Maybe it's our location in New York City that led us to this series on magazine photography. After all, this metropolis is an image-saturated place (we don't need to remind you of the mind-blowing visual cacophony of Times Square since it's broadcast as a backdrop these days on MTV and other national news programs). Not to mention that the city is also the headquarters for the publishing industry, which supports about 60,000-80,000 jobs. But geographical tendencies aside, the consumption of images in American culture is right up there with McDonald's hamburgers and Madonna's latest pop incarnation whether you're living in Albany or Albuquerque. So perhaps our urge to do this series could be summed up as some variation on the old adage, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." After all, even within this media-saturated environment, many magazines are still managing to use photography in creative, beautiful, and unusual ways. And that's a distinction worth exploring. But we also want to bring you closer to the action, because if you really want to work within this field, you've got to know what the magazines want. So we're going to take you inside for a behind-the-scenes look at what magazine photo editors do to get their images from concept to cover. We'll ask them, what images are they looking for? What photos are selected and why? How are they or their photographers using the new digital technology? We'll feel out opportunities for aspiring photographers and report back to you on the opinions and inclinations of those photo professionals who will be judging your work. By the way, you'll sometimes hear industry insiders referring to a magazine as a "book." Our series title, "Book Report," is a nod to this tendency, because this series is designed to bring you the ideas and opinions of magazine professionals in their own words. In this installment in our series, we visit with the people at Wildlife Conservation Magazine. Feel free to drop us an e-mail if there's a "book" out there that you'd like to hear more about. |
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Working with the Wild: Behind-the-Scenes at Wildlife Conservation Magazine
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© Wildlife Conservation Magazine
Wildlife Conservation Magazine operates out of a tiny building strategically located behind a camouflage of trees and shrubs on the grounds of the Bronx Wildlife Conservation Park (known locally as the Bronx Zoo). As I make my way inside, I wonder whether the building's location between the oddly juxtaposed Mongolian Wild Horses exhibit and Birds of Prey house is really that odd, or whether I'm just unreasonably captivated by the contrast. The place has a kind of down-the-rabbit-hole, Wonderland feel, which fosters these seeming absurdities.
© Dennis DeMello 
The little publications building, crowded as any such office would be with the usual industry spillover of papers, slides, books, and posters, is where the magazine's Creative Director, Julie Larsen Maher, pieces it all together. But Wildlife Conservation Magazine, which has a circulation over 155,000, is rather notably not the only publication under her creative direction. Julie also handles the Wildlife Conservation Society's annual report, the staff newsletter, the members' newsletter, park maps and guides, posters, brochures...the list goes on and on. The WCS, which has been working since 1895 from their Bronx Zoo headquarters to save and protect wildlife all over the globe, is an expansive and, it would seem, well-published not-for-profit organization. To focus on the magazine alone, which is why I came up here, is looking unlikely. Conversation about the photography in Wildlife Conservation Magazine wanders inevitably in and out of a discussion of Julie's other projects, and the line connecting the dots, it seems, is the zoo's staff photographer, Dennis DeMello.
Dennis, who has been photographing for the zoo for almost twenty-five years, takes pictures of zoo donors, covers celebrity visits, zoo construction, seasonal activities-and anything and everything, of course, that the animals care to dish out. His photographs appear regularly in Wildlife Conservation Magazine and other WCS publications and have even made it onto the cover of LIFE magazine. © Dennis DeMello 
As he and Julie show me around his office, we stop to examine one of the framed photos hanging on the wall-a shot of a polar bear underwater grasping a fish between its paws. The photo, technically and compositionally, is quite remarkable: a beautiful, clear shot taken through the glass window of the polar bear exhibit.
"Getting that photo took all day," Dennis says. "It was a really bad shoot. We started (feeding the polar bear) with chicken instead of fish, but it looked horrible." "Like human body parts," says Julie. A photo of a pair of butterflies perched delicately on a young girl's hand and head prompt further anecdotes. © Dennis DeMello 
"This one was tricky until we figured out how to do it," Julie explains. "[The curators] made us stand up on a catwalk, on top of Jungle World ... so it was, what, like 190 degrees up there? If we put the butterfly on the kid, it would just fly away. So these butterflies were chilled slightly or just newly emerged. You had three to ten seconds before they would fly away and that's when you could get the shot. Just that little bit before they warmed up."
"We had a very good curator," says Dennis. "This is all about working with the people who really know the animals." Dennis, though, knows the animals pretty well himself. He takes as many photos for Wildlife Conservation Magazine as there are animals in the society's unique system of wildlife parks. There's the vast menagerie of the Bronx Zoo, plus the New York Aquarium, and the Central Park, Queens and Prospect Park wildlife centers. Altogether these facilities draw more than 4 million visitors annually. But the WCS system cannot provide all the animals Julie might need photographed, and there's no substitute, of course, for images from the wild. "I use Dennis whenever I can," Julie explains, "but we're often limited by habitat. So then we end up going to other photographers or to stock agencies." WC Creative Director Julie Larsen Maher © Anne Townsend 
Julie occasionally turns to the WCS field researchers stationed in 53 nations across Africa, Asia, Latin America and North America. When not conducting studies of wildlife needs or training local conservation professionals, these researchers are perfectly positioned to capture images of, say African elephants, for publication in Wildlife Conservation Magazine.
After locating the photographers who can provide the shots, how does Julie winnow the submissions to the few selected images that finally make it to publication? If Dennis has taken the pictures for the article, she and Dennis edit his work together, laying it all out, keeping whatever might be printable, and setting aside slides that would be appropriate for inclusion in their already substantial archive of zoo images, which includes over 100,000 photos from the early 1900s to the present. "The stuff we get in from a professional photographer is a little different," Julie explains. "We'll get 20 to 80 slides on a given submission and those are already tightly edited by the photographer or the people that work for them. I go through and pull a variety...close-ups, behavior shots...and I'll scan them to see what works. I'll maybe love a shot but it just won't work in some cases. Maybe I can't get type on it and it's supposed to be an opening page, for example." © Dennis DeMello 
When selecting images for Wildlife Conservation Magazine, Julie steers clear of postcard-style, greeting card-type animal shots and picks instead those images that have, as she put it, "something special that would make it stand out, whether [the photographer] attempted something with a crop or motion or whatever."
"It takes a sense and a patience," she explains. "We see a lot of people that just shoot, shoot, shoot. They've taken five hundred pictures but they haven't taken the time to wait for the animal to turn this way or turn that way. I think that's what separates the best photographers from the good ones. They wait for the opportunity to get the shot...wait for the moment so that they've got something different from what everyone else has." Because WCS is a not-for-profit, Julie has to work with a budget slightly less ample than, say, that of Conde Nast Traveller. As a result she and Dennis sometimes have to get resourceful in order to obtain the right image. Take the swordfish boycott, for example. When Julie decided to run a piece on the subject, she needed a photo of a swordfish in a supermarket or restaurant environment. So Julie and Dennis approached a store, which gladly plopped down a giant swordfish, and with New Yorkers doing their grocery shopping all around them, Dennis took the photos. "We got a [free] lobster out of it," says Dennis. "We asked if there was a dead one we could photograph and they gave it to us." "We felt bad about putting a live one under the copy stand," offers Julie. © Dennis DeMello 
The creative collaboration between Julie and Dennis is reciprocal. Julie occasionally serves as a body double when Dennis needs to test set-ups with animals, and she frequently accompanies him on his zoo animal shoots, during which she serves as a kind of creative consultant.
The day I visit, Julie and Dennis are working together to photograph the ostriches interacting with their keepers, Frankie and Mike. Dennis is positioned on the visitors' side of the outdoor ostrich pen, a 35-mm Nikon SLR hanging from his neck and the battery pack for his flash attached at his waist. "Part of what we end up running into is that we just don't know how the animals are going to behave," Julie says. The primary obstacle today seems to be the quite brazen unruliness of the ostriches. The keepers are in the pen now, hand-feeding them kale, and Dennis is leaning into the waist-high fence, photographing the activity. When the keepers temporarily run out of kale, the ostriches peck at the empty hands. "They kissin' ya or pinchin' ya?" Julie yells to Mike. © Julie Larsen Maher 
The ostrich that Frankie is somehow able to identify as the one with "the prettiest face" is eagerly pecking at Dennis's leather shoes through the wire fence. Dennis complains that the light is too hot and tries to get keepers and ostriches to move into the shade. Every once in a while he switches from a 105 mm to a 35-70mm zoom lens, then back again.
"Perfect! Stay right there. Okay, bring them over here a bit." The ostriches move in the opposite direction. One of them plucks the black baseball cap from Frankie's head. "Sorry, Frankie, can we get you over there, back in the shade? Right...there...much better...good...stay there...just a second." Dennis is able to get a few shots of the group, before the ostriches start to wander off again. A few minutes later and the ostriches are back in the shade with the keepers-this is the kind of shot Dennis and Julie are looking for-but now there's the problem of a bush with tall brown stalks, which, Julie points out, will look bad alongside the long necks of the ostriches. Not to mention that the birds keep turning their hindquarters to the lens. "She's trying to take my wallet!" Frankie yells suddenly, as an ostrich digs into his backpocket. "But what do you expect? It's the Bronx!" © Dennis DeMello 
Theft averted, the bird later bites his ear, which obviously hurts but Frankie takes it all with good humor.
"The ostriches aren't really handleable, they're not trained," Julie says. "It's a special gift that the keepers have to be able to work with them a little bit for us." The possibility of missing the perfect shot-when the variables of light, movement, keepers, and ostriches come together harmoniously-keeps everyone tightly observant, even those of us not using our cameras. "Art Wolfe was here photographing one time," Julie said. "And every time he would change rolls of film, he would look down, look away, and then you'd go 'oh!' when you saw something happening, something worth photographing, and he would say, 'I don't want to see what I've missed! I never look up when I'm changing film!'" After about twenty or thirty minutes the ostriches have had enough of this awkward choreography and refuse to cooperate without the lure of kale. Frankie echoes the sense of increasing chaos by spinning in place, which startles the birds, scattering them left and right. – Anne Townsend © Wildlife Conservation Magazine 
Note to our readers: Wildlife Conservation Magazine does not put out open calls for submissions. If you feel your work is appropriate for Wildlife Conservation Magazine (check out a copy or three before making this evaluation), NYI suggests you send a query letter to Julie. Don't send slides or prints.
Check out Wildlife Conservation Magazine at www.wildlifeconservation.org. |
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