Interview

So we’ll begin with, how did you get into all this?

About as random as anybody else…I didn’t know that I was always interested in photography, actually friends have reminded me that I was the photo editor for the yearbook, things like that. I actually have no memory of that. I do remember looking at beauty magazines, not for the fashion, but…I would always play games with myself about seeing if I could guess who the photographer was, I was always looking at photo credits.

Seeing if I could guess who the photographer for that cover of Elle was, and I got pretty good at it, it was like a little parlor game, that was my little obsession. And it was never that I wanted to be the photographer, it was more that I wanted to understand photographic styles or voices. So I wasn’t cognizant of it. I went to college and studied English and art, and I ended up concentrating in photography and studying documentaries.

Mmm.

At the time they were doing [at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies] DoubleTake magazine, in Durham. And I was doing a lot of stuff there, and I tried to get a job with DoubleTake…didn’t get one. But tried. I ended up at the Farm Worker’s union in the same building.

I knew I was interested in documentary photography, so I applied to a bunch of grants when I graduated and one of them was with Mother Jones magazine (with a Labor Union tradition and an exhibitor of great photography), and that’s ultimately where I got my first internship and worked there until I became the photo editor, because there wasn’t one. And I was finally like, “okay I’m the intern but there’s no photo editor, so can you pay me like a photo editor.”

“Can you just create a job for me?”

It was great! I learned so much there and I met a ton of photographers, I did it with the intention of seeing how professional photographers were presenting themselves, so that I could ultimately be a professional photographer, but I found I really liked working with people, and I liked collaboration and teams. And I think I was either a little bored with myself or, it wasn’t enough, my voice alone was not enough, I liked this curation of voices. It was also scary to me, me being with photographers who were clearly still hustling every single day, well into their sixties.

Ahhh.

It was humbling.

Yeah.

I was like, oof, I don’t know if I’m going to love that! But I actually really loved magazines, my intention was to stay in magazines forever. I worked at Dwell after Mother Jones as a photo editor, and then was going to go to Wallpaper in London, that was my intention. But a million life things happened, and I quit my job to move to London– London didn’t happen, and so I was sort of at a crossroads of, do I move back east, where all the photo editing jobs are…but I love California. I didn’t have a job, so one of my friends, a photographer [Olivier Laude], said, “why don’t you rep me, I’ve been looking for a rep.”

And I was like, “ugh, I’m not a sales person, I don’t want to be your rep.” But I didn’t have a job, so I said, “hey, I’ll make a list of people you should meet in New York, these are the people making decisions at these places, this person is really smart, go here go there.” And he said, “I’ll just pay you on a consulting basis,” and that’s really how it started. I just back ended into it, that way I was working out of my apartment, I was still freelance photo-editing for three or four years, maybe five, after I started Redeye.

I started Redeye in 2005.

Okay.

I had always been a photo editor hiring all these different people, I just wanted to work with my favorites. People that inspired me, that I knew, I’m very much a parasite (chuckle), I kind of live off of other people’s energy and creativity and that excites me.

You’re a born collaborator.

Yeah, that’s a nicer way of saying it. So it was then that I kept on doing it, and it didn’t feel like sales to me, because I loved all the people I was working with. Once I was able to sign Noah Webb (www.noahwebb.com) here in LA, who I knew from my days at Dwell, I thought, “oh this is, this could be real.” My cousin was in partnership with me, she ended up not doing it, she started a food truck [Skylite Snowballs] before there were food trucks, and it did very well. But she came up with the Redeye name and we were doing it together, and I had Noah and Olivier, and and I was waiting for a woman to be my third photographer to launch with. I couldn’t find— this is how different the times were– I could not find a female photographer to start. Just couldn’t. You know, it was like, Peggy Sirota and that was it.

(chuckles)

I knew Amanda Marsalas, but I think she already had a rep. And that was that (laughter). Eventually I did find somebody and started the agency, and then ironically, Chris Buck of all people– who I now represent– I remember seeing him one year, I had three photographers on the roster, and he was said, “What are you doing… you only have three photographers?” But it was such a responsibility to me, I was responsible for these peoples’ incomes.

Right.

I was very reticent to grow the agency, because it was just more opportunity for failure, it was just scary for me. Chris was like, “you’re not a destination, you need to have an agency,” and he was dead right, and I’ve talked to so many people since then who have said, “Chris Buck gave me unsolicited advice it was the best advice of my career.” He also told me to take on Michelle Watt, who’s one of the star photographers at our agency, and I was taking my time with it, and he was like, “No, I’m serious,” and I replied, “Alright that’s so sweet, you’re such a good advocate for your colleague.” And he couldn’t have been more correct. So, I’m just going to keep on listening to other people, the right people, tell me what to do and mainly everything will be okay.

I mean, you know, it’s not a bad strategy, listen to people.

Listen to the right people. And it’s funny because we do a lot of reviews now for up and coming artists, and often times we’ll give a piece of advice and they’ll say, “oh well somebody else told me something the opposite,” and I’ll say, “part of who you are as an artist is knowing who you want to listen to, and deciding who your mentors are going to be, that is a creative choice in and of itself.” So, in turn, if I listen to the right people for me, it will (hopefully) go well.

Right! Right.

That might not be the same for somebody else.

 

How many people do you guys represent now?

Twenty-five, we represent stylists, as well. It started because we were repping stylists we worked with all the time and just loved them as artists, and they were looking for agents, and same thing, we kind of back-ended into it, like okay, if you’re okay with us not being styling agents, per se, we’d love to work with you. And it works great, and now it’s a huge part of our business [Check out Liza Nelson, Amy Taylor, Gabriela Cobar, Casey Dobbins, etc].

When did it become not scary to start taking on more people? How’d you get to 25 from 7?

When I had good employees. Because it was less personal, it was more like I could give people research assignments, I had time to go out and meet people and then also have other people, making lists and doing outreach…

It wasn’t all on your shoulders.

It wasn’t all on my shoulders, exactly. And now there are certain people who work with certain artists, you know. Jen [Schmitz] works almost exclusively with Michelle, Kayt Fitzmorris with Ryan Young, Tiffany Yich with the stylists, and there are people that can actually give the time and attention to each artist as they need it.

So you don’t feel that having twenty is like, “I don’t have enough time for all the people,” because you have your people to take care of them.

Yes, yeah. And we all divide tasks according to what we’re good at, and what we want to be doing at any given time.

In terms of like the industry today, was there a moment when you started to feel like the ground was shifting?

Many! I will say that I had been very used to the vicissitudes, slower times, busier times, not taking it personally. Having confidence it will come back around or that I need to make changes to keep up with the times. This is the first time that I really have no idea what’s happening! But I will say that most of my colleagues and I are in the place of, is this normal, are these the normal curves, or is this the end of this industry as we know it? I really don’t know. I know that I’ve never been better at my job than I am now. I know that most of my colleagues feel the same way. I used to always be able to look at where there was energy and new business, and who’s working and why, and I’d be able to figure out that, that’s puzzle with some tenacity. This is the first time where I’m not seeing much there, there. I’m not seeing a lot of answers to my questions. And that is scary, I don’t think it’s devastating, but it’s uncertain.

Mhmm.

I think that those of us who are curious, creative and dogged will find a path, but I don’t know if it will be the same construct that it has been. A lot of people have been talking about this AI stuff. I’m not seeing AI quite there yet, as the technology to take all of our photo jobs, but it will be, it just isn’t there quite yet. And with all technology, the dream is that it will just support the creative vision. This is the first time where it feels a little different, it’s not a post tool, it’s not CGI, it’s more advanced than that. So I don’t know what that looks like down the road.

I mean I’ve talked to a lot of people, writers, technical writers, they’re finding the same thing… I think there’s a confluence of there being this very sophisticated technology, which can do a lot of what we do, and the fact that people are no longer working in an office together, so there’s no institutional knowledge or understanding or taste for that matter, community…. So most people who know what they’re doing will say, “AI is still kind of cheesy, you can tell the difference,” whatever. But guess what, there’s more than half the people that don’t care or don’t know the difference.

Right.

When I first started as a photo editor, I was not a very good photo editor, I didn’t know the difference between good pictures and bad pictures, it took years of being with colleagues, having creative directors tell me why they chose a different picture than I wanted, seeing different people’s edits, seeing portfolio after portfolio after portfolio, knowing the difference between the ones that were good and bad, arguing with people about that, before I really became voiced in the difference between good and bad.

But there are so many people now, designers, art directors, creative directors, photographers, [influencers], who don’t have that conversation, and there’s nothing new being brought to the conversation, so it doesn’t matter necessarily what’s good or bad, it matters what’s working. Which is sad. There will always be a place for taste, but it just might not be place with a lot of money!

Right. It seems, looking back it seems more and more that there was a golden era, right,  you could make really good work and get paid for it. Where in the early-mid 2000s, you could take pictures for one of dozens of magazines, and a lot of people could have a career because there were so many magazines.

So many! There was so much volume, I mean, we’re still here, we’re still working, but it used to be if I lost a job, it was like, okay can’t win them all, there’s another one around the corner. The problem is that now every single person who’s great at what they do is going for those same jobs. I’m actually finding that having been in the business for nearly 20 years is helpful, because [of] old relationships, people are just reverting to old relationships.

This is a good time in some ways for somebody like Chris Buck, because art directors who worked with him 15 years ago aren’t doing these full searches for new talent, they’re like, “why wouldn’t I work with the best of the best? I know that he’s great.” I actually think it’s a really hard time for emerging photographers.

Mhmm.

I used to know exactly how to guide emerging photographers and tell them how to do it, and now I worry. I mean, even if they do everything right, I don’t know what’s there for them. There’s just not a lot of volume. During the whole dot com era, there was a new business every day, and even the pandemic was a very busy time for us. People were shopping online.

Ohhh.

It was a boon for still life photographers. It was tough for the lifestyle photographers, but it was great for the still life photographers. We used to do a ton of Amazon shoots. Those people are just not relying on photography as much anymore. Even Airbnb is now doing those sort of AI generated houses. [They’ve since gone back to more traditional photography].

Yeah!

You know, for talent, talent is/was so expensive, you don’t have to pay talent with AI. A lot of things have already been changing. The merging of film, video and stills was already happening, that was changing the cost structure. I still run into that now where a film producer will be like, “what do you mean lunch doesn’t count?” Or, “what do you mean that that’s part of the 10-hour day?”

I say, “well you have to pay them two extra hours for overtime if it’s a 12 hour day,” and they’re like, “no!”

They know better.

I try to have sympathy and know that they come from a different set of rules, but the advent of treatments was also from the film industry, you know, treatments for every job was because art directors were becoming integrated, art directors and creative directors, and they were used to seeing treatments for everything in the video world, so they started asking for treatments for still shoots, too. So now being up for a job is a sort of two week endeavor.

I remember when I started [as a photo editor] and we had to do research requests to news outlets, we paid $150 for each research requests. They’d send you a package with slides– which is really aging me– and then you’d send them back within a certain amount of time, scan them, etc… but I feel like if people are going to ask for a triple bid, they should be willing to pay for it. If a big healthcare company wants a 25-40 page treatment, then they should pay a couple thousand dollars per treatment.

Right.

And we’ve had some luck asking for that, I always ask. They say no a lot, but I’ll ask! And some people are reasonable about it, especially people from a film background who know that they get charged by a production company. So yeah, a lot of things have been at play at the same time. And in the past I’ve always thought, just got to worm my way into the new way of doing things and figure it out, stay ahead of the game. This is the first time where I’m like, huh, is there still going to be a game?

But it’s not just our industry, I mean I hear that from people everywhere, every creative field. And then, the non-creative fields, people are being laid off in droves. I mean, I think it’s an uncertain time politically, I think it’s, we’ll either all look back and say this time was so innocent, we had no idea what was coming, or we’ll look back and say it was a shake up like any other shake up, and there was a way out. I really don’t know.

It’s been my job to kind of know for a long time, and it’s funny to just be honest and say like, I honestly have no idea. I don’t know if I’ll have a job in five years. I’m going to enjoy it while I can, I love what I do. I always thought I’d do it until the day I die, but I don’t know what it’s going to be, I don’t know where we’re all going to live, I don’t know if there’s going to be an environment. I don’t know! It’s weird.

I’ve always admired people who sort of embraced new technology, I admire the people who…I talked to a National Geographic photographer the other day, and he did a whole experimentation with AI and it made me like him more, because I was like, “oh that’s not expected of somebody like you.” But he was a true artist.

Right.

He’s playing with it.

Use whatever tools are available.

And so it’s inevitable AI, we all know it’s inevitable, I want to see how people use it, collaborate with it, I want to see voice-driven work in that field. Part of my job is to put myself in the client or the agency’s shoes, be sympathetic and understand it, if I’m looking at a five location shoot around the world, and AI can do that in minutes…how do you rationalize spending a million dollars for a shoot, or five-hundred thousand dollars for a shoot, when most people aren’t going to know you can fabricate it. And I’ve seen the experimentations of a photo that they redo with different AI programs, and yes there are glaring mistakes in some of them, yes they don’t quite have the grittiness, but they’re not bad! They’re a lot better than I thought they’d be. And for commercial advertising on a big glossy billboard, if you get the right number of digits? I don’t know how you can compare what would have been $150,000 to $300,000 shoot to, I don’t know, seven thousand dollars, at most, for somebody’s time.

For some post.

Yeah. I don’t know…they’re going to have to figure out licensing, but they’ll get there. It’s not the first time that a new technology has changed things, I always felt lucky, because I was the young upstart who came to the field past the golden age of photography. All of those big gallery shoots with $30,000 a day in fees photo shoots, those were happening, those were ending right when I was starting. It was really at the end of the dot com bubble, it was 2005 when I started. So I actually started in the worst time in the history of photography! I had nowhere to go but up. So it was great, I had no expectations, and all the people were grumbling about the way things used to be, but I had no baggage. I just felt lucky to be there. And so I imagine that’s what younger people feel like now, I just don’t really see anybody spending a ton of money on photography, so I don’t even know what the “pinch me I can’t believe I get to have this be my job” moment is anymore.

Right.

Maybe it’s there for influencers, that’s my guess.

For sure.

I don’t see a lot of that. And I think I told you a little bit that food, because of legal issues, will not be able to be totally fabricated from AI. They have to use the real things, they have to sell what it is.

Right!

And healthcare, we will have standards that can’t be avoided.

What I see is also that, as of right now anyway, whenever it’s revealed that something is AI, there’s a huge negative reaction. People don’t know the difference, but if they’re told the difference, they feel cheated.

I actually don’t care at all. I care about the effectiveness of the image. I mean I care if it’s somebody’s copyrighted work that’s being infringed, but to me photography is a very emotional experience, and I’m not a stickler for the medium, the intricacies of the medium, I’ve never been a gear-head. To me, it’s about the experience of the image. But we’re going to get a very glossed reality served back to us. One, you know, without a lot of grit or imperfections. One without soul and depth.

My guess is there will be a pendulum shift and there will be a movement towards a scene kind of like punk rock…

An authenticity.

Yeah. Authenticity has always been above…

Authenticity-core.

(laughter) yeah, in photography, but I think it will go even more in that direction, I think that will be a rarified ask. I mean, you know, I remember seeing Jurassic Park and people being like, the special effects are amazing, and I was kind of like, What special effects? Dinosaurs are real.

(laughter)

That’s sort of where we’re headed with all photography, AI technology going to be good. And you’re not going to be able to see the cracks. And the machines are going to be able to do a lot of it. So I do believe that there’s a capacity to shake things up that in the right creative hands and the right iconoclastic hands. There’s something new to be said, and it will be done very well.

And I’ve seen some AI artists do really interesting stuff [Charlie Engman]. People will do fun things, but I think that the average will be a very sort of stock regurgitation. And the question is whether people will really care, whether there will be a thirst for more, and who will be riding that wave, joining that movement and direction.

If there are going to be enough spaces that value that.

Yeah, and I mean we’re at a time where ad agencies are so afraid of losing business that they’re not standing up to the clients, we’re past the Don Draper days.

(laughter)

“Shut up and do what I tell you, because I know what I’m doing.”

I mean I’ve had this conversation so many times this year where even ad agencies said, wow we really wanted your artists, but at the end of the day the client doesn’t care about the difference between good and bad, they don’t care, and we need the client, so we didn’t even…

So we didn’t fight.

Because…I need a job.

Right.

It’s sort of a focus group mentality. Like, for your paycheck, what do you want us to say, it’s very different. There’s not monolithic voice. And I thought the democratization of media was going to be a great thing. I didn’t like the idea that there were three news outlets and you only heard from them, I liked the idea of hearing a lot of voices, but the result has been that there’s so much out there that no body knows what is real, what isn’t, and what’s good and what isn’t, it’s just a whole bunch of free data. There’s not a lot of direction or voice [or standards or fact checking for that matter]. I’m curious what art directors and creative directors are feeling right now. My photographers who are doing the best are the ones who are doing art direction, to some extent.

As part of it.

Their treatments are their ideas, and people are coming to them not with a deck that says what they’re going to do, but with a, “what are your ideas,” and they come back and shape it, and then the agency shares that with the client, the ones that are kind of the sexiest and most exciting work. But it used to be that ad agencies did all of that. They sold it through, they did not depend on the photographer to sell the idea or concept through.

Mmhm.

I think they’re working so hard just to get clients, they don’t have the time to do that. I mean, realistically, I think that’s what’s happening. Even my friends who work at big tech companies, they don’t work on that many shoots, a couple a year, a lot of pitches. So it’s a different time. It’s not all doomsday. It’s a paradigm shift, I just don’t know what it’s going to look like moving forward.

When I started my career, we needed to fill a quarter page space, we had timelines and things, so you had to write to photographers and see well, pictures of what politicians they had, and you had to fill that space.

You needed a landscape, you needed a this and that. And then in my lifetime, my creative career lifetime, there was no value in just filling space. Everybody could…you could go out with your iPhone and take a perfectly good landscape photo and fill that space

Right.

So we stopped paying $500 for a quarter page, because we didn’t need to. Now you don’t need to pay for a very high resolution ad, really.

I mean what we’re talking about could be more than just, oh photographers have a problem. It’s that advertising is the problem.

Well, advertising already has a problem!

(laughter)

But I mean, I’m seeing more and more clients bring their creative in-house, and photographers going in with producers directly, just making stuff happen. My business model used to be, in order to be relevant, you need to be a destination, right, you have to have a voice. People have to come to you because they need what you do, they don’t just need a picture. And that worked for the last 10, 15 years, being a cut above, creating voice driven work, people knowing where to go, people who care. They would go to places like Redeye to find voice-driven work. But now you can (potentially) make voice-driven work with AI, I mean, you can. And you need a voice to make it but my concern is, I actually just ran into this recently, my concern is we have an AI clause in our contract, say somebody gets a buyout, and they wanted to take the AI clause off. The photographer shoots a gallery, thousands of photos, that tech company trains AI to shoot like said photographer, they never need to hire that photographer again.

Oof.

Insert new product into blank blank style of photography, it’s going to be pretty good, for a long time. So the voice, I think it’s a little bit of a mind bender, but when your voice is sold, then you literally have nothing!

Yes!

So it used to be, some photographers would get scared, oh this person is copying my style, this person is doing this, and I’d always say, “don’t worry, you’re steps ahead of them, you’re you! That’s why you’re good, you’re a step ahead of them.” It gets a little trickier now, because AI, if you give people enough images, AI can be trained. And I’ve had people come to me and say hey, do you have a photographer who shoots like Chris Buck, do you have a photographer who shoots like Stephanie Gonot.

Right.

I say, “well I rep them,” but let’s say a big tech company purchases a buyout of 3,000 images of their work, it’s suddenly not ours to sell.

It’s an existential threat. And the more distinguishable your work is, visually, the easier it is to be trained!

The more of a voice you have, the easier it will be to train. So yeah, I mean it’s interesting. It’s exciting, but if the rule of art or image making is to make people see differently, people are going to have to get much more aggressive in terms of what that means.

I’ve always been a total optimist, I’ve always been saddened by the dooms-dayers and the whiners and the this and the that, but it does feel different. I’m not anti-all of it, I mean the promise of creativity through social media and all of that stuff was a really good thing.

There’s just so much uncertainty from so many different directions that it’s hard for me to…I’ve always had a game plan, I’ve always had a path. Even this year, I was like, I hadn’t been going on the New York trips as much just because I have young kids, and I was like, “I just want to talk to people, I want to see what’s happening.” And I was more  hopeful than I thought I’d be.

Oh?

There were some agencies that I loved that were vibrant and doing some good work, mostly in beverage space and things like that. But just a lot of the people with a lot of institutional knowledge are being laid off, the higher ups are being laid off, so there’s just no one to teach anybody anymore.

I see.

And I believe in young voices, but I believe in them in combination with older ones! I had to learn so much from the creative directors I worked for in the first eight years in my career, and every designer I know learned so much from their colleagues. And we’d all say we’d be embarrassed at what we put out to the universe the first decade of our careers. It’s completely unfettered now. So I don’t know, maybe it’s a different kind of taste and voice, it’s something that we’ll have to get used to. I went to the Printed Matter show, I was happy to see that there was a lot there, there were people making things.

People are still making things, it’s not over yet!

I hope we talk in five years, and it will be interesting to look back on it and be like, “oh, we were so innocent then, and it was so much crazier than we thought,” or it was just a bleep like any other bleep and we found our way.