livebooks blog

"Hay Bales" © Brian Kosoff

At the end of my last post I had decided to close my studio. I open this post with the admission that I’m glad I did! I still keep in touch with many of my old clients and studio-mates, but talking to them about work is not a cheery walk down memory lane — it’s a bummer. Fewer and fewer photographers have their own studios. The majority share, but in cramped conditions. Now you’ll find five photographers sharing 2,000 square feet: a ratio likely to create stress and conflict. Some photographers I know shoot family portraits for the general public, something that would have been embarrassing for them to pursue ten years ago.

My work is much more solitary now and I miss the camaraderie of other photographers, assistants, and stylists (and the catered lunches!) that I had in the studio. Sometimes I don’t speak with anyone in person, except a motel clerk, for months. I joke that when I get back home from one of my trips, I hand my wife a credit card and ask for a non-smoking room. Still, I consider myself very fortunate. On an almost daily basis I get to see some truly magnificent sights and I get to drink some of the best and worst road coffee out there. (Best: ANY Scandinavian country. Worst: the U.S.).

"Dune Silhouette" © Brian Kosoff

As for my landscape photography, it’s still a work in progress. I‘m relatively new to it, and while it didn’t take too long to master the technical aspects, I’m still trying to figure out why I’m drawn to certain subjects. It took me a while to realize that my fondness for a minimal style, often having a center oriented composition and a high-key or white background, was a direct result of having spent more than 20 years shooting minimal, center oriented, often white background product photographs. I guess that even when you change directions, you still carry some of the momentum from your earlier motion.

Change is inevitable and it’s often feared, but I consider my change from advertising to landscape photography an opportunity. For me now, my work is more satisfying than ever, and life is simpler. That’s a change for the better.

On the job at Cape Crozier, Antarctica. Photo by Chris Linder, WHOI

When I wrote the “Live from the Poles” proposal with the WHOI Director of Communications, this was our justification and plan for the embedded media team:

“Insightful writing and compelling images are the heart of every successful publication. The core of this project is support for a professional science writer and field photographer to join each expedition. Scientists are frequently working around the clock when in the field, and have little time to describe their fieldwork with written dispatches and photography. They also cannot be expected to have the training required to produce professional photographs and video clips. To ensure that the groundbreaking research conducted during this historical period [International Polar Year] is properly documented, support for the writer/photographer team is critical to this proposal. The team will be responsible for filing daily dispatches including science updates, logistical challenges, team member profiles, and life at sea (or on the ice). The team will also coordinate real-time phone patches from PIs [Principal Investigators] in the field to museum audiences, National Public Radio stations, Scholastic magazine, and manage student Q&As with scientists. An experienced shore-based team at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) will manage Web updates from the field, and prepare publication of photo essays and articles in Oceanus magazine, which receives 30,000 visits online each month.”

To summarize, we were cognizant of the lack of quality photographs coming out of scientific expeditions and saw an opportunity to assemble a professional team to tell visual stories from the field. The trick was to do it daily from some of the most remote places in the world.

So why photograph science fieldwork? There has never been a more important time to understand how our planet works. Glaciers and Arctic pack ice are shrinking at an unprecedented rate. Rising temperatures are causing profound shifts in ecosystems. In the October issue of Scientific American, John Holdren, a Harvard physicist and President-elect Obama’s White House science adviser, wrote that “the ongoing disruption of the earth’s climate by man-made greenhouse gases is already well beyond dangerous and is careening toward completely unmanageable.” According to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, a consensus of the world’s scientific experts, we (human beings) are causing unprecedented changes to our climate.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a doom and gloom kind of guy. Despite the challenges that rising global temperatures will present in the coming years, I believe in human ingenuity and resilience. And scientists are out there in some of the harshest places on our planet, like the Greenland Ice Sheet and Antarctica, collecting data on past and present changes so we can better predict future conditions.

I’m an idealist; I see science as a noble, selfless profession. By photographing scientists in the field, I am hoping to communicate a deeper understanding and respect for the scientific process and profession, and to urge people to use scientific knowledge of the world to help sustain it.

• The Guardian reported Monday that after ratings for the Academy Awards last year plunged to a historic low, producers asked key actors and presenters not to enter via the red carpet this year so viewers would have to watch the ceremony to see their gowns. Not surprisingly, the photographers who make their living from photos of Oscar gowns were pissed. The ratings this year jumped 13 percent — and in typical over-simplified fashion, we bet the academy attributes that to this new policy (not the fact that the styling was classy and classic this year, the presenter was hot, or even, that people need Hollywood distractions more when the economy’s in the toilet), and keeps it.

• In an official announcement released via the NPPA website, Pete Souza, the recently-appointed official White House photographer, filled out his team with Chuck Kennedy as assistant director of the White House photography office and Lawrence Jackson and Samantha Appleton as official photographers. Kennedy’s precisely executed inauguration picture made front covers of hundreds of newspapers all over the world. Jackson was most recently a staff photographer at the Associated Press in Washington DC, and Appleton, named one of the “30 Under 30” by Photo District News, is known for her projects on Iraq and Africa. Souza said she will be primarily assigned to cover the First Lady. We wonder if it’s common practice to have a woman photographer specifically assigned to the first lady. Anyone know?

• After months of speculations, Rocky Mountain News owner E.W. Scripps announced yesterday that the publication will cease operations after its last edition today (February 27, 2009). The paper, which has been serving Denver for 150 years, has won 3 Pulitzer Prizes in photography since 2000. Sadly this is likely the first in a long line of newspaper closings; the San Francisco Chronicle also announced this week that it is looking for buyers in a bid to save the paper. We can’t decide if it’s poetic justice or just sad irony that the best reporting on the closing was done by the paper’s own staff via Twitter.

• Defense Secretary Robert Gates has finally lifted the 18-year-old photography ban, now allowing caskets arriving at Dover airforce base in Delware to be photographed, as long as families of the deceased agree to it. The Dover Air Force Base is the military’s largest mortuary facility, where bodies of American troops are sent before traveling to hometowns. We hope this is part of the wave of change apparently sweeping Washington. If those photos had been allowed earlier, maybe we wouldn’t have had to wait so long for that change.

Here and below: Alan's images from the floor of the DNC. © Alan Chin

At the DNC, typically we would talk in the morning. Michael was there with his son, who works for Talking Points Memo, so the two of them were in what’s called the big tent, which is the press tent for bloggers. They were live-blogging the event and keeping an eye on everything going on, and they would text or call if they saw something I should cover. I would do the same for them. In the morning we would discuss things on the calendar, and I would spend the day doing those things. It meant not sleeping a lot because the big speakers were in the evening. We were working from 9am to midnight. We would meet in the evening and discuss how to we were going to put everything up on the site.

Basically I said to Michael, I trust you as an editor. It’s your site. If I file a picture to you, it means I’m willing to have you use it. Obviously you can’t file every picture. And actually I think it was a real learning experience for him as an editor. Because at the beginning he was using every picture I sent him. And I said, you don’t have to do that. Nor do I think we’re serving ourselves well by doing that. If we do four pictures or three pictures or one picture, sometimes it’s a lot more powerful than doing a 15- or 20-picture slideshow. So we talked about that a lot, and he got more comfortable being a kind of editor. And of course he’s wearing so many hats at once and ideally he would have a bigger team; there would be someone who’s thinking about aesthetics, someone else doing analysis, someone else doing really technical stuff — and then at that point you really are getting to be like the New York Times. You’re really starting to emulate how traditional media works.