Photo Editors

Illustrating the Story

Before they look at a single shot, photo editors must confer with reporters and photographers on staff to delegate assignments. Reporters may have information and suggestions about photographic opportunities, but often it is left to the editor to plan visual coverage, determine whether credentials are necessary, or arrange for a photographer to cover a particular story. Once those photographs are submitted, the editor's primary, though hardly singular, task involves choosing images to accompany stories in a newspaper or on a webpage. They must consider whether the chosen photo is informative, appealing, and serves to enhance, but not detract from, the story.

A modern photo editor may scan hundreds, if not thousands, of images on a digital server each day. Choosing a photo for display is the first step. In their classic 1951 text on photo editing, Stanley Kalish and Clifton Edom advised editors to look for “eye-stopping appeal.” Many of Kalish's principles about what makes an image “eye-stopping” [Page 1054]are still taught at an annual workshop established in his name. Every editor has different criteria for the “right shot.” The best have a solid combination of information, design, emotion, and intimacy. Choosing photographs will also depend on the nature of the story, its placement in the publication, and the quality of the image. Editors must balance information and impact, understanding that the photographs must work in tandem with the text. The emotion of a photo can draw people in to learn more from the text, and might be what is remembered even after details fade from memory. Yet another consideration: each publication will have a different photo style for the images it uses. A front-page photograph for the UK's The Guardian, for example, is expected to have high-impact color with strong graphic elements in keeping with the overall look of that newspaper. Other publications might emphasize portraiture, such as Vanity Fair, or unusual subject matter, as with National Geographic.

Photo editors must also make ethical and legal decisions about individual shots. Images of dead bodies, for instance, might be rejected as too offensive for the audience, because they are particularly graphic or because of the identity of the victim. Some violent images, however, may be deemed important to the polity in spite of being graphic. The editors of Life magazine, for instance, did indeed upset some readers by publishing some of the first photographs of dead American solders on a Pacific island beach in World War II. They justified their decision in an editorial which asserted that “… if (the soldier) had the guts to take it, then we ought to have the guts to look at it …” (Moeller 1989, 206–07).

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