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Grant's Rant
Daily Ink
Stored in: Photography News
Posted On: April 29 2008
By: Brittney Bush
Photo © carljohnson
In a blog entry posted today, Grant Alden, Co-Editor and Art Director of No Depression magazine, discusses both mental and physical aspects of the magazine's design process. He speaks mostly about No Depression's current (and final) issue, but also inserts older stories from the magazine's thirteen-year run. Though the entire article is an interesting read, most relevant to Utata are Alden's descriptions of how he works with photographers:
I tend to be a pretty laissez faire art director, by which I mean that I hire from a small pool of photographers whose innate sensibilities I trust, who understand both the music and the magazine, and who appreciate the fact that I don't tell them what to do. My belief has always been that we don't pay enough to micromanage shoots (nor had we funds for me to be physically present at shoots, and on those few occasions when I was around I felt singularly useless). And I don't put type on photos, save for the opening spreads and the minimal type placed on the cover. Good photos don't need words to dress them up, and I've been fortunate to work with some terrific photographers over these last years. And it's more fun for me to take their photos and figure out how to work headlines and text around them, than to play it the other way.
As this is one of Alden's final descriptions of life at No Depression, the piece, though posted on a blog titled Grant's Rants, is mostly a combination memoir and lament. He issues several apologies:for retouching photos badly, for choosing the wrong images to publish, for hiring photographers and then not using their shots. I've never worked at a magazine, and therefore have no idea how No Depression's editing environment compares to most. But reading Alden's essay, one can dream of a sort of art direction utopia, where photographers and magazine staff work in perfect artistic harmony, and can walk away with the sense that once, fleetingly, it almost, almost happened.
Otherwise, in Photography News:
- Previously: A Day In The Life
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