3.16/The Lived Worlds/The Magazine

Photography and Image Culture, 1989–2001

The Photograph No One Had to Approve

Demi Moore secured exactly that courtesy, and only by telephone. Tina Brown, then the editor of Vanity Fair, had commissioned Annie Leibovitz to photograph Moore, seven months pregnant with her second daughter, in a clothed portrait; the picture that became the August 1991 cover was one Leibovitz brought back from the same session instead — Moore turned in profile, one arm across her chest, one hand beneath the curve of her belly. Brown decided on the spot that it was the cover. Leibovitz telephoned Moore to ask; no approval was owed her, but she was asked, and she agreed. Walmart told the magazine’s circulation department it would not stock the issue, calling the image indecent.¹ The result was one of the most reproduced magazine covers of the period and a demonstration of how far a photograph on a newsstand could travel past the newsstand itself.

Leibovitz had photographed for Rolling Stone since 1970 and moved to Vanity Fair in 1983, and by the start of the decade she was the dominant figure in American celebrity portraiture — the maker of the image other magazines were trying to reproduce. The production behind a Leibovitz cover bore no resemblance to the one-photographer-one-subject model of an earlier portrait tradition. A shoot arrived with assistants, lighting rigs, stylists, hair and makeup; for a single portrait she might reserve several houses, hotel rooms, and trailers while the location was settled. The picture that read as a single caught moment was the product of a day’s controlled construction. The effect on the rest of editorial photography was gravitational. Through the decade the celebrity portrait grew more conceptual and more expensive, and the covers editors were conditioned to want were productions of this kind.

That pull created a standing tension for anyone in the same profession doing a different kind of work. A photograph made under a photographer’s control in a studio and a photograph seized in a half-second on a street in a war were being judged, in the same layout meetings, against a single aesthetic expectation that the first kind had set. The image economy of the period ran on that confusion — between the photograph as something composed and the photograph as something witnessed — and on the fact that the people who made the pictures rarely controlled what happened to them afterward.

The Other Photograph

The counter-tradition had its own hierarchy of names, and at the top of it in the field was James Nachtwey. A member of Magnum Photos, he documented the same events the era’s foreign reportage was built around — Somalia in 1992, Bosnia, Rwanda in 1994, Chechnya, later Kosovo — and he won the World Press Photo award for the Somali famine in 1992 and again for Rwanda in 1994, and the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal five times across his career.² He worked close to his subjects, in black and white, on Tri-X film pushed hard for speed, applying classical compositional principles to catastrophe without letting the composition turn the suffering into an abstraction, and he printed his own work in the darkroom to get from it what he wanted. His collections Deeds of War, from the decade’s start, and Inferno, from its end, stood as the visual record of the same events the era’s foreign reportage was built around. His pictures ran at whatever size an editor granted them, and the size was the argument: a full page from Rwanda struck with a force a quarter-page from the same take did not.

The lineage behind that work reached back through Henri Cartier-Bresson and the idea of the decisive moment — the single frame in which a scene’s geometry and its human fact coincided — and its instrument was often the Leica, the quiet rangefinder that a photojournalist could carry where the period’s workhorse — the autofocus Nikon F4 that the wire services and most assignment photographers used — was too loud and too conspicuous. It was the camera of unguarded work, and carrying one on assignment was itself a statement about the kind of photograph a photographer meant to make.

The decade’s sharpest argument about what a serious photograph should be attached to Sebastião Salgado. His Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age, published by Aperture in 1993, gathered black-and-white photographs of manual labor across six continents, and his pictures of the gold miners of Serra Pelada in Brazil — thousands of mud-covered men on ladders in an open pit — were composed with a formal grandeur that recalled painting more than reportage.³ The unease that such grandeur produced had reached print before the book appeared. Writing in The New Yorker in 1991, as Salgado’s reputation crested on the Serra Pelada pictures, the critic Ingrid Sischy argued that his beauty was a moral evasion: that finding grace in the forms of people in agony risked producing admiration where the subject demanded action. “Beauty is a call to admiration, not to action,” she wrote.⁴ Whether a formally beautiful image of poverty served the poor or the photographer’s reputation was the period’s central photojournalism argument, and a working photographer was expected to have a position on it.

There was a counterweight to the celebrity idiom from inside the magazine world itself. When Richard Avedon became the first staff photographer in The New Yorker’s history in 1992, he set his purpose against the culture the celebrity cover had built: “What I hope to do is photograph people of accomplishment, not celebrity, and help define the difference once again.”⁵ His portraits of writers and scientists and political figures carried the same formal severity as his fashion work, turned onto subjects chosen for substance. That such a program had to be announced at all measured how far the balance had already tipped.

The Image That Paid for the Others

In 1992 the photographer Herb Ritts shot a campaign for Calvin Klein underwear that paired the rapper Marky Mark — Mark Wahlberg — with the young model Kate Moss.⁶ The pictures borrowed the surface of documentary photography: grainy, available-light, bodies that looked recorded rather than arranged. They ran in magazines, on television, and on billboards, and they made both figures famous. What the campaign also demonstrated was the difference scale made. On a forty-foot wall — the kind that rose over Sixth Avenue at Forty-second Street, or the west side of Seventh Avenue in the upper Forties — above the pedestrians and the traffic moving toward Midtown offices, a black-and-white image of two near-naked young people stopped being a picture a passerby chose to look at and became an environment moved through. The advertising image at that size was not consumed; it was inhabited.

The campaign carried a fact its surface did not show. One of its subjects was a teenage model photographed by a celebrity photographer for a major brand — a commercial transaction whose terms the younger party was in no position to set, wearing the appearance of spontaneity over an industrial production. That gap between what the image looked like and what had made it recurred across the decade’s most powerful advertising, and it reached a legal edge in 1995, when Calvin Klein’s jeans campaign — shot by Steven Meisel, its young models filmed being questioned in a wood-paneled basement got up to evoke amateur pornography — drew a public backlash and an investigation by the Justice Department into whether the imagery violated federal child-pornography law. The models proved to be of age and no charge followed, but Klein pulled the advertising within days.⁷

For a magazine, the imagery was not only a subject; it was a source of revenue. A publication of any standing ran Calvin Klein advertising, and the advertising pages paid for the editorial pages on which serious photography appeared. A magazine could cover the Klein controversy with full independence and bank the Klein ad revenue in the same issue, and the arrangement was a structural fact of the business that no one on an editorial floor was comfortable naming aloud.

The Price of a Candid

Below the commissioned photograph and the advertising image ran a third market, in pictures nobody had assigned. The celebrity-candid economy in New York operated through picture agencies — Rex Features, Splash, the New York desks of London houses — that licensed images to publications, and many of its most aggressive shooters were British, trained in a tabloid culture that had run this trade since the early 1960s. The prices were negotiated case by case and never transparent: a genuinely exclusive frame of a major star could run to five figures, an unremarkable shot of a lesser one to a few hundred dollars, the figure set each time by the subject’s fame, the picture’s exclusivity, and the buyer’s need. The work was done on speculation, without assignment, at the places the famous could be found: The Odeon downtown and, as the decade went on, Nobu and Balthazar; the residential blocks of the Upper East and Upper West Sides where certain addresses were known; the arrivals halls at Kennedy and LaGuardia; the Meatpacking District’s clubs by mid-decade. The relationship between the freelancers who did this and the photographers who shot on assignment for magazines was one of mutual contempt — the second group holding the first beyond the ethical line, the first holding the second economically naïve.

The reckoning came at the end of a tunnel in Paris. Diana, Princess of Wales, died in the early hours of August 31, 1997, of injuries from a crash in the Pont de l’Alma underpass; her car had been pursued by photographers on motorcycles, and her driver, Henri Paul, was found to have been intoxicated.⁸ A Gallup poll taken afterward in Britain and the United States found more than seventy percent of respondents holding both the driver and the photographers “extremely” or “very” responsible for the death, and British tabloid sales — the primary market for candid celebrity images — fell sharply in the months that followed.⁹ Britain’s Press Complaints Commission was pressed to review its code of practice.

What the death did not do was end the market. Pictures of the famous kept their value; the economy adjusted rather than collapsed. What changed was the language around it — the public acknowledgment that a market for pursuit had produced the conditions for the crash — and the pressure on editors to draw a line between coverage they would defend and tactics they would not. The underlying demand that priced a candid at five figures was intact the following year.

Who Owned the Meaning

For a photographer, placement was the whole career, and the positions ran in a fixed order of prestige. The cover was one image an issue, the magazine’s face on the newsstand, chosen by the editor. Below it came the well opener, the full-bleed spread that began a feature across two pages with no text on them. Then the interior of the well — full-page, half-page, the size setting the force, the same frame reading as reportage at a quarter page and as an argument at full. At the bottom was the small print, the single-column image beside a news item, published and effectively invisible. Where an editor placed a photograph was a verdict on what the magazine believed a reader would stop for. A foreign story that had cost a correspondent and a photographer weeks in the field could run deep inside an issue, on a late page, across from a fashion spread — not killed, not held, simply placed where the magazine’s estimate of its readers put it. The placement was itself the judgment, and it was made after the photographer’s work was done.

The caption made the second judgment. A published photograph was never only a photograph; it was a photograph and the words set under it, and those words could narrow an image, redirect it, or contradict it. A picture of a woman carrying a child through a shelled street could be captioned to identify and locate her, leaving the image open, or captioned to instruct the reader whom to blame — converting a photograph into evidence for a settled argument, collapsing the ambiguity that had made it worth looking at. Who wrote those words was a question of power. At most magazines the caption came from a photo editor or, increasingly, from a researcher who had not been present at the picture, and the photographer had no contractual right to approve or change it. She might first see the caption in the printed issue.

That absence of approval rights was fixed in law before either judgment — placement, caption — was made. Some celebrity subjects still negotiated de facto approval as a condition of access, because a photographer who displeased them lost the next sitting; the refugee photographed through a fence and the mourner in a ruined street negotiated nothing.

The Consolidation

The market that licensed the world’s photographs was being assembled into a few hands across the second half of the decade. Getty Images was founded in 1995 by Mark Getty and Jonathan Klein, and its first act was to buy the stock agency Tony Stone Images. The merger with the digital-stock company PhotoDisc that gave the firm its lasting name was struck in 1997 and completed the following year. In 1997 Getty also acquired the Liaison Agency, a New York photojournalism house that had supplied news images since the 1970s, which carried it into news photography; the sports agency Allsport followed in 1998.¹⁰ In parallel, Corbis — the archive company owned by Bill Gates — bought the Bettmann Archive, some sixteen million historical photographs, in October 1995, and set out to license the past in digital form.¹¹

The consequences fell on the independent photographer. An agency had done specific things for the photographers it represented: advanced money against future sales, placed the work with publications, held and marketed the back catalog. Absorbed into a corporation, those relationships were reset on corporate logic, and rationalized licensing rates generally meant lower ones. A photographer’s own archive — a decade of negatives from assignments, an asset a magazine or book might license years after the fact — lost value as a vast consolidated catalog undercut the price of anything held independently. The photograph was becoming a file, infinitely reproducible and instantly transmissible, and the same quality that made it cheap to move made it cheap to license. An image that had been a physical object with a single owner was turning into an entry in a database owned by someone else, and the photographer who had made it was further than ever from controlling what became of it.