Kathy Ryan, director of photography for the New York Times Magazine, has a legendary eye for light and form. Our photo contest judge talks about creating art in the age of Instagram and transcending cliché.
At 2:32 p.m. on 14 November 2012, Kathy Ryan saw a zigzag of light on a flight of stairs in the New York Times Building. Ryan, acclaimed director of photography for the Times Sunday magazine, couldn’t help herself. “It was like a bolt of light on the stairs. I wanted to capture it.” Lucky for her, she happened to be carrying the most important photographic device of the 21st century: an iPhone.
She posted the picture on Instagram. Then more pictures, almost all from the halls of the Renzo Piano-designed Times Building. The result was a popular Instagram feed and a 2014 book, Office Romance, establishing the rookie photographer as an artist in her own right.
Photographers weren’t surprised by her success in “their” business. Ryan’s eye is legendary. During her tenure, the New York Times Magazine has won prizes including two National Magazine Awards for photography and a pair of Emmys for videos based on Times Magazine features. Her international honors include the award for outstanding service to photography from the United Kingdom’s Royal Photographic Society. Yet she’s almost as well known for her affable nature and ringleted hair as for her résumé. “You might find someone who doesn’t like Kathy,” one photographer says, “but you probably can’t find two.”
Frequent contributor Kevin Cook met Ryan in her sixth-floor office at the Times Building in early February. “It’s a small, windowless room,” he reports. “One of her Emmys gleams on a high shelf. And there’s a whiteboard covered with headshots – part of her latest project.”
THE ROTARIAN: Those look like pictures from your book.
RYAN: This is brand new. We’re redesigning the Times Magazine – closing the first one next week [the 22 February issue]. As an element of the redesign, we’re going to have a contributors page for the first time. Jake Silverstein, our new editor in chief, loves photography. He wants to break out one contributor each week with a photo. He asked me to shoot them in the Office Romance style.
TR: You didn’t begin shooting your own photos until 2012. And you’ve still got fierce deadlines rolling at you every week.
RYAN: It does get a little crazy around here. But this is a fun new challenge. I get a kick out of making people look great, and the incredible, cinematic light in this building helps.
TR: Did Piano, the architect, plan to make the light so unusual?
RYAN: Yes. He talks about the most important element an architect can use, the most immaterial of materials: light. Skyscrapers have to be energy-efficient – that’s why most of them have dark or mirrored windows. “Buildings with sunglasses,” he calls them. Instead, he made this building with white ceramic rods that block some of the light, creating amazing shadows.
TR: Piano calls his 2007 skyscraper “photosensitive.” He loves how your photos capture what he calls “the light, the shadows, the vibration” in the building. Would you be making your own pictures if you worked somewhere else? Would you still have caught the bug?
RYAN: (laughing) I doubt it. I think I have one subject – this building and the people in it. But my main job is still being an editor, appreciating other people’s pictures.
TR: How can a photographer make a picture that matters?
RYAN: You’ve got to trust your instincts. What are you drawn to? You also need to know the territory. If you’re interested in sunsets or bridges or animals or cityscapes – these things are heavily covered. For example, there are tons and tons of photos of the Brooklyn Bridge – which isn’t to say, don’t photograph the Brooklyn Bridge. Clichés can be OK. Just do something with it. Whether it’s through light, framing, or composition, you want to make your picture special.
Another approach is to find a subject that’s not so heavily covered. I think a lot of people are like me – they have to look around before they see the pictures in their everyday lives. It’s easy to forget, but your work life might be pretty interesting. Probably every reader of The Rotarian has access to something that others don’t know about.
TR: And then you just point and shoot?
RYAN: No. This is where commitment comes in. You have to say, “I care about this image – enough to work to make it right.” That doesn’t mean taking five pictures and picking three to show your editor. Or taking 10 or 20. It means making hundreds of pictures, looking for a really good one.
TR: You’re famous for looking at hundreds or even thousands of images and quickly culling them to the best 10 or 12.
RYAN: People often underestimate what it takes to get the right picture. Maybe you’re drawn to light – you want to make pictures because you love a particular sort of light. Or maybe you’re drawn to action – you want to capture something unfolding in real life. Or to a place – I assume there’ll be people submitting landscapes to The Rotarian contest. That’s great, but look at a bunch of landscapes first. They’re all over the Internet. Spend a couple of hours every week Googling landcapes. Go to a museum or a museum’s website to see how Turner painted them 200 years ago. That’s how you train your eye.
TR: What kinds of mistakes do amateur photographers make?
RYAN: They may have the heart it takes to make a great picture, but you need the eye too. The heart is the story, the feeling you want to share. The eye is what you work at. You look at your pictures and ask yourself, Is this the best possible composition? Is this the best light? Few photographers can nail it in two or three frames.
Think of all the options you have. Generally, a head-on portrait is boring. Move around! You’ve got 360 degrees to play with. Move to the side, get a profile or a three-quarters shot. And don’t make them look at the camera. Catch your subject looking down, looking away – an indirect moment.
TR: How is Instagram changing the world of photography?
RYAN: It’s allowing a lot of visualists who weren’t photographers to start making pictures, and that expands the kind of image-making that gets done.
Here’s an example. On Instagram, I stumbled on Devin Alberda. He’s a dancer with the New York City Ballet, but he has all the instincts of a documentary photographer. I discovered his wonderful pictures online and showed them to other people at the magazine. We ended up publishing a portfolio of his work. Not that this happens all the time – most of what you see on Instagram is not “Photography” with a capital P. But it does happen, and it will continue to happen.
TR: Do professional photographers hate that?
RYAN: Some do, but Instagram is good for them too. They used to have to contact the magazine, schedule a portfolio drop-off, and we’d break from the frenetic action around here to look at that portfolio. Today, I’ll be home at night or on a weekend, scrolling through my Instagram feed, and if a professional’s feed is showing good work, I’m going to look. What better way to get your work seen? You don’t have to hang it in a gallery or get it published in a magazine. This is new, and it’s cool.
TR: Are there other ways smartphones are changing the craft?
RYAN: Technology has always driven new creative approaches. Now, for the first time, really decent cameras exist in cell phones, and that leads to a kind of picture-making you couldn’t have done 10 years ago. If you were at your job and something interesting happened, you couldn’t say, “Wait a minute,” and set up a big camera with all the equipment you needed. Now you can take a phone out of your pocket and make a beautiful document. Sometimes it’s a more authentic document: People don’t take the cell phone camera as seriously as they take a camera camera, so you sometimes get a truer, more candid picture.
“People don’t take the cell phone as seriously as they take a camera, so you sometimes get a truer, more candid picture.”
TR: That leads us to the most popular sort of picture of all: Is there such a thing as a good selfie?
RYAN: Yes! Do you know who’s doing brilliant selfies? Alec Soth.
TR: He’s known for big projects.
RYAN: A major artist at the top of his game. He’s doing them on his feed, Little Brown Mushroom, based in St. Paul, Minn. The vast majority of selfies are silliness, but it’s possible to do something great with them. His are psychological and smart. There’s one tight shot of half a glass of water, warmly lit, and you can see his face reflected in it. That’s a clever selfie.
TR: People often wonder whether to shoot in color or black and white. You recently went against the grain by featuring Tom Brady, the New England Patriots quarterback, in black and white. Why?
RYAN: That was Damon Winter’s work, from the last game before the Super Bowl. Damon’s an incredible color photographer, but some of his best work is in black and white. What happened was, we thought we were going to get a portrait sitting with Brady, and we never got it.
TR: NFL fans will suspect he was deflating the footballs.
RYAN: He was “too busy.” So Damon went to the game, focusing solely on Brady. And we chose black and white for two reasons: One, you distinguish your pictures from almost all the rest of the football coverage. Two, black and white can eliminate a lot of background noise. A football game is colorful, but the colors of the uniforms and the bright green of the turf do nothing to up the emotional content of an image. We wanted as much Brady as we could get – this 37-year-old athlete, a superstar, thinking … what? Damon took a great shot where Brady took his helmet off, and he’s got an ambiguous expression on his face. Eliminating color focused the emotional energy of the image. Without a cacophony of color and visual noise, it becomes all about the face.
TR: Were you a photographer before you were a photo editor?
RYAN: No. I majored in art and art history at Rutgers University. I did some lithography, but no pictures. I knew I wanted to work with pictures, but I was never the solitary-artist type. I liked working with people. Someone told me about an opening at Sygma, the photo agency. I started as a librarian, then got promoted to researcher, and one of my jobs was filling photo requests for the Times Magazine. After a couple of years of that, in 1985, they invited me to apply for a position as deputy photo editor. All the while, I was falling in love with photography.
“Office life is an important, undercovered subject. It isn’t considered poetic or beautiful, but it can be.”
TR: Yet it took a quarter-century for you to start making pictures of your own. Was it scary to post your first Office Romance photos for the world to see?
RYAN: Maybe it should have been. But no, it was fun. The Instagram community is supportive. My pictures started out as a guilty pleasure, but as soon as I started posting them, I got positive feedback. That gave me confidence. I’d compliment other people in our photo department who were doing the same thing. Our first followers were in the cubicles here on the sixth floor. We’d put a Like on each other’s pictures. That sort of support keeps you going.
I also think office life is an important, undercovered subject. So many subjects are overcovered, it’s hard to find virgin territory. Office life isn’t considered poetic or beautiful, but it can be.
TR: Can you ever see an image – a sunset, a striking shadow – and just enjoy it? Or do you reach for your iPhone as fast as you can?
RYAN: Ha! It depends. There were times in my life when I couldn’t. I’d get hyper and worry about missing the picture. I’m a little more sanguine now, a little calmer. I tell myself I can come back tomorrow. The light might not be exactly the same, but it’ll be pretty close. And if I need the exact same light, there’s always next year.
TR: Because the earth will be in the same spot in 365 days?
RYAN: (laughing) Right. On a cosmic level, I might get another chance. — Kevin Cook