Day four we met with Human Rights Watch and Esquire.
At Human Rights Watch we had the opportunity of meeting Emma Daly (Director of Communications). She ran us through the general idea of what Human Rights Watch is. It's a non-profit organization looking to raise awareness and change social views. To make these stories compelling HRW uses both still imagery and multimedia to push the idea that change needs to happen. With the rights to what's being made for HRW it's dependent on what is agreed upon, with still images it's usually that the photographer gets to keep the rights to the images, with multimedia it's usually HRW keeps the rights, and the photographer having the ability to use the work on their website. After hearing about the usage and rights Emma talked about photographers that they've worked with in the past, and the one that stuck out most to me was Platon, a very influential political figure photographer. They've been working with him for sometime now and their relationship seemed to be very strong. He's happy to hand over all the images that he takes to HRW. After hearing about the relationships they've built it sounds like a very good opportunity to take, but it is a highly competitive job to get. We concluded our meeting with a few more questions about internships.
After HRW we met with Michael Norseng (Director of Photography) at Esquire. We had a limited amount of time with Michael, but everything that was talked about is very applicable to the work that I'm trying to do. He opened with a bit of history and what Esquire is, along with showing a history of a few photographers that changed or ultimately mold what Esquire's photography esthetic is. The three photographers being Bruce Davidson, Eugene Richards and Diane Arbus. The three of them have been able to make Esquire a unique photographic magazine that separates them from other fashion, food and portrait magazines. After a brief history of the magazine Michael also gave us a brief history of his having worked at GQ for a few years then moving to Esquire where he started as the number two and became the number one after four years. Transitioning out of the histories we started to talk about how to be a young successful photographers that can obtain work. Being able to brand and market yourself was a large part of this conversation. Having your brand in order, and photographing what is true to you. And by that he meant having you're branding organized, by having your website in tact, social media representing yourself in a way that you want to be seen and being a reasonable person to be around.