PHOTOGRAPHERS AT WORK
Picking Shots
Time picture editor MaryAnne Golon's visual storytelling
Last year MaryAnne Golon, Time magazine’s picture editor, dispatched some of the world’s best photojournalists to cover the border between Mexico and the U.S. The resulting photographs, by people like James Nachtwey, Alex Webb, and Vincent Musi, were gritty and dense, smoldering with the colors of the people and the sky and the land. Golon loved them.
But she had to fight for them. Arthur Hochstein, the magazine’s art director, wanted something less photojournalistic, more stylistic. “He didn’t think the photos were right for Time,” says Michele Stephenson, the magazine’s director of photography. Golon stood her ground. “Welcome to Amexica” ran thirty-two pages as the June 11, 2001, cover story.
If anyone understands how to maneuver in the complex and often cutthroat world of photojournalism, it is Golon. “MaryAnne is a very forceful personality,” says Stephenson. “She is opinionated and passionate.” But to become such a newsroom force has required more than passion; it has been a nineteen-year learning curve, and along the way Golon even had to quit the magazine and then come back to it.
“I left Time because I suffered from bloody head syndrome,” Golon says. “I was like a boxer who couldn’t get back into the ring. Walter Isaacson (Time’s managing editor then) was not exactly pro-photojournalism; it wasn’t considered a ‘hard element.’ I needed to go where somebody thought I had something to say.” So in 1996, after thirteen years at Time, she left for U.S. News & World Report, then edited by the more photo-friendly James Fallows. She returned to Time in 1999.
Snug again in her twenty-fourth floor office in Rockefeller Center, Golon seems to have traded her embattled early days — “I used to be absolutely merciless” — for an I’ve-seen-it-all inner reserve.
Still, Golon remains best known for her conviction. Her voice has a husky drawl, a vestige of too many cigarettes and a southern childhood. She grew up the third of six children in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Florida, in Gainesville, in 1983. When she was eight, her mother bought Golon her first camera with S&H green stamps. Today, her many photography awards — including a first place in 1999 for picture editing in the University of Missouri’s Pictures of the Year International competition — hang on her office wall alongside the artwork and snapshots of her nine-year-old son, Christian.
A tall woman — six feet in stockings — in her early forties, Golon wears her nearly black hair in a shoulder-length fall and tends to dress in dark slacks and blazers. She exudes enthusiasm. On a Thursday afternoon in early June, the only sound in the otherwise hushed wing of the picture department is Golon’s effervescent laughter. “His work was inspired!” she yells into the phone. Two more “quick” phone calls follow — about ten minutes each — before she turns her attention to one of her deputies, Hillary Raskin, who has been waiting patiently, holding laser copies of archival photos by Edward Curtis for an upcoming feature on the Lewis and Clark expedition. “Some of these rare manuscript libraries need three weeks to get a photo,” Golon says, pausing to size up the pictures. “I’ll knock their doors down to get the pictures if I have to.”
A photo editor’s job is to whittle a broad range of photography — assigned, agency, wire, archival — to fit the publication’s mission and the day’s news. Time’s nine New York-based photo editors sift through some 15,000 pictures a week, selecting about 125 for each issue.
Golon, who is second in command behind Stephenson in the twenty-three person department, typically works on cover stories and special sections or issues. She has coordinated photos for every Olympics since 1984, was the on-site photo editor for Time and for Life during the gulf war, and led photo coverage for Time’s stunning September 11 special issue. “Being a magazine picture editor is like being a film producer,” she says. “I put together the right person with the right story, and you’ve got to keep everybody going toward the same thing — great visuals.”
But not just great visuals. Golon and others have fought to have photography recognized as a first-class journalistic citizen, an equal. “The photo editor has to be able to speak the whole language of journalism,” says Scott Sines, a managing editor of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington. He is one of the few picture people to break through this editorial glass ceiling. “The impression that they’re not real journalists has been pounded into photo editors throughout the course of newspaper history,” Sines says. “It’s a form of professional discrimination.”
Golon, who once wanted to be the editor of Life magazine, says editors often view their photographic counterparts as “necessary evils,” and adds: “They see us as jovial adversaries and as representing a reduction in their real estate. But we’re not just the people who say, ‘Make the picture bigger.’ At the bottom of it, we’re all journalists. Certain stories you want to read, so we lightly illustrate it. In other places, what are you going to say? The pictures say everything. You have to know when to back off.” Golon takes a breath. “I was a lot more volatile in my youth. Now I’m more of a diplomat.”
David Burnett, a photojournalist who has shot for Time since 1967, would stick “savvy” in front of “diplomat.” In 1995 he went to Golon to discuss a sports essay he wanted to do that was more about capturing the poetry and energy of sport than about featuring famous athletes. Golon, he says, loved the idea, and the coming 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta made it timely.
Burnett’s photos were stunning, but would the editors like them? Golon and Burnett hatched a plan to ensure that they would. They made sixteen-by-twenty prints — far bigger than a usual presentation — for final review. “We did it so big to wow them,” Burnett says. “I was totally comfortable to let MaryAnne take the ball.” The essay ran twelve pages.
On September 11, Golon was at home in Bergen County, New Jersey, when she first heard of the attacks from Stephenson, who called from Maine, where she was vacationing. On her three-hour journey into Manhattan that morning (it typically takes forty-five minutes), Golon made several dozen cellular phone calls to orchestrate the coverage. Eventually, she had about twenty-five photographers in the field. Hundreds of amateurs, including some firefighters, walked the three-and-a-half miles to Rockefeller Center from Ground Zero in the hopes of having their photos published. No amateur shots were used in Time’s photo-laden, ad-free special edition, which hit newsstands on September 13, but in the next issue a photo taken by an assistant state attorney general ran as a three-page foldout. Time’s photo editors reviewed at least 15,000 pictures that day.
Golon’s standard on September 11, though, was “the same as any other story,” she says. “The best pictures just jump off the light table and knock the doors down.” The issue won a National Magazine Award and a first place for editing in the Pictures of the Year International contest. “We’re trained to respond to extraordinary situations,” Golon says of her staff. “We knew exactly who to call and what to get organized.”
Knowing whom to call is something of a Golon specialty. “This business is built on personal relationships,” says Stephenson. “MaryAnne’s success that day comes from a reputation she has built through the years.” That reputation also makes Golon someone photographers trust. Robert Clark, whose images of the second plane hitting the south tower of the World Trade Center — taken from the roof of his Brooklyn apartment — won a first-place in the World Press Photo contest, knew exactly where to go with his film. “In my heart I knew that MaryAnne would do the right thing,” he says.
Golon also made full use of AOL Time Warner’s deep pockets. Clark, for instance, says he got about $10,000 from Time just for a first look at his still-unprocessed film. By the end of the day — and roughly $50,000 later — Time had exclusive worldwide rights for a week. Golon declined to discuss how much she spent on September 11. “Business is my least favorite part of my job and the singularly most important part of my job,” she says. “There used to be a time where the only relationship that mattered was between the editor and the photographer. It was all based on trust and handshakes. That is becoming a distant memory.”
There may have been a time when Golon would have fought this
changing reality. Today, she picks her battles, but her fundamental
belief that photojournalism is crucial has never wavered. “You
have to work for it and support it,” Golon says, pushing
herself up in her chair. “And I’ve done that. I’ve
never lost the faith.”
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