28.06.09
Fiona Hayes - Creative Director, Phillips de Pury,
The right advice and inside track on how to get commissioned
You’ve been working in the publishing industry in the UK for quite some time, could you give me some background as to how you started out and how your career progressed?
I went to art college in Dublin, where I grew up, and originally I wanted to be an illustrator.
But in my final year I spent part of the summer in New York, visiting the art departments of magazines like Newsweek and Esquire. It was incredibly exciting, and completely changed my mind about my future. I became determined to work in magazine design.
One of the people I spent time with was Derek Ungless at Rolling Stone. He’d started his career under David Driver at Radio Times in the ‘70s. So when I graduated, and moved to London, the first thing I did was call Radio Times. They hired me as a freelancer immediately (I was lucky: it was a big art department and they always needed freelancers.) Everything progressed from there.
How involved in commissioning photography are you when working as an art director in the UK?
Very! From fashion to houses, food to beauty, still lifes to portraits, I’ve commissioned most kinds of photographers and art directed a huge range of shoots. I particularly love working on set with photographers. As creative director of Eve, I regularly flew to New York and Los Angeles to photograph covers and celebrities.
But I am just as happy to spend a morning in the Condé Nast studio, as I did today, with my friend Mattias shooting a story with Playmobil figures!
You obviously have a love and passion for photography because whilst working at House & Garden you set up DayFour. Can you tell me a little bit about how and why this came about?
I’d been looking at photographers’ portfolios for a long time and was struck by the fact that their personal work was often much more interesting than what they were commissioned to do. Like many designers, I’d always fantasized about setting up my own magazine.
So, when I had a couple of months between leaving Eve and starting at H&G, I started playing with this idea for a magazine about non-commissioned photography: the work people do for love rather than money. And it came together so quickly and so smoothly it was incredible. Everything – the name, the format, the layouts – just flowed out as if I’d been working on it for years. I guess my subconscious had been!
How has DayFour been received by photographers and the industry?
The wonderful, gratifying, thing is that people love it. I expected to have to convince photographers to let me run their stories but in fact the opposite has happened. I have far more submissions than I can possibly run: they come from around the world, and the standard is extremely high. It gets great reviews too.
You are obviously in touch with a wide spectrum of photographers across the UK and Europe. What is their general feeling about the state of the industry?
There is a feeling that the volume of work is down and rates are not up, but I’d have to say this is not a recent development.
I know that certain publishing companies have not put their rates up for years:
it’s only their excuses for this that have changed. Recently, a talented young German fashion photographer friend told me that he’s been struggling in New York, Paris and Berlin for his whole career, and nothing has changed in 2009.
Meanwhile, I noticed on Facebook that one very successful British photographer was complaining about how his life nowadays is nothing but work…
So nothing changes: if you’re already doing ok, you’re probably still doing ok, and if you’re struggling, you’re still struggling.
One thing that some people had predicted about four or five years ago was that, with digital making photography so much more democratic, there would be a huge influx of youngsters and even amateurs into the market, making it harder for established photographers to make a living.
That hasn’t happened, and finding the right photographer for a job is really no simpler than it ever was.
You’re now working in Munich whilst continuing with DayFour. Has working there changed your perception of photographers and photography?
It has changed my perception of German photographers. In the UK, we forget that Germany is a much bigger country with a proportionally bigger publishing industry. Finding great fashion, reportage, beauty, travel and portrait photographers here is easy.
But what is less easy is finding the right person in the right place. I don’t think a British photographer living in Brighton, say, would ever make a fuss about traveling to London or Liverpool or Edinburgh to do a job.
But in Germany, the business is decentralized. A photographer is as likely to be based in Hamburg as Berlin as Frankfurt as Stuttgart… It makes it much trickier to set up a shoot in, say, Munich if your first-choice photographer is based in Hamburg. And it’s a real nightmare if you want to set up a big studio-based still-life story.
The daily effect of this is that, on a commercial magazine, you often simply don’t get to hire your first choice. That’s frustrating.
Have you found that photographic budget expectations from photographers differ greatly in Germany from the UK?
Not at all. If you work for an international media company, the rates tend to be broadly similar.
Do you feel that there is such a thing as national characteristics in the approach and style of work produced internationally?
Difficult question. I find it very hard to generalize. But nowadays I think there is less national quirkiness, certainly in photographic styles, than one might imagine. Especially in western Europe and the US, we’re all seeing the same things, we’re all looking at the Internet, everyone’s on Flickr…
What do you look for in a photographer and his/her body of work?
Apart from talent, commitment, consistency, intelligence and reliability?!
I’d say I want someone who (a) knows what they’re doing and (b) has confidence in their own abilities and understanding. It’s not uncommon for very talented young photographers, with great personal work, to completely lose their way as soon as they get commercial commissions. My picture editors in Munich have a habit of asking me, when they commission someone, whether they should provide the photographer with an example of something similar from the magazine.
I always say absolutely not, because I choose a photographer for their own work, not because they can copy somebody else’s.
With all your experience can you spare a little advice for a freelance photographer hoping to get commissioned today in the UK or in Europe?
Have a website that has lots of representative work on it, that is very quick to load and very straightforward.
Art directors don’t have time to sit around waiting for whizzy graphics, or to figure out how to move to the next image – and remember: we might not even have the latest version of Flash on our Macs.
Make sure the work you produce on commission is like the work on your website. If your website has pictures of people relaxed and laughing, but the person whose portrait you’re commissioned to do just looks pissed off, your art director is going to be pissed off too. Of course your website will have your best work on it, but it shouldn’t be full of flukes. Ask beforehand what they expect and why they picked you for this job. Hopefully it won’t be because you’re the only person who answered the phone today and they’re desperate.
A good art director will always trust their photographer, and let the photographer have some freedom to experiment. But make sure you’ve got the image you were told to get before you play around with other ideas. I’ve been commissioning photography for nearly two decades, and it still never ceases to amaze me how often the one thing you didn’t think of is the one thing a photographer will do. Which can be fabulous. Or not.
Last but not least, don’t follow the example of a photographer I shall call Mr X. A week ago, he sent us pictures from a shoot, from which I chose one to run.
This morning, looking at his website I saw images from our shoot – our shoot which has not been published yet – including a MUCH BETTER picture that he never showed us! Cue a round of furious phone calls, presses screeching to a halt, and one photographer who won’t be getting the call from this office again in a hurry.
www.dayfour.info
- Average Article Rating 4 Stars
-
Your Rating
Login Required!
Sorry - You must be a registered user & logged in to rate this.
Login | Register
Back to Categories