Interview: Rob Haggart of A Photo Editor

Today’s interview is with Rob Haggart, the man behind the ever popular blog, A Photo Editor. All images are screenshots taken from Rob’s site, and were directed by Rob, NOT taken by him.

Jake Stangel: You write a blog that I would assume gets thousands of hits a day. As your readership increases over time and you attract a wider spectrum/base of visitors, has it changed how you approach your blog as a whole? Do you write for a certain type of reader profile, or do you just write whatever the hell you goddamned want?

Rob Haggart: Actually, I don’t look at the numbers anymore. It started to plateau a while back with many tens of thousands of monthly visitors and I made a decision to not bring in any advertising so I got rid of sitemeter (I still have google analytics but haven’t logged in for months). Anyway, once the growth period is over and you’ve found your audience tracking isn’t all that necessary. Also, it can be really distracting watching the numbers and I started to feel a lot of pressure to write all the time. It’s really helped to not pay attention to numbers.

I really only write about what interests me. That certainly has changed plenty since I left working full time as a Photography Director from being concerned mostly with how PE’s deal with Editors, Art Directors and Photographers to looking at the industry as a whole and interviewing people who are busy shaping the industry now. One thing that I think makes my blog unique is that I’m not a photographer. I love working with photographers, I love photography and know a lot about the business from being in it for a while but I don’t know how to take pictures.  I can fake it pretty good from being on set with photographers, absorbing what’s going on and I ask questions but mostly it’s just so I can explain something I want to a photographer. I think the best blogs are about reacting to the news and the environment so I don’t really plan anything out beforehand. If I find myself in contact with to a photographer I’ve worked with before or a Photo Editor I will just ask them for an interview.

JS: A lot of photographers have blogs, and it definitely gives art buyers, PEs, lurkers, etc. a chance to peek into the mind of a shooter that he/she has interest in. Blogs are also a great place to show rough or unedited cuts of an upcoming project, outtakes from a shoot, iphone shots, or even party snapshots. Have you ever been thrown off if one’s personal work, say from a photographer’s blog, doesn’t really match up with his/her “real” website work? Do party snapshots have to represent the photographer, or are you able to pass over the mismatch? Have you ever not been able ‘to get over it’?

RH: Well, purely from a hiring point of view I probably don’t want to peek into your mind and I certainly don’t want to see pictures that don’t reflect your skills as a photographer. When I visit a photographers site to make a hiring decision I want to see the pictures that will land on my desk. I made a statement awhile back on the blog when I was still working as a PE “Everyone takes crappy photos, the best photographers don’t let me see them.” When photographers don’t edit their work it only serves to remind you that they’re capable of making really bad pictures too and maybe next time that’s what you’ll be getting. On the other hand I do think that blogs are an amazing way to build and strengthen communities. And, in the case where photographers are communicating with each other, trying things out and in general working to build a better industry I say go for it. 99.9% of the people looking to give you a job will never visit your blog. That will eventually change but for now blogs are not a part of the hiring decision.

JS: I was talking to Lindley Warren, who runs a great site called the photographic dictionary, and we were talking about all these great, highly conceptual photo sites, such as collectives (like the Exposure Project or Fjord), ongoing group projects, quote-unquote photo ‘hubs’, and some of the more involved blogs out there. They’re so potent, so helpful, so full of new approaches about the marriage of internet and photography. Totally exciting.

Lindley and I were talking about how all of these sites are a labor of love, and that many of them are incredibly time-intensive. I’m unaware of any ‘grassroots’ (maybe that’s the problem?) sites that are pulling in money (besides strobist which is a different story)… There’s a very respectable argument that labors of love, at their core, are wholly fulfilling and are incredibly rewarding, and that some sites happily exist for this purpose alone (blogs especially). However, Lindley and I were discussing how it’d be nice to get something back out of such a big personal investment to help defray the time/hosting/etc. costs.

I’m curious, given your business savvy, if you can foresee or offer how such sites can turn their popularity and readership into some form of legit income that doesn’t alienate a very corporately jaded artistic community? We can’t exactly stick a bunch of banner ads on our sites and call it a day. It kind of reminded me of how web developers are constantly searching for new variations on profitable social media sites; do you see any strong parallels and/or opportunities within the photo community?

RH: Sure, there will be plenty of opportunities to make money but we are in the very infancy of figuring out how that can work. Coming from the magazine business the audience always came first. Way before the advertisers and the big bucks happened, a loyal and somewhat defined audience had to emerge. Anything that starts with the advertising first is destined to fail. If you want to advertise to someone you have to gain their trust first. The real beauty of what’s about to happen online is the low cost for advertisers to get in the game. How much money do you need to make a project like that worthwhile? $70,000? That’s how much one page of advertising in one issue of a decent size magazine costs. Don’t you think the right advertiser would be willing to pay that much for a years worth of exposure.

So much money is spent trying to reach people in such a passive way that if there was an opportunity to participate with a community and actually engage people advertisers will eventually snap these opportunities up. The problem right now is advertisers know the old way works and are unsure if the new way is as effective of exactly how much should be spent on this new medium so the risk prevents them from just going for it. If I wanted to make it big in the photography world I would start a firm that specialized in media buying online and I would put every single cool blog, community and interesting idea into my offering and come up with a million different ways for them to spend their money reaching people online and help support the development of these communities.

JS: Of all the photo communities (in it’s loosest sense) that exist on the web, big and small (flickr/photoshelter to… small), which one has the most promising concept and following? Have you see any concepts on the horizon that might turn Internet photography on its head, or rework how we look/sell/consider images in a major way?

RH: The Big Picture. It’s one of the first websites that exclusively uses photography to reach consumers. A site created by the IT guy at a newspaper in Boston beat the pants off every major media organization in the world. I could scream every time I click on the view the sideshow button and a little tiny slideshow box comes up about the size of an 1/8 page image in a magazine. Do you media people even fucking know anything about slideshows? People used to project that shit on their wall, 8 feet high. It’s completely idiotic the way people treat photography online.

I also think what license stream has done with one click image sales where you attach a license to the actual image and then it can go live wherever it wants. And, google hosting the life picture collection is a big deal. I have to say the biggest problem in photography is finding pictues to buy. It could be a whole lot easier. I would buy from photographers directly if I could find the right image and license it quickly.

JS: Working off of this idea, do you think we’ll be seeing more enterprising photographers who are not just in the business of taking photos, but being their own kind-of self run entities- proactively producing their own stories and projects (like Todd Selby), making their own books, creating their own multi-faceted startups? What other types of exciting personal enterprise have you seen, or wish to see? Does the concept of a photographer being more than a photographer excite you or make you weary (or something else)

RH: Sure, photographers that are immersed in a culture are really setup for this kind of thing and I think it’s brilliant. I think any photographers that are very singular in subject matter can attract a following and build a fan base. Then not only will the photographer be hired to shoot that stuff for agencies, magazines and newspapers because of the audience they bring with them and their perceived expertise they can also sell merchandise to those people. Once you have a loyal audience who trusts you this opens the door for advertisers to come in. A couple of those one page ads that just disappeared from a magazine can go a long way with a community like this.

JS: On a quick related note, do you think there’s a parallel between photographic talent and business sense?

RH: Do you mean people lacking talent can make up for it with business sense? There is all kinds of photography out there and the majority of it is just a job like any other. If you run a good business and can take decent pictures you will get work. If you’re supremely talented and don’t have much business sense you will get plenty of work as well. So, what’s that? Inversely proportional I think.

JS: You currently live in Durango, Colorado. Was it relatively easy for you to make the transition from New York City- arguably the epicenter of American photography- to such a comparatively remote location? If so, was it because you were relatively established in your industry by the time you left the city? Did you have any fear or dropping off the map when you moved 2,000 miles away from New York? Are you where you want to be right now, both literally and figuratively?

RH: It turned out to be relatively easy but when I initially made the decision to move to Durango I fully expected to drop off the map. I had no idea that the Internet was so powerful and certainly didn’t think I’d be writing about photography from my house in the middle of nowhere. It’s pretty shocking to think that I’ve been in touch with more photo editors since moving here than I ever was working in New York. I’m exactly where I’d hoped to end up some day. I still work in the industry, I’m building websites and innovating ways photographers reach people and I go skiing, biking and rafting whenever I want. Let’s hope that’s the future for everyone.

JS: I assume Internet communication plays a pretty large part of your day-to-day life. Could you have made the move away from New York City ten years ago, or has email, comprehensive websites, blog surfing, even video been the gateway to making this happen?

RH: No, I couldn’t have done it even 2 years ago. Without blogs I’d be waiting for PDN to arrive in my mailbox each month to see what’s happening in the photography industry. It wasn’t that long ago when all business was done on the phone or in person. Using email as a primary means of communication is relatively new. We used to make all our hiring decisions based on a photographers book. It’ only been in the last couple years that everyone finally has a decent website. The websites used to be so bad.

JS: Synthesizing the previous two questions: what advice can you give to serious photographers that live outside of NYC and LA? In this day and age, what remains the biggest barrier to entry if you live outside these cities? Are personal visits to NYC and LA going to go the way of hard-copy promos and cold calls (and become replaced with video chats)?

RH: When you live and work in New York you can’t help but be influenced by the NY aesthetic in photography. It’s everywhere and it influences your hiring decisions and the decisions of your superiors. You don’t realize it out west but many of the people making decisions about photography have lived in worked in New York City all their lives. So, that leads to hiring local photographers and some of the best photographers in the world live in NY. I think it will always be a struggle for photographers living somewhere else to be considered first for shoots when there’s budget for travel. A decent analogy would be to ask yourself why you hire a local accountant to do your taxes. Why don’t you hire one in Dallas?

JS: You seem to have no shortage of advice for the publishing industry, and often have a lot of disbelief for their slow transition to efficient and rewarding electronic storytelling. I haven’t heard much explicit advice for photographers about how they can confront the same issues publishers face, in part because they are obviously not the publication. But as multimedia providers, will photographer’s roles change as the publishing industry rapidly transforms? Do you see/hear photographers being asked to approach stories differently nowadays?

RH: I’ve made a few posts about photographers not taking the initiative to try and help publishers see the value in photography online. The problem is that the people who can have the most impact are comfortable with the way it’s working and not willing to take a chance and forge a new path for the industry. Same thing in publishing. The publishers who can lead are just trying to cover their asses. The recession will change that. It will force everyone to start taking chances because they have nothing to lose anymore. We should see a rapid changes in 2009 from publishers and photographers. As far as predicting what those changes will bring I can’t really say other than I strongly believe that photographers who can navigate the online world will be incredibly valuable to media organizations. That was my original reason for starting a blog. I figured if I was a Photo Editor who also knew how to blog it would make me that much more valuable to publishers.

JS: Thanks so much for your time Rob. I’ve been just dying to know: are you a dog or a cat person?

RH: Golden Retriever.