I am an editorial and commercial photographer based in NYC who moved from Dublin, Ireland in 1995. Most of my work is generated here in the US but I also have experience working with English publications on location here and in the UK. I have shot for British magazines including Esquire, Q and the Observer Life and made some trips to London a few years back to meet with photo editors in an attempt to drum up business. I was struck during these visits by how differently things worked here from what I was used to back in the States.

Chris Floyd, originally from the never-ending suburbs of London, was based here in NYC from 2000 to 2006. During that time he worked with a similar subject matter and client base to my own — environmental portraiture with a mix of reportage working for titles such as Esquire, ESPN, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Premiere, and Entertainment Weekly — but not much celebrity work, which since his return to the UK has become his bread and butter.

I have always been a fan of Chris’s work and was thrilled one day to get an email from him out of the blue after he had stumbled across my blog, What’s the Jackanory?. This led to his own voyage of discovery through the ever-expanding online photo community. He has become an active commentator on many of the sites where his honesty and candor have been much appreciated. I have found Chris to be an incredibly smart, eloquent, opinionated, and talented individual whose passion and knowledge of the business has been most illuminating. We got together in October when Chris was back in NYC pressing the flesh with editors and clients and have kept in touch since.

The ‘London Calling’ post was conceived following an email Chris had sent to me about his experiences in the UK and how differently the machinery worked there compared to here. I really thought it would make for an interesting piece and that it would be worth sharing with my readers. It’s been a couple of months now since the post dropped and the reaction to the piece both in the US and in the UK has been phenomenal. I wanted to take this opportunity to follow up with Chris and discuss some of the reaction.

Seeing as it’s all the rage here in the photo blogosphere to have a conversation or Q+A with our peers, I didn’t want to be left out of the party so here’s my first serious contribution to this burgeoning genre! A little back-and-forth with inspirator and friend Chris Floyd.

AH: Hey Chris, I have been trying for sometime now to come up with a decent post on the state of British photography after your comment on A Photo Editor (APE) a couple of weeks back. I think a lot of us would be interested to hear your take on the UK scene, in particular the state of the editorial market and how it differs from your experiences over here.

CF: To be honest, it’s in a dire way these days, editorially speaking. Well, it is if you’re talking about paid editorial. I am working quite a bit, but the lack of vision and imagination is so depressing, especially having lived in NYC for over half a decade. British editorial photography is really an exercise in page filling. What’s important are the ad pages, as always.

AH: From my experience, things work a little differently over on your side of the Atlantic.

CF: Thinking about it now, the most immediate reason for this is the impotency of the British editorial photo editor. The title is there on the mastheads, but by and large, the photo editor here is really just a glorified researcher who calls in pictures of teenage celebrities drunk and showing their knickers for the pap pages. Maybe that’s overstating it, but at the heart of it no one higher up the editorial publishing tree is thinking, “Ooh, I wonder what our director of photography will make of the fabulous shoot we are trying to set up with Mr. XYZ.” The commissioning and editing of photography is not a consultative or well thought out process.

AH: I noticed that myself when I went on go-sees in London a few years back. A different experience than what I am used to in NYC. I never met with the photo editor but would end up seeing a creative of some sort. Yeah, I will never forget when I went to GQ once thinking I was meeting with the photo editor, but they escorted me up to see Tony Chambers, the creative director at the time.

CF: Your mention of GQ is the perfect example. It’s so perfect as an example that they should put it in a museum. It crystallizes everything I’m thinking about. Tony Chambers is the single most influential creative director I’ve ever met. His influence on me in terms of aesthetic, attention to detail, approach and overall philosophy is something I shall always be thankful for. However, Tony is unique. He’s very well-read and that’s because he’s innately curious. You should see the bookshelves in his apartment. He views all these things — art, design, music, photography, graphics, use of space, writing, ideas, fashion — as strands that all converge in a place called magazines. He sees his job as fighting for the consideration of the visual. He also has a fantastic sense of history and lineage. He knows and understands how things came to be the way they did, how this person influenced that person and so on. He is the only creative director I’ve met who seems to actually read the stuff in the magazines he designs. And he influenced all the people around him in that way. As hard a taskmaster as he could be, you learned stuff from Tony that you would use time and time again. So when you have someone like him running the art department it works because he knows how to pull all the elements together.

Modern magazine publishers don’t really know or understand what qualities a great art director needs. As long as the girl on the cover is showing plenty of flesh and has her tongue hanging out, it doesn’t really matter. So they appoint people who are perfectly competent, graphic designers, but they are not art directors as I would define them. Yet they are given business cards that say they are art directors or creative directors, so they must be those things. What a great magazine needs to make it great is an editor-in-chief and a creative director that must pull and push their respective sides—words and visuals. However, the editor-in-chiefs and the publishers are appointing people who don’t have the desire to be in that role. They are picking people who like and want the job title and will do the bidding of the editor-in-chief. It’s a separation of church and state situation that’s required but it’s not happening here. The editor’s decision is first and last as well as everything.

It’s no surprise to me that Tony is now an editor-in-chief (at Wallpaper*). When he got the job lots of people were surprised because the notion that someone who comes from the visual side could, heaven forbid, edit a magazine was a bit of a shock to some.

He’s an exception though. Ninety percent of the rest of those in the creative director position are not well-read or curious about what is going on outside of their own narrow field. They don’t read the copy. They’re just thinking about fonts. Come on, who gives a toss about fonts? A font is where you christen your baby, not where you lay out the altar of your life. I have a great story that illustrates this: a friend of mine who is the features editor at one of the best selling men’s mags in the UK, told me how the current creative director said that the first letter of the first sentence of a feature they were running on a female celebrity had to begin with the letter ‘L’ because he had designed the most wicked upper case ‘L’ ever. When my friend laughed at him, the guy threw a fit and stormed off. I mean, this is the level of intellect we are dealing with here a lot of the time.

By the way, there is a good interview with Tony here.

AH: How has your work flow changed since you moved back to the UK?

CF: When I lived in NYC all my work was enviro-portraiture and reportage-style portraiture. No celebs at all. Here the bulk of my work is celebrity stuff. I can’t complain, the resale of it does me well. I have a daughter and a wife who wants another so I really am not bitching at all. When I lived in NYC I did okay but I was doing work there that I LOVED. Buffalo farmers in North Dakota, military cadets at West Point, illegal immigrants in Arizona—really great stories of modern America. There is nothing of that here because there is no money for this stuff. It’s exactly how Simon Roberts put it in his talk at KlompChing Gallery—you’ve got to assign yourself and then treat it as an art project almost, with books and print sales foremost in your mind.

AH: I loved your comment on how the Russians could have taken Britain with a phone call. You obviously miss the call of the great American wild. Are you just as jazzed these days by a spin up the M1? Is a lot of what you do now in London or do you get around a bit? Europe for instance.

CF: No, not really. Ninety-five percent of my work is in London. Britain is not like America. The UK media market is London, London, London. Trailing a distant fourth place is London. Although today I’m writing this in Cardiff, the capital of Wales. This is my first trip outside of London for a job since last July. Oh wait, that’s a lie. I was in Toulouse, France a week ago to shoot a portrait of the chief engineer at Airbus.

AH: I just finished Don McCullins terrific autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour. Reading it reminded me how the British print media had a long tradition of ground breaking photojournalism. Following our phone discussion, it would be safe to say that the UK has a stronger newspaper culture and that the US has a stronger magazine culture.

I remember the epic newspaper strikes growing up and closure of The Times for a year over its move to new printing technologies. McCullin had a great line when he noticed the shifting tides both in his own career and the changing needs of his employers: “Lifestyles rather than life were coming into fashion.” I couldn’t think of a better sentence to describe what was happening at the time. Not only a description of how photography was being repackaged for the masses, but also indicative of the major socioeconomic changes going on at the same time throughout the country.

CF: Yes. Bang on. Please don’t bring us anything that might make the advertisers baulk. The commissioning of big stories is gone. If you are working for UK mags then no one is going to send you off somewhere for a month to work on the equivalent of the great American novel. The content is kind of irrelevant. It’s not important, as long as the skin looks okay. I just did a job for someone. It was a big bunch of teenagers, real kids not models. What do all teenagers all over the world have? Acne! Guess what they wanted me to do? Retouch out the acne and smooth the skin. This isn’t reportage, it’s advertising interspersed with infomercials. News International (Times/Sunday Times) has just dictated this new rule: all photos are to be digital. They will not pay for film and processing or prints. You can shoot on film, but your final submission must be a digital file and they will pay a maximum of £150 towards the cost of your digital equipment.

The publishers of the Sunday supps — Guardian, Telegraph, Times, Independent, Observer —have all taken the attitude that what they operate are platforms for advertising and new media. The content is relevant only up to a very low threshold. Ultimately people like us are merely content providers and there are millions of us.

I did a shoot for The Sunday Times this year on January 3. The world champion female track cyclist. A Brit. Big hopes for the Olympics. Great! A job immediately after the new year — it gets your confidence up and your new year is out the traps. I got a £250 fee. One of my very first commissions ever was for The Sunday Times in 1993. My fee was £250. In 15 years they have held down their costs one hundred percent. What an amazing achievement. The chief picture editor of the whole newspaper — a man I’ve never even heard of or met and the boss of all the photo editors in all the sections/magazines — was so impressed with my pictures that he had his production assistant call me and “ask” if it was alright that they hold on to the pictures for a little bit longer as they were so good he felt that they were very syndicatable. For how long? Not long, just a while, well until after the Olympics. Is there going to be a split in it for me? We’d give you ten percent. The institutional disrespect for photographers and photography cannot be over-emphasised.

AH: Same as here, there has been little change in editorial rates since I started. Have you noticed a difference in your clients usage demands too?

CF: So not only are they paying me the same rate as they were 15 years ago, they are then demanding to take away the thing that would financially render the gig worthwhile—the right to re-sell the work elsewhere. I could barely conceal my rage at this Murdochian crushing of the little freelancer and finished by suggesting that I was being financially penalized for producing work of a sufficient quality to be noticed by the guy at the top of the photo food chain in Murdoch Towers, E1. Then I tag-teamed Getty into it and he relented. However, I still need to be able to work for them so I had to give him a way out of his position by allowing News International the right to re-use the pictures in any of their own publications for six months for free.

I’ve spun away from the state of British photography here into the state of the British photography industry, but there you are.\

AH: No worries, man, you are obviously passionate about your art. You have referred to yourself as a journeyman. I liked that, care to elaborate?

CF: Sure. I take a great deal of pride in the fact that you can send me anywhere and I will bring you something that is a.) compelling and b.) will tell you something vital about the subject. I can find something to be curious about in pretty much anyone. It’s like that line, “How can you justify your fees? It only took you twenty minutes to do it!” Yes, it did, but it took me twenty years to learn how to do it in twenty minutes.

I also have a fundamental mistrust, suspicion, dislike of and animosity towards anyone who defines themselves as an artist without very good reason. It is too easy now to say “I AM AN ARTIST.” All the greatest people were, to a large extent, artisans. If someone were to call me an artisan that is what I would be most proud of. If you called me an artist I would have to leave. The job Michelangelo did on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was a commission, a gig. Shakespeare was really just a guy with a quill trying to make some dough. The Mona Lisa, La Giaconda, were commissions. How possible can it be to create something so beautiful and for it purely to be inspired by something so common as a pay check? One of my great heroes is George Orwell. Some of his greatest writing was commissioned journalism. When you try to exist in your own self-defined vacuum you are entering dangerous waters. There has been this great shift towards “art” photography, particularly in NYC. Some of it is good and some of it is terrible. Most of it…what is the point? What does it say outside of the fact that Kathy Ryan thinks it’s awesome? Gregory Crewdson? Is it good? I don’t know. What I do know is that it is a fantastic exercise in production. What is he doing for us that Edward Hopper or Stephen Spielberg haven’t done? That’s all it is to me. Edward Hopper’s tableaux married to Spielberg’s lighting and production values.

There can be — not always, some of my best friends are artists — this weird attitude of condescension towards those of an artisinal bent from those who define themselves as artists. When I lived in NYC I was commissioned by The Guardian in London to spend a few days with this band the Arctic Monkeys. At the same time, Rolling Stone had sent along a young, very well-known American photographer who takes a lot of pictures of his friends cavorting naked and jumping off of idyllic rural bridges into far below rivers on cross country summer road trips.

We got to chatting while the band was sound checking and I asked him how he came to be there. He said that he just did whatever he felt like doing and this was a band he was really into and he called up Rolling Stone and told them so. So they got him the access and hey ho… Then I asked him who else he worked for, bearing in mind I totally knew who he was, he got a little superior on me and said, “Well I don’t really accept commissions, that’s not my thing. I just tend to create my own projects. I’m self-assigning.”

The fact is I think his pictures really are fantastic but what I baulked at was this idea that an idea is only valid if it is self-generated. “Commission” was like a dirty word. But what that statement also said to me was that this was someone who had never had to earn a living from his work. He was privileged. There is nothing wrong with privilege, my daughter gets what she wants all the time, but if you are privileged you need to show respect towards those that need to earn a living from their trade. In France, to become an artisan is a process that takes time and ends in an official recognition and status. To call oneself an artisinal baker, for instance, means that one has been through a period of learning. There is a respect there.

AH: It would appear difficult or almost impossible then for fine art to cross over into editorial as it has done here. There simply isn’t the market? Or does it all stop at Martin Parr?

CF: There isn’t that level of ambition. I’m convinced Martin Parr has some form of Asperger’s Syndrome. Can I say that? Is that actionable? I’ve met him half a dozen times. He doesn’t know who I am. His eyes glaze over when he’s not talking about himself.

AH: Chris, you have said Britain doesn’t have a magazine culture. Men in particular aren’t interested in quality magazines although style bibles like Arena, I-D, Dazed and Confused and the defunct Blitz and The Face were considered the cutting edge. Did the average man give a shit or did he just like his tit and ass with a healthy dose of Maxim.

CF: I think that, historically, those mags (The Face, Arena, Blitz

i-D, Dazed) will come to be seen as an anomaly. All those people that started those mags, and were on the outside of the establishment and vocally proud of it, are now very much a part of the establishment and they are certainly not letting anyone else in. What they did do was pave the way for popular culture to be taken seriously by broadsheet newspapers. All the broadsheets now have pop music columnists and reviewers, fashion coverage, etc. Ironically, considering this discussion, not one of them has a proper, serious full-time photography reviewer. And that is probably the single most defining aspect of what we are talking about when it comes to British photography and the public attitude towards it.

AH: So why then are there so many British fashion photographers at the top? Must be the accent right? Goes down a treat over here.

CF: Hmmm…there is a very strong art school tradition in Britain. Some of our greatest bands came out of art school. The Beatles, The Who, Roxy Music, to name three. There is a great, unofficially vertically integrated fashion scene at work in this country. Music, clubs, fashion, design. Out of that mind meld come incredibly hipped up people with cameras. However, a lot of those mags that were great in the 80’s and early 90’s started to eat themselves. Instead of generating great ideas at street level they started to get above themselves and they became trade mags. Fashion mags by fashion people for fashion people. They froze out the 16-year-old kid in Leeds with eight quid in his/her pocket and instead said, “Oh wow, we have great shots by Craig (McDean) of Kate (Moss) wearing Stella (McCartney) that were styled by Katie (England) which will help all of us get a great new campaign from Karl (Lagerfeld).” The minute they started using first names only was the minute they entered Marie Antoinette territory. And at that point they all moved to NYC anyway for the massive cash bonuses on offer. That’s what you have now. The generation that made it big in the 90’s are now shooting all the big stories and campaigns for the international fashion brands, mags and labels. I’m not sure what there is here now in the way of mags to help breed a new crop
though? No one is going to make it big in Japan by shooting for British InStyle are they?

AH: Tell me a little about the effect the photo blogs have had on you?

CF: Oh man! They have opened my eyes to the fact that I…am…not…alone. What we do, as photographers, is so solitary. To be able to engage with other people at an intelligent level of discussion is just awesome. Part of me feels like Tom Hanks. I’ve been sitting here growing a beard and talking to a FedEx box for 15 years and now there are people that I can engage with who live time zones away.

AH: You obviously enjoy the new found interaction. This was evident when you were lamped on a little for that infamous early comment of yours over on APE, the one where you wrote/talked about how fabulous your life is. Great back-and-forth with Olivier Laude and his anonymous alter ego.

CF: Ha ha. Indeedy! That little contretemps was in answer to APE’s post about how being a photographer can be one of the greatest jobs in the world if the chips fall in your favor. What I was saying was how right he was. However, the chips don’t fall in your favor all the time. The day before that posting of APE’s (can we call him Rob now?) I had just won the highest paying job of my life—enough money to pay the mortgage and keep the wolf from the door for several months. It was a big publicity shoot with Gwyneth Paltrow for Paramount Pictures. On top of that I had several other tasty things in the pipeline. That was in October, I think.  From January to March of last year I just about kept my head above the parapet so this was a complete turnaround. This is a career with unutterably high highs and intolerably low lows. I said it myself in one of the back-and-forths with Olivier: "Sometimes weeks go by where the best part of the day is the bit where you get to go to bed intoxicated and numb with self loathing." I’ve been doing this for 15 years as a professional. So having had the strength of character and conviction to see out those periods which are regular visitors to my door, without bitching, then you’ve got to allow me the honor of feeling a little pleased with myself when the tide turns in my favor considerably from time to time. The insecurity and worry never goes away. No matter how pleased one feels at any given moment. I am smart enough to know that the weather can change like that. You see, the thing about what we do that our friends with safe, secure nine-to-fives will never quite grasp is that, although to them our lives look sweet and easy going, we get no sick pay, no holiday pay, no guaranteed income or pay check and most importantly, no one to talk to or share problems with in the office or the pub after work. Those fears are always there. In the evenings, before bed, at weekends, on holiday, on Christmas Day, while you’re having sex, in the shower, at dinner, in a cab, while I’m cuddling my daughter, in the garden, on and on and on and on. We do this alone. And going back to the APE posting, if you read all the comments from people, you’ll see that the vast majority responded in my defense and I felt vindicated there. Those that know what it’s like…they know. The buzz from this job can be incredible, but can you take the solitude and doubt? We lay it all out there and have to survive on each and every roll of the dice. What is a photo editor after all? A professional opinion holder, although Rob is one of the good ones it seems. Can I go now? It’s 1 am here.

AH: Chris, it’s been a real treat, I really appreciate you taking the time and making the effort. You know this has been really great for me, a way for photographers to collaborate other then doing a Mert and Marcus. Thanks, man.