Making the cut—part 3

This is the final installment of my interview with Sarah Weissman, who worked as a photo editor and producer in New York for many years. Her last position before coming to Los Angeles was as a photography producer at Condé Nast Portfolio magazine.

Portfolio was conceived to reinvent the business magazine. What brought your there?

Sarah Weissman: I heard about Portfolio from a photographer I know, and thought that it was a truly great idea. In a sense, everything can be reported from a business and financial perspective, regardless of the story. As crass as this may sound, money is at the bottom of most stories we read—in art, in media, in culture, in government and politics. It ties people, organizations and even countries together. I love financial journalism. It’s like a parallel track running alongside many of the other things we read and know a lot about. Financial transactions are the underpinnings of many stories, and I find it all really interesting. It explains many things.

How much editorial or creative freedom were you given at Portfolio?

SW: Magazines are very different from newspapers. In some ways, magazines have something different at stake because they stick around for so long—a week, a month. They can’t be perishable in the way a newspaper can be. In a magazine, the very top editors make many of the final choices, and each page is studied and often revised several times by the editor-in-chief before going out the door. In a newspaper, there isn’t time for the same degree of scrutiny of each page while on deadline, so photo editors make daily picture choices in collaboration with the section editors they’re working with. There’s a different kind of autonomy in a newspaper, in part because of the relentlessness of the closing schedule.

What new skills or experiences did you gain from working at a magazine that weren’t possible at a prestigious newspaper?

SW: I learned an enormous amount that would have not been possible in a newsroom, in part because I had the opportunity to travel a great deal, put the entire production together and be present for the shoot. It’s a different way of collaborating with photographers, I think. If I’m there, I can really see all of the challenges of the assignment—getting four cover options in 12 minutes with a reluctant subject, for example—as well as see solutions that might not have been obvious from a distance.

Apart from being present at the shoots, how different was your collaboration with editorial photographers than with photojournalists?

SW: Magazines can be so expensive to produce. I think that the experience of putting together large photo crews, leaving literally nothing to chance and having contingencies for every possible scenario, taught me a great deal. It’s very different from strict news photography, where a photographer makes an effort to have no impact on the outcome of a situation. At a very well-produced magazine like Portfolio, a photographer has total impact over their environment, and tries to ensure that they capture what everyone is looking for. I think that this leads to a different kind of creativity: planning in advance and having a lot of control over the feeling in a picture, rather than making pictures happen without setting anything up. In this way, I was in contact with photographers in a much different way. We would go over all the details of a shoot prior and during, and have a “plan” that we would try to adhere to.

The photography, publishing and journalism businesses are going through massive changes. What can you take away from the experience at Portfolio that will prepare you for the next phase of your career?

SW: Portfolio taught me a completely different approach to presenting visual information, and I learned an enormous amount about how to create beautiful and lush pictures that tell a story. It’s like having a few more tools in the shed. The skills required to organize a large crew and pull ideas out of nowhere, while banishing obstructions to the process are valuable things to take away. And they’re just part of always trying to see the big picture of how things are made. I learned a lot more about what photographers go through while working, which I had always wanted to see more of. A more versatile skill set can only be a good thing, right?