers who call every week. So we end up mainly seeing people who are recommended to us, who have some introduction to the magazine, perhaps from another photographer we know. It becomes a kind of networking thing.

Do you do any photography of your own?

Serious photography? No. I have a lot of fun making pictures, but not for sale, not for publication. I would never consider myself a professional. I began in this business as a professional, but I am now a struggling amateur and I have a lot of fun. I love digital cameras, but I also still love to shoot film.

What should photographers be doing now to prepare for the future?

I think they need to be multi-platform. Never, never, never forget to focus on still photography. But think in terms of gathering sound, of making little video clips that can give context to the pictures. Photographers need to know their stories, not just what they saw. This has been the standard for newspapers for some years. I think photographers, now more than ever, need to be good journalists.

MaryAnne Golon: Time life

MaryAnne Golon