When you’ve got a single Saturday afternoon in São Paulo and you need to whittle the city’s hundreds of art exhibitions, world-class museums and iconic architecture down to a manageable – and memorable – handful of visits, it helps to have expert guidance. 

My expert, Casa Vogue Brazil Art Director Tammy Takenaka, was precise: “IMS and MASP.”

MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo) was founded in 1947 and houses one of the world’s great collections, of European as well as South American art. IMS (Instituto Moreira Salles), a few blocks north on Avenida Paulista, is a baby in comparison. Part of a non-profit cultural organisation founded in 1990 by philanthropist Walter Moreira Salles, with centres around Brazil, the institute opened in São Paulo for the first time in September 2017.

The seven-storey glass-fronted building houses a film theatre, photography library, book shop, café and restaurant, along with airy gallery spaces. Photography is the institute’s main focus, and it claims a collection of around two million images from a roster of mainly Brazilian or Brazil-based photographers. Names like Maureen Bisilliat and Marcel Gautherot may be unfamiliar to an international audience (they certainly were to me) but, if the current exhibition is anything to go by, they are treasures just waiting to be discovered.

Chichico Alkmim Fotografo surveys the life and work of Francisco Augusto “Chichico” Alkmim (1886-1978), proprietor of the local photography studio in Diamantina, Minas Gerais. A diamond-mining centre in the18th- and 19th-centuries, Diamantina was a handsome colonial town (and is now a UNESCO World heritage Site), and its inhabitants seem to have enjoyed nothing better than gathering – in bars, cafes, the street, and most of all the studio – to have a picture taken by Chichico. Five thousand negatives from the photographer’s archives were donated to IMS in 2015, and they create a captivating insight into Brazilian life in the early 20th-century.

Chichico set up his studio in 1919, and much of this exhibition is dedicated to studio portraits. An excellent short documentary film shows the building where he worked: a deep, high-ceilinged room, with sunshine blazing in from both sides that the photographer managed with curtains and screens. He painted the backdrops himself.

The subjects are formally posed, with solemn expressions and intense eye contact. For the working classes in early 20th-century Brazil, one commentator explains, having your portrait taken was not simply a celebration of events or commemoration of milestones: it was evidence of going up in the world.  

The exhibition displays a selection of these portraits printed life-size, so walking through the exhibition you encounter the citizens of Diamantina eye to eye. It’s an extraordinarily strong and intimate experience. 

A young woman in a flapper dress, beads and darned stockings holds a black umbrella like a treasured possession. A gangly young man in a wrinkled jacket and rolled-up trousers rests his wrist awkwardly on an étagère, oversized hat taking pride of place beside him.

Pride is an emotion that comes out clearly in these pictures. The women of Diamantina, according to one of the film commentators, prided themselves on being fashionable – and on their independence. One particularly delightful composition shows three young ladies lost in reverie whilst posing with two wine bottles (and glasses). Another shows a group of three women and three men, all raising glasses of beer in a solemn toast to the camera.

As well as studio portraits, Chichico photographed hundreds of street scenes. Crowds of children in school uniform; young guards in dress regalia; factory workers and municipal picnics; and lots and lots of musical groups. His ability to choreograph the crowd is a marvel: in scene after scene, dozens of faces stare directly at the photographer, not a blink or blurred expression in shot. 

As well as documenting the attitudes and pastimes of Minas Gerais, Chichico’s practice recorded the hardships of life in rural Brazil. One very poignant section of the exhibition shows photographs of dead children in their coffins, their grieving parents and siblings standing behind. 

Another image, of the photographer’s own family, shows Chichico seated with a baby on his lap, his wife and little son standing by his side. Some versions are cropped to show only the family, but the whole frame reveals two more figures, a servant woman and child, propping up the backdrop. The woman is holding another toddler, out of shot, by the hand. The dirty, barefoot servant child contrasts strongly with the spit-and-polished Alkmim offspring. Chichico may have had a democratic approach to photography, but he was still a product of his times. 

The last section of the exhibition presents close-up portraits made for official use, but here printed life-size. Again the effect is almost shockingly intimate. The photographer exposed two or more portraits together on glass plates, printing them like a contact sheet and cropping the individual pictures afterwards. The subjects have cards printed with numbers pegged to their jackets for later identification. 

Again, the sitters look straight into the camera, some with expressions of anxiety, some with pride. The exhibition provides no information about these people, their names, their circumstances, even when the pictures were taken. But it’s impossible not to read more into these faces, to imagine their lives – and, even more, to imagine their feelings.     

As the first major exhibition in the new IMS, Chichico Alkmim Fotografo sets the bar very high. Lucky Paulistas can anticipate more great shows to come: meanwhile we photography lovers in the rest of the world can only hope that IMS is working on international partnerships and will be sharing some of Brazil’s photographic treasures very soon.

Chichico Alkmim Fotografo, IMS São Paulo, until April 15, 2018.

Magnum, the world’s most famous photographers’ cooperative, celebrates its 70th anniversary this year.

Leonard Freed, Harlem Fashion Show, 1963

Among the various commemorative books, exhibitions (four in London alone), and t-shirt collections, the show currently at Le Bal presents a unique take on Magnum’s heritage. 

The little prints in Analog Recovery were originally made for distribution to the press, starting with Magnum’s inception in 1947 and continuing till the late ‘70s. The exhibition’s curator Diane Dufour tantalisingly describes “a collection of thousands of prints… stored in the Magnum archives in Paris in boxes bearing the name of each photographer.” 

The prints displayed are accompanied by commentary from the photographers themselves, including some original teletyped notes sent from worldwide war zones. These are by turns poignant, hilarious, hair-raising and heart-breaking. Gilles Peress, covering the Iranian revolution in 1979, tells head office, “Nothing’s happening. Am tired. Out of money. Two cameras went dead in Beheshtezara Cemetery. Will probably return Monday.” Only to hear back, “Impossible you leave. Rumour hostage will be freed next Thursday. Also Life interested.”

Gilles Peress writes from the American embassy siege in Tehran, 1979-1980

The prospect of selling a story to a publication like Life was of course Magnum’s raison d’etre, certainly as far as some of the administrative staff were concerned. What would be the point of supporting the worlds’ greatest photojournalists if not to present their photojournalism to the world? 

But of course the perennial problem of the photojournalist – do you put your camera down to help or do you keep shooting? – is often the dynamic that drives this exhibition. Werner Bischof says, “When you think like an editor yourself you’ve already gone wrong, because then you have put the event first.” 

Werner Bischof, Magnum Analog Recovery

Bischof is only one of the photographers who profess dismay, disgust or despair with where their talents have led them. “I am simply not a newspaper reporter,” he says, “I am prostituting my work and I have had enough.”

Erich Lessing, documenting street fighting in Hungary in 1956, writes, “I had thought… that by taking pictures we were showing what the world is like, that you can at least in a small way influence behaviours and the course of politics. But every journalist knows… the most horrible war pictures will not end wars.”

Erich Lessing, Budapest, 1956

But for every Werner Bischof there was an Elliott Erwitt. His trip to the USSR in 1957 was an assignment for Holiday magazine, to document the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution. Erwitt shot “the first pictures of the Soviet missiles that were seen in the West which testified to the technological superiority of the Soviets over the Americans.” 

He also witnessed “The Kitchen Debate,” a moment when Soviet Premier Kruschev and the visiting US President Nixon argued publicly. Erwitt wrote, “This picture was used in Nixon’s campaign to show what a tough guy he was… I am pleased with the pictures but I am not terribly proud of the use that was made of it but what are you going to do? You just take the pictures.”

Elliott Erwitt, Nikita Kruschev and Richard Nixon in Moscow, 1957

It’s impossible not to sympathise with the Magnum members who suffered for their work (George Rodger in Bergen-Belsen in 1945: “The dead were lying around, 4000 of them, and I found I was getting bodies into photographic compositions. I said, My God, what has happened to me?…[But] it had to be photographed because people had to know.”) 

George Rodger at Bergen-Belsen, 1945

But at the same time, one can only be grateful that they bore witness. In a world where every smartphone is a camera, and respect for the photographic profession is declining rapidly, this exhibition is a clear illustration of the “why” of photography. Photographers may not stop terrible things happening, but they can stop us from lying to ourselves that everything’s ok.

A major adjunct to Magnum Analog Recovery is the catalogue that commemorates the exhibition. It’s presented as an A4 horizontal ring binder: 230 pages, including reprints of the images and text from the photographers, foldouts, enlargements, and plenty of anecdotes. It is simply, brilliantly, and beautifully designed and edited. It’s available in French or English, and can be ordered online for just €60. Definitely a candidate for photobook of the year.

Robert Capa, Magnum Analog Recovery

Magnum Analog Recovery, Le Bal, 6, Impasse de la Défense, 75018 Paris, until August 27, 2017. www.le-bal.fr

Tickets for London’s most popular art exhibition this spring, the blockbuster David Hockney retrospective at Tate Britain, cost £19.50 each. Now you can catch the same show at the Pompidou in Paris, as well as the museum’s comprehensive and thoughtful Walker Evans retrospective, for €14.00. (What’s more galling: the vast gap between what you have to pay to see art in London vs Paris, or the vast gap in what art you can actually see?)

Walker Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmer Floyd Bourroughs, 1936 (© Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The last time the UK hosted a Walker Evans’ photography exhibition was 14 years ago, when Evans’ Polaroids were shown at The Photographers’ Gallery and his work was part of Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth Century Photograph at Tate Modern. The current show at the Pompidou includes over 400 prints, artefacts and documents, including, as the organisers justifiably claim, the best examples of his work. Alongside these are some of Evans’ more telling personal possessions – postcards, advertising placards, signs and posters, which he photographed and collected as he travelled around the country.

Born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1903, Evans was the son of an advertising executive (which perhaps helps explain his fondness for ad posters). Aged 23 he spent a year in Paris, translating Baudelaire and Blaise Cendrars and tentatively taking photographs. Some of his early images in this show, like New York City Street Corner, 1929, are somewhat reminiscent of Paul Strand with their dramatic angles and lighting. 

Walker Evans, New York City Street Corner, 1929. (© Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

However, there’s no evidence that Evans knew the older photographer, and in 1929 he was introduced to the work of someone who would prove much more influential: Eugène Atget. 

Atget’s champion in America was Berenice Abbot. Like Evans, she had gone from New York to Paris in the 1920s and clearly thrived there, studying sculpture and assisting Man Ray before opening her own studio where she photographed the likes of James Joyce and Jean Cocteau. Man Ray introduced her to Eugène Atget, then in his late 60s, and the two became friends. On his death, Abbott acquired the photographer’s archive and brought it to NY. Evans first encountered Atget’s work in Berenice’s apartment, and the experience was clearly a formative one.

Atget’s pictures of turn of the century Paris avoided arty effects, concentrating on simple subjects simply composed: people at ground level, ordinary buildings and streets, unprepossessing store fronts and shop windows.

Eugène Atget, Cours D’Amoy 12, Place de la Bastille, c.1895

Walker Evans, Joe’s Auto Graveyard, 1935 (© Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In terms of both subject matter and approach, Atget’s work clearly struck a chord with the young Walker Evans. Some of his subsequent work seems like homage to specific Atget images – like the abandoned Model T Fords in Joe’s Auto Graveyard which echo the piles of carriage wheels in Cours D’Amoy 12, Place de la Bastille. 

Much later in his life, in an interview in 1971, Evans said: “You don’t want your work to spring from art; you want it to commence from life, and that’s in the street now. I’m interested in what’s called vernacular. For example, finished, I mean educated, architecture doesn’t interest me, but I love to find American vernacular”.

Walker Evans, Houses and Billboards, Atlanta, Georgia, 1936 (© Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

“Vernacular” is the word that the Pompidou’s curator Clément Cheroux has seized on for this exhibition. He uses it to describe Evans’ pictures of roadside shacks and billboards, the visual language of America, as well as the people themselves. Evans shot people in much the same way he shot houses and film posters: simply and with sincerity. 

In 1938 Evans started photographing commuters on the New York subway, using a miniature camera hidden inside his coat to catch people off guard and unawares. MOMA describes how he “concealed his 35-millimeter Contax camera by painting its shiny chrome parts black and hiding it under his topcoat, with only its lens peeking out between two buttons. He rigged its shutter to a cable release, whose cord snaked down his sleeve and into the palm of his hand, which he kept buried in his pocket. For extra assurance, he asked his friend and fellow photographer Helen Levitt to join him on his subway shoots, believing that his activities would be less noticeable if he was accompanied by someone.” A collection of these images, edited from over 600 originals, was eventually published in 1966 in a book entitled Many Are Called, with text by Evans’ writer friend James Agee.

Walker Evans, Subway Photographs, 1938-1941 (© Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The Subway Photographs in this exhibition are small and intense. Their tight framing and artificial light gives them a dramatic feel, but they are entirely natural. Evans described these pictures as "what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.”

Some of his most famous portraits, also in the show, share these qualities – apart from the anonymity. Evans’ portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs has become one of the most recognisable images in American photography. A mother of four and, at just 27, old beyond her years, Burroughs was the wife of a sharecropper whose family was documented by Evans and James Agee in another book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Four frames of Allie Mae exist, with her expression varying from anxiety to a hint of a smile. The exhibition shows two versions, with recordings of Allie Mae talking about her experiences. 

Walker Evans, Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama, 1936 (© Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Walker was chary of commercial commissions, but in 1935 was contracted to work with the “historical unit” of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), part of the Department of Agriculture, on a project to document rural America, primarily the South, in pictures. He spent 18 months travelling, often alone, recording the people and their way of life. In 1936 he started working with Agee, a journalist writing for Fortune magazine, and accompanied him to Hale County, Alabama, where they met the Burroughs family and their neighbours.

Walker Evans, Bud Field and his Family, Hale County, Alabama, 1936 (© Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The pictures, and Agee’s words, never made it into Fortune, but with the publication of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941, the sharecropping families of Hale County were immortalised, their poverty presented with unflinching but undramatic clarity. 

In 1943 Evans was hired by Time Inc., and worked for the company, mainly Fortune, for the next 22 years. One set of images in this exhibition, Anonymous Labour, shows men and women walking in the street in Detroit on a Saturday afternoon in 1946. Photographed from below waist height, they hurry past, a few casting suspicious glances towards the photographer, most ignoring him. Fortune’s text reads, “The American worker, as he passes here, generally unaware of Walker Evans’ camera, is a decidedly various fellow… When editorialists lump them as ‘labor,’ these laborers can no doubt laugh that one off.’ 

Walker Evans, Anonymous Labor, 1946

The legendary John Szarkowski, Director of the Photography Department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, described Evans’ work as “puritanically economical, precisely measured… qualities that seemed more appropriate to a bookkeeper’s ledger than to art. 

“But… [his art] constitutes a personal survey of the interior resources of the American tradition, a survey based on a sensibility that found poetry and complexity where most earlier travelers had found only drab statistics or fairy tales.”

This exhibition is comprehensive in a way Evans himself might appreciate. It presents a vast amount of material, neatly and accessibly, and rewards the patient visitor with wonderful discoveries.

Walker Evans: A Vernacular Style, Centre Pompidou, Paris, until August 14th, 2017

…and then two come along at the same time.

Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion, now on at the V&A Museum, is the crowd pleaser. It brings together a selection of the master’s designs with a larger selection of pieces by contemporary designers, to demonstrate exactly how Cristobal Balenciaga has continued to influence subsequent generations. 

The original gowns (or replicas of them) are displayed in the V&A’s lower fashion gallery, in vitrines singly or assembled in groups. There are interactive touches, like the display above labelled, “Cape or skirt? Balenciaga designed this garment to serve as both. Try on a replica of this ingenious design and share a photo on social media using #BalenciagaStyle.” 

Some pieces are placed next to x-rays by photographer Nick Veasey – the example above shows the boning and hoop skirts of a 1955 silk taffeta evening dress. It’s a catchy idea, a nod to Balenciaga as the master of construction. But Balenciaga’s fashion constructions were based on a revolutionary approach to fabrics, and how they could be cut and folded, rather than resorting to architectural devices. This exhibition doesn’t really get to grips with that fact.

Instead, it throws in a bit of everything: Balenciaga’s use of embroidery and embellishment, of colour as well as form. 

The exhibition really gets going in the upper gallery, where the “tributes” are assembled. From Rei Kawakubo (below, a polyurethane leather ensemble from 2016) to Demna Gvasalia, no opportunity is missed to draw a parallel between Balenciaga and current designers. 

While the inclusion of Gvasalia, as current head of the house, makes sense (“like Balenciaga he plays with proportions in his designs”) some of the comparisons are distinctly tenuous. For instance, “the outrage surrounding Balenciaga’s ‘sack’ dress in the 1950s was echoed in the controversy caused by Rei Kawakubo’s collections in the 1970s.” Well, yes, so?

Overall, this exhibition is aimed at a fairly mainstream audience – and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you want a more rarefied approach, head to Paris and Balenciaga, l’Oeuvre au Noir at the Musée Bourdelle. 

This exhibition, curated by Olivier Saillard of the Palais Galliera musée de la mode de la Ville de Paris, takes a strict and rigorously intellectual approach to the designer’s work. Every one of the 100-plus pieces in the show, from day dresses to coats to evening wear, is black. 

The exhibition is divided into three sections: “Silhouette & Volumes,” “Noirs et Lumières,” “Noirs et Couleurs.” According to the museum, this is because “for Balenciaga, black was more than a colour or even a non-colour; he saw it as a vibrant matter, by turns opaque or transparent, matt or shiny – a dazzling interplay of light, which owes as much to the luxurious quality of the fabrics as to the apparent simplicity of his cut.”

The effect is to make you focus entirely on how the clothes are constructed. 

The setting for the exhibition is one of Paris’ lesser-known delights, the former studio and home of the prolific and successful sculptor Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929). 

Upstairs, parts of toiles are set up next to Bourdelle’s giant sculptures. Selected dresses are housed in black “tents,” where you have to tentatively pull back a curtain and peer in to see the item, protected from daylight like a religious relic.

Most of the dresses are displayed in the dark basement of the museum – which makes it tricky to get a decent Instagram shot, but is a semi-spiritual experience for the patient visitor. 

L’Oeuvre au noir is the polar opposite of Shaping Fashion. Where the London show is populist and somewhat chaotic, the Paris one is strict, disciplined, and distinctly elitist. In both cases, the one constant is the clothes themselves: utterly fabulous, the genius of Cristobal Balenciaga shines serenely through.

Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, until Sunday February 18, 2018.

Balenciaga, l’Oeuvre au noir, Musée Bourdelle, Paris, until Sunday July 16, 2017.

Monochrome covers are not a new phenomenon, but for upmarket publishing colour has traditionally dominated. 

Right up to the 1990s glossy magazines had “colour allocations,” and art directors had to go through the flat plan and decide – before designing anything – exactly which pages could be printed in black and white and which had to be in colour.

Fashion stories, obviously, got the works, as did covers. 

Going to the printers to “pass the cover” was a rite of passage. In my experience it always seemed to involve a 5-hour train ride to Yorkshire or Cornwall and getting dragged out of bed at 3am to go to the print works and check that the colours matched the proofs. If they matched, you could head back to bed (or, if you were feeling creative, make the guys on press tweak various settings to get a slightly different result, to “bring it to life.”) If they did not match, you were likely in for hours of misery while the print foreman struggled to get just the right balance of ink on the cover, without killing the ad on the back.

B/w covers are not usually so tricky as this. But then, I rarely had to pass b/w covers, apart from my time as Creative Director of Eve.

When we launched Eve, in 2000, our Editor in Chief Gill Hudson decided that all covers would be b/w. It was a radical idea, and it would set us apart from the opposition. 

It also made us – at least in theory – a bit more upmarket. Black-and-white had, and in some ways still has, an aura of elitism, of “artiness,” which is entirely due to the predominance of monochrome in 20th-century art photography.

If you look at which glossies have run b/w covers over the years, the same names keep coming up. Vogue Italia, the most creative of the Vogues, has always championed b/w, not least because of the magazine’s close association with Peter Lindbergh, who only shoots b/w. Vogue Paris and German Vogue run b/w covers every few months. British Vogue does so rarely, and American Vogue not at all. 

Vogue Italia’s b/w covers tend towards “story-telling” in style: the model or models on location, looking not at the reader but at whatever is going on around them or in the background.

A couple of British Vogue covers – Lillian Bassman’s image from June 1950, “The Black and White Idea,” and Nick Knight’s shot of Liz Hurley from August 1995 – illustrate a different approach to monochrome, i.e., its usefulness as a graphic device. The strength of both these covers comes from bold shapes and sharp contrast. The use of b/w is not to create a certain atmosphere, tell a story or to look arty: it is purely about design.

Traditionally, b/w is supposed to be better at conveying personality, at uncovering a “true” persona. Above, a selection of b/w covers from recent months – Australian GQ, German Vogue, British GQ Style, and the launch issue of Vogue Arabia. These all rely on b/w to convey intensity: heavily-kohled eyes for Madonna and Gigi Hadid, heavy beards for Jai Courtney and Jake Gyllenhaal, dark backgrounds and tight crops. Common to all four covers, I would say, is an impression of seriousness, of weight. B/w says “classic” – art photography and the silver screen – and that’s something these issues want to communicate.

However, I’m interested to see a different trend in b/w covers these day. Below are recent issues of Vogue Ukraine, Vogue Korea, GQ Turkey, Dutch Vogue and Vogue Italia. They are not tightly cropped and the backgrounds are all white, apart from Lara’s on Dutch Vogue. They have very few coverlines. The shots are simple, direct, and don’t seem very polished. The overall impression is of youth and freshness. 

IMHO, this is something new for fashion glossies. It’s a style of photography and layout I associate more with music magazines, where you get ten minutes to shoot a band in a studio with plain white walls.

Is it down to social media? Is it a youth movement? Who knows. But it’s exciting to watch.

I drafted this piece way back in 2015, but never got around to posting it. In the intervening year-and-a-bit the publishing industry has tightened its belt even further, and I’ve been involved in even more situations where I’ve had to fight for the right to a pic ed. I believe now, more than ever, that the job of sourcing, researching, curating and commissioning images is a serious one – and we don’t take it seriously enough. 

December 2015: To round off the year on CNI Now, this week I compiled a “memorable images” gallery of photography which appeared in Conde Nast titles in 2015.

With something like 130 magazines over 27 countries – and the fact that CNI Now is a corporate blog so time and space are not infinite – doing this objectively is well nigh impossible. You have to make political decisions: which countries to focus on; which titles you can get away with leaving out; which photographers have to make the cut, and which you can safely ignore.

You have to have Mario in there, of course, and Patrick, but not the most obvious shots. Everyone sees the big shoots of the year, the American Vogue covers, the Rihanna and Beyoncé shoots. The trick is to find a great image that might have been overlooked. At the same time, it has to be an image that has resonance, that can stand on its own and say something – about the photographer, about where it appeared, about when it appeared.

The Mario Testino I chose is one of Gisele from Vogue Paris’ “Legends” issue, in October. It’s simple, but dramatic, very tightly cropped, a bit fierce, and the blue is a very specific tone that has echoed through Testino’s work over the years.

For Demarchelier, I selected an image that’s not typical – Anna Ewers in front of a white backdrop, in a wood, published in Vogue China in August. It’s got a slightly awkward feel – Anna doesn’t look quite steady on her feet – and the fact that it’s not in a studio against a classic grey Patrick Demarchelier background is odd. But it’s arresting. And beautiful. And it’s important not to be predictable, even when you’ve been shooting for Vogue for a quarter of a century.

Showing the right models is also vital. Anna Ewers is CN’s golden girl this year, with about 19 shoots in Vogues and W across the world. For the boys, I wanted Ton Heukles and Henrik Fallenius, but given the story I was trying to tell I ended up with Sean O’Pry and the now-bearded Mark Vanderloo instead. I can live with that.

The only reason I could do this (I added travel and interiors shots too) was because I have worked for this company on and off for 17 years, on different titles, in different markets. So I know what I’m looking for.

Once upon a time, this would have been a job for a senior picture editor. But I don’t have one of those, and frankly they’re getting scarcer all the time. 

In the last year, three of the best, most experienced, picture editors/directors of photography I know have been made redundant. (Not all from the same company.) It seems to be a money-saving thing. As the publishing world “goes digital,” funds are diverted to hiring growth hackers and data analysts, away from creatives. 

Sadly, lack of appreciation for picture editors is nothing new. As an art director, I have argued for years that my picture editor is my right hand. People who should know better say, “You can get an assistant/an intern/the editor’s PA to help source images.” What they overlook is what a great picture editor brings to a project: experience, knowledge, contacts, resourcefulness, and a strong, original eye. 

Before the Internet existed, magazines syndicated less material, so there was less obvious work for a pictures department to do. Post-Internet, people think you can find every image you need on Google. 

But knowing where to look is one thing. Knowing what to look for is a very different skill.