QUARTO CREATIVE
Episode 6: Local Time
Covering the Spread
Episode 16: Tape That Baby to the Wall
Louanne Welcome to “Covering the Spread, Magazine Design for the Next Age,” a monthly discussion of all things related to our favorite medium, magazines.
Scott Whether you’re a seasoned designer, an aspiring creative, an editor or publisher, or just someone who appreciates the art of storytelling through visuals, this is the place for you.
Louanne I’m your host, Louanne Welgoss from LTD Creative, a graphic design firm located in Frederick, Maryland, and I’ve been working on publications for thirty-two years. You can see our work at LTDCreative.com.
Scott And I’m Scott Oldham from Quarto Creative, who’s been making magazines for twenty-five years. You can see my work at QuartoCreative.com. And on this podcast, we’ll chat with industry experts, designers, editors, and production pros to uncover the secrets of all things magazine.
Louanne It’s time to turn the page and what you thought you knew and reimagine the future of publishing.
Scott Welcome to the latest episode of Covering the Spread. We are joined today by a very talented photographer, Saverio Truglia, a Chicago-based photographer who has shot for, among other prestigious publications, The New York Times, Oprah Magazine, Chicago Magazine, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, among many others. Welcome, Saverio.
Saverio Hi, Scott. Thanks for having me.
Scott I hope I did justice to your portfolio there. I know you do a fair amount of non-editorial work as well.
Saverio I do, but those are some of my favorite editorial clients that you mentioned.
Scott Tell us a little bit about your background, and in particular, how much editorial photography has meant to you over the course of your career.
Saverio Editorial photography really gave me my start commercially back in the 90s, when I was young and starting to be interested in editorial photography. I went to the Chicago Reader, which is still a publication in Chicago. It’s much like The Village Voice might be in New York. It’s weekly, and back then it was black and white, four sections, delivered for free. Everybody had the Reader. Everybody picked up the Reader on a Thursday or Friday to know what was going on — classifieds and whatnot. But it was really great. With local stories, I would get probably one assignment a week, and they quickly realized what my interests were, and I was very interested in what was sort of quirky and a little under the radar. So they gave me a guy that’s got the miniature golf course in the basement of his funeral home. Never a politician or something dry. It was somebody that made some controversial film, and I would go make a conceptual portrait of them. And so that’s how I got started. Before that, I went to art school and studied fine art photography. So I have a BFA in photography from Mass College of Art in Boston. But really, I got my chops working for the Reader. That was my first experience.
Louanne That sounds like a lot of fun working on random things, like a… what did you say? A putt-putt golf course in a basement?
Saverio It was never what you’d expect. The stories were very offbeat, very human interest. Rarely do they have a real timely component to them. But that’s what I really love doing.
Louanne When you went to do these photo shoots in these random places, were people involved or were you just shooting locations?
Saverio I was always photographing people, and really, to a large extent, that’s all I do is photograph people.
Louanne Because I think that, ultimately, that’s where the topic of today is going to go, because editorial photography is, I think, a lot of what people are hiring photographers for today, and that is photographing people in their environment. What do you think makes for a better editorial photo shoot? In a nutshell, how do you think magazine teams can get better results?
Saverio The best way that magazine teams can get better results with their photography is to hire photographers not necessarily based on style, but to hire photographers who they can identify as aligning with the content in some way or another in their portfolio. They show a sensitivity to that type of subject, that they can work with that kind of personality. And it’s a harder ask to try and find somebody whose sensibility and point of view aligns with the content. But that’s when my best work comes, is when I really feel aligned with the subject in some way or another. One of the last shoots that I remember doing it was a CEO portrait. It was very short. It was fifteen minutes, the total thing. We did two setups, but we ended up talking about family, about being older parents. You know, we were both in our 50s with relatively young children. We’re both athletic people. And I knew this from having done my research. So that’s the kind of photographer that I am: interested in people, curious about people. I do my research and I connect with people very quickly because I come in prepared.
Louanne The first thing I do is look at your portfolio and make sure that you have grasped the concept of shooting somebody on location without just having them stand at a desk or sit at a desk, and you can really bring in their environment into their portrait. But then I have a conversation with you to get a feel on your personality, because what you just said was really integral in photographing people.
Saverio I do. I think that one way that magazines can get better photography is to assign their photographers over the telephone. So many of my assignments come over email and the entire transaction happens over text as a medium. We lose a lot of understanding of each other. Maybe it’s more efficient. Maybe you have a text trail you can go back on, but you’re missing the connection between the editor, the photographer, and both of their abilities — especially the editor’s ability — to feel out a photographer to make sure they’re suitable. Your portfolio was one thing, but your demeanor is entirely another thing. You’ll never know that unless you speak to somebody in person.
Scott So what level of collaboration are you looking for from, let’s say, a magazine art director? How involved is best for you for them to be in producing a shoot?
Saverio That’s a great question because it comes in many different levels. I’ll think of some of the most successful and regular clients of mine. We are very close collaborators. Immediately we get on the phone and we start talking about ideas, and some of those conversations yield the plan. Sometimes it takes two or three calls back and forth to really decide what we’re going to do that day and what’s on the shot list. But the people that trust me the most bring me in early, and that helps work out a lot of kinks and opens up fresh ideas that you wouldn’t be able to develop over email.
Louanne How do you develop a shot list if you don’t know the setting until the day of the shoot? For instance, I have been charged with photographing a CEO of a company, and he didn’t want to leave the building. So you were pretty much limited to whatever was in his office or the space in his company. But you don’t know what that is until you get in there. How do you how do you figure all that out beforehand if you don’t have that opportunity?
Saverio It’s a good question. And sometimes we don’t have the opportunity and we are just welcomed in fifteen minutes before the session begins. And it begins. In those cases, I really have to trust my instincts. That’s hard to do. It’s hard to involve an art director in that case, because there’s just simply no time to run a photo back to them over text from my phone just to get an A-OK. But more often than not, when I have little time with somebody, I prepare the subject or their people. They tell me. I just show up 30 minutes before the shoot, and then I get 15 minutes with the subject and then we’re done. I gently push back and I say that really what’s best for us is to get there two hours before because you’re in a high-rise, and security can be tricky, and we could be directed back down to the loading dock. That’s another thing. I have to clear my certificates of insurance with the building. So I express to them that my coming to their location is not walking in the door. I come in with a lot of gear. I have an assistant. It’s cumbersome and it takes some time. Once they understand the scale that I’m working with, then they start to offer me more time. And in a recent case, I was in a high-rise building in Chicago to shoot an executive. I did some research and looked online, and I found stories about their new corporate headquarters. So I had pictures and, in communication with the PR person, I said, “How about this place? How about this place?” And they said, “Sure, that stuff’s available.” They were going to put me in a boardroom, of course, with a big table in the middle. That’s generally what happens. It’s terrible there — big rooms, but there’s nowhere to put a light stand. So I offered them my research and they said, “Yes, that’s it, exactly. Our offices haven’t changed.” And once they saw that I was interested and curious and really wanted to do the best job by them as I could, they took me through the whole building, and then they showed me the floor I was to shoot on. And I said, “Well, what about the floor that he works on? Is that available?” She hemmed and hawed and she said, “Well, yeah, maybe we could go up there.” And we did. And that’s where we shot. That’s where the location was. In the end, they wanted to license the pictures themselves from me, so they liked them that much. So their collaboration with me was crucial and are having a successful shoot that lasted exactly 15 minutes.
Louanne I think it’s really important then that the right photographer is chosen, one that has the communication skills that go deeper than just their skills at taking that photograph. In my experience in working with photographers, those have been the most successful photoshoots.
Saverio The magazine might not ever really quite know the hurdles I had to go through to get what I got, but it’ll always come back from the subject: “Thank you for the photo shoot.” They might say something like, “It was a great experience. We enjoyed the photographer.” That gets communicated back to the magazine and I’m a representative of the magazine, although I’m a freelancer, and I make it perfectly clear, if I misrepresent my client, I’m not going to work for my client again. We may have beautiful work, but in some way, we need to earn the trust of our clients. That’s oftentimes in that phone call that we have with a client. Initially, I’m earning your trust by listening, repeating what I hear, making sure that I get it, making sure that they know that I get it. And it goes beyond the work itself.
Scott Now, in looking at your portfolio — and for anyone listening, I strongly encourage you to view Saverio’s portfolio at hellosaverio.com — there is a lot of humor in the work that you’ve produced, or at least the work that you’re showing there. Do you feel like that is a reflection of a “style” that you bring to your work?
Saverio Yeah. Thanks for noticing that, Scott. For a long period in my career, and maybe it continues on, I always wanted to hit on the lighter side of life. It’s more interesting to me. And in doing work that touches a humorous bone in the subject, it takes them out of the present moment and it becomes something like a play. I could tell them that we were not going to represent you as you think of yourself every day, but we’re going to use metaphor. You’re a metaphor for your story, and this is how we’re going to orient the shoot. Humor is a great icebreaker. I think people gravitate to humorous content, whatever it is. But I think for me, why I use humor when I do, it’s often because it’s very spontaneous. All of the editorial photography I do, if there’s any humor involved, it’s just invented right then. Or maybe I have a little bit of a plan, but it’s developed with the subject right then. I generally don’t clue them in too early. We build this quiet trust between them and myself, and it’s a kind of a sacred experience in a way. It’s very intimate, of course, because I’m asking them to do things that they don’t think of themselves as doing. When I come with a funny idea that I want to try with somebody, I come with a couple other ideas, too. I might need to warm them up. I need to do some things that are just in the can, just some safeties. And then once I feel like we’re really rolling, then I’ll pull out the idea to get in the manhole cover or stand inside that shopping cart. The photography in magazines: That’s your entry point. You cannot scan a page fast enough to get a sense of tone as we can by looking at imagery. That’s why imagery will be in magazines and in content, I predict, forever, whether it’s video or still imagery or GIF, because we experience the world first and foremost through our eyes, and that hooks people in.
Scott Do you find that it’s harder to produce the results you want when you’re going in on a humorous composition or a humorous take on a subject? I just know from a lot of the shoots that I’ve produced, where we’re trying to get to a visual joke, that it’s actually a lot more work than doing something that is more neutral because your wardrobe, your propping, your lighting — everything has to be absolutely precise, or you kill the humor. If you don’t set the right tone with all those supporting elements, the joke will not read as you intended to. Do you find that to be a challenge?
Saverio It is. Yeah. That’s a good way of putting it. Things do need to align. It’s like telling a joke. You could tell a joke poorly. Or you could set it up really well. Same as with photography. It needs to be set up. And all of those elements are your setup or else it just falls flat. So oftentimes, with editorial photography, when I’m trying to do something that’s a little bit humorous, what I’m trying to do in those cases is to just figure out where the friction really lies and keep it as simple as possible. So should the wardrobe not be right or the hair isn’t right because I don’t have a groomer, the prop that I’m using is strong enough to carry us through. And then I also have options if I’m going to come in with a humorous concept, and I’m going to have two or three ideas. If it’s rubber mice that I need, I’m going to have six kinds of rubber mice. If I need a magnifying glass, there’s going to be four magnifying glasses because you won’t know if it’s going to work or not. I did a picture of a kid eating at a restaurant. The editor was there and she said, “Um, could you try and eat more?” And I didn’t know what she meant, but I heard, “Stuff your face.” And so it was this kid, stuffing some lentil burger into his face. And it was just the way that his eyes looked away from the camera. He was compensating for how much he had to stretch his mouth. And it was so nuanced. I didn’t go in with a plan, but I went in with an open-ended idea of the things I would need to try.
Disclaimer The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any organization, employer, or company they may be affiliated with. Covering the Spread is intended for informational and educational purposes only. While we explore topics such as design trends, industry practices, and future predictions, the content shared should not be interpreted as professional advice or a definitive guide. Listeners are encouraged to conduct their own research before making decisions related to magazine design, publishing or business strategy. We may reference or discuss third party content technologies or companies. These mentions are for context and commentary purposes and do not imply endorsement or affiliation unless explicitly stated. Additionally, given the ever-evolving nature of media and technology, some discussions may become outdated. We strive for accuracy, but we make no representations or warranties about the completeness or reliability of any information shared. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the spread.
Scott How often are you put in the position of fully producing a shoot, that is to say, hiring all the external staff?
Saverio You need the stylists, the hair and makeup, the props, and so forth for editorial shoots most of the time, and on occasion, when I work for regional magazines, they have their own relationships with certain crew members — makeup artists and groomers — that they will pay on their own budget and bring into the shoot. But on the bigger shoots, I staff it from top to bottom, and it may be one or two assistants, it may be a groomer, maybe a makeup artist. Generally, editorial assignments are fairly small in terms of crew. It’s rare to have more than four people on set, versus a commercial assignment where there could be 12-20 people on set. Editorial assignments need to be efficient. We don’t have a lot of time. There’s not always the same kind of preparation, and there isn’t as much money at stake. So they have to be smaller.
Scott Between doing a commercial shoot and an editorial shoot, is there one that you out and out prefer, apart from the fee that you get to enjoy at the end of it?
Saverio Yeah, the fee is nice. Commercial shoots pay much better than editorial shoots, where editorially, you get the budget from the client, and there’s not a whole lot of wiggle room. And we don’t necessarily do it for the financial reward, although that’s certainly important. But the scale of the shoots can be bigger. I can’t say that I prefer one or the other. Sometimes I have anxiety around each one, which I think is a good thing, because it also means that I’m probably taking some risks and stretching myself, and that puts me into a good creative place. I love the freshness of editorial photography because it’s like a play. There’s a beginning, a middle and an end, and I think of it as an arc. The best parts of the shoot happen before the crescendo and immediately after the crescendo, and that’s an arc that I can take them through at my own pacing, with my own style, by myself, without somebody over my shoulder and jumping in front of the camera and trying to redirect the subject and confusing them. On the other hand, a commercial shoot is different than an editorial shoot because it’s run by committee. There’s the art director, the creative director, the executive. This is their first experience with the production and everyone has something to say. And my job as a diplomat is to listen to everyone’s opinions, synthesize them into action, to move forward. How do we honor everyone’s opinion — include everybody, but also deliver the best work that I can?
Louanne A lot of our listeners are associations, so they tend to be on the conservative side and don’t have the largest budget in the world. So two things are happening at once: One is a smaller, smaller-ish budget. And the second is that you’ve got people that you need to photograph that are on the conservative end of the spectrum. So with those challenges in mind, tell me how you would work with your art director on resolving those challenges.
Saverio That’s a great question. Universities, not-for-profits often have publications — online and print publications. They’re wide audiences. They’re not necessarily as specific interest as some publications can be. So that does mean that you’re not going to get too wacky, which is honestly quite fine. As Scott pointed out, sometimes doing the more conceptual pictures has a lot more effort, a lot more moving parts. A great photograph connects to us emotionally. So it could be a picture of somebody living with multiple sclerosis and their partner walking in a park. It’s not just about them walking together, it’s how they’re walking together, how they’re looking at each other. Are they looking at each other? What’s that body language like? And so I come to it like a film director, and I have to give them direction. Open-ended direction leads to a lot of humanness. That is a big thing in that type of arena and editorial photography. Do you believe it? Does it feel staged? Does it feel overly produced? Especially with those association publications, because those people that are participating are not getting paid and they’re giving up their time, and they need to feel honored and respected, and that they brought something to the shoot that was collaborative. And I make that so.
Scott I used to work with someone who had a bias against model-staffed shoots, because his philosophy was that you will never get surprised during a shoot by someone whose profession it is to be on camera all the time, because they’re only going to perform within the parameters of what they know to be successful. Whereas when you’re working with “real” people or people who rarely appear on camera, you have a greater likelihood of being surprised — pleasantly surprised — by something that they spontaneously bring to a shoot. Has that been your experience?
Saverio It’s a different challenge because you really do have to bring the real person up to speed, really just about how this is going to go. A professional model knows how to time their poses between strobe flashes. They’re just going to do that. They’re going to hit something that looks good on camera again and again and again. But they have a repertoire. A real person doesn’t know their repertoire. It’s my job to figure out their repertoire, and I have to do it quickly. When I give them some direction, they might interpret it in some very unexpected way. If I want them to emote a kind of seriousness, maybe they take it a little too far, and it’s amazing how they take it a little too far. That’s where the surprise exists.
Scott Let’s get into copyright because this is something that is really not well understood, even within our industry, among people who traffic in this kind of stuff every single day and ought to know what their rights are and what the legal responsibilities of organizations that are commissioning photography are. So can you walk us through how it plays out in your practice?
Saverio Sure, sure. Copyright is increasingly important to photographers to maintain as often as possible. AI puts this into question, and at this recording, it’s a bit unresolved. But basically, the law says that when you squeeze the shutter, you own the intellectual property of what’s produced by the camera. And so when you work with a magazine, there’s oftentimes contracts and the contracts are presented from a legal department to a photographer who must agree to them. It could be a situation where we’re agreeing for work-for-hire, whereby whatever we produce on that shoot is no longer our intellectual property. It all gets transferred over to the publication as if we were an employee of theirs. Other ones have “shared copyright” where you share your copyright with the publication — you maintain it — but maybe you have to ask for permission to use it for your own purposes, and you can’t relicense it for an embargo period. I’m seeing fewer work-for-hire contracts for magazines. They are carving out more liberties for photographers to use that work in relicensing, which is very important. There’s often an embargo period, so we might agree to three or six months after publication date that the images would not be resold. I think that all of that is quite reasonable. But copyright is intellectual property. And what we have, that’s what we have. That’s our currency. That’s our legacy. And if we photographers give it away too freely, we are losing out on potential income, but also the incentive to make the best work possible. If we know that the work that we’re making is no longer ours to use, I don’t know that I’m as incentivized to do all the things that we’ve been talking about doing to make the greatest pictures ever.
Louanne Let’s talk a little bit about stock photography. A long time ago, we didn’t have stock photography. We had to hire our photographer or an illustrator to do everything. So how much has stock cut into your bottom line?
Saverio I can’t say that it’s really cut into my bottom line, but I know it’s present. I don’t participate in it. I don’t contribute to the stock agencies I used to. But you have to work in such volumes of photographs to see any return, any substantial return on it. Maybe in a year, if I make $60 on some piece of stock that I gave over to Getty 15 years ago, maybe that’s it. So I really don’t participate in it too much. I think perhaps illustration might be taking a bigger hit than photography because of the nature of it.
Scott Yeah, well, there’s some pretty elaborate composites in your portfolio. Do you do those yourself?
Saverio Yeah. Some of the work that I do in my portfolio that you might find under conceptual is composited in. A lot of what I do is with Photoshop. I don’t do the retouching myself. I have retouching partners. What I like about doing conceptual photography with retouching is you’re able to jump over a lot of logistical hurdles. I needed to photograph a young girl with a pig, but the pig had to be photographed on the farm and the girl needed to be photographed on a fairground. You really would never know. So as much as I love a documentary, shallow focus, spontaneous portrait, I do also have time for the controlled precision that you get with working with bigger teams.
Louanne I think everybody needs to have a good retoucher on their team. If you, as an art director, don’t have one, call us. We’ll give you a retoucher. And in addition to that, if you’re photographing for a magazine cover and you get these photos back and you just need a clean area for typography, retouchers can help you with that, too, and still make it look as natural as possible.
Scott AI is really cutting into people’s livelihoods, and I’m curious to hear your opinion about this because as I’m sure you know, there are AI workflows that have been integrated into Photoshop. They’re there whether you want to use them or not. And what’s your estimation of the results that you get? Are you satisfied with the results that it gives you, or do you think it needs to be done old school?
Saverio Well, it’s true that those tools are built into Photoshop now. There’s a number of them. You can choose to use them or not, but they are always going to be available to you. And you’re encouraged by the software constantly to use them — the “generate” window is ever-present. And you’ve got to push it out of the way to get it off. But there’s a distinction in Photoshop, what you have to pay for, for generative work and things that you can do unlimited for free. So say, for example, cloning. Cloning is algorithmic at this point. It’s a lot like the old school cloning, but it just sort of does it magically for you. But if you want to put a castle on the hill, you at a certain point are going to pay for those tokens to use that. The downside, my understanding with Photoshop is, is when you’re using those generative tools, it does not reproduce it at the same pixel quality as your original. So if you’re working with a file that is eight thousand pixels wide. It is not going to reproduce eight thousand pixels. You’re going to have a degraded area. And on the other hand, when you work with a retoucher, they’re going to use existing pixels, recreate it. They’re going to make sure that the hand is invisible. The thing that cuts into retouchers’ income a little bit — and it’s probably because I have used it enough — is there’s something called neural filters, where you can clean up wrinkles on people’s faces in a controlled way quite easily now. And so that might have been something that I would call a retoucher to do. Sometimes a retoucher is just what you need to make sure that the picture remains believable. You still need a skilled photographer to match the lighting. So if you have a background and the sun’s coming from the left and you photograph your subject and the sun’s coming from the right, you’ll only know that when you see it put together and the untrained eye will know and people will say, “Well, it just feels cut out.” That’s the thing you hear all the time. It’s because you’re living in the world of two suns. So there still needs to be a lot of attention to matching lighting, not just direction, intensity, quality — everything.
Louanne Tell us a funny story about a photo shoot that you did something, that you just came home and you laughed and you had to tell your family about.
Saverio It was a personal picture that I was doing many years ago, and I had some idea I would go online and I’d find pictures of like fails — people falling down. They’d be in that sort of domain, maybe somebody putting themselves at risk, using three ladders on top of each other to reach some point that they were fixing. And I found some picture along the way of a baby taped to a wall with duct tape. As far as I could tell, it was an authentic picture. I wanted to recreate it. At the time, I had a studio — about a 2,000 square foot studio, and I had wall segments and I was building a lot of sets at the time. So I built this set that was a living room with a patio and chairs and television. I decked the whole thing out and hired a child and an actor who seemed like his father. This was before I was a father myself, and we made a harness out of duct tape and taped this baby to the wall. And he cried and cried the whole time. Of course, I’m not a father at this point. And so this kid, bawling and bawling, is not bothering me at all — apparently, not bothering the parents, who are bringing a bag of Pez over to the kid, popping Pez in the kid’s mouth, and we’d shoot the kid sucking on the Pez between cries. He cries some more and we put some more Pez in his mouth until we got the shot. And what’s funny about that is, many years later — literally the day after my first son was born — I’m in the hospital and I get a call from this agency in Los Angeles, and they tell me that they’ve seen a picture of a baby taped to a wall, and they want to recreate something like it for their children’s hospital ad. And I said, “Well, sure. It’s interesting.” In my mind, I’m thinking, “I’ve done this before.” And they send over my picture. They picked it up off some Russian website
Louanne And they didn’t know it was yours?
Saverio They didn’t know it was mine. And I said, “That’s actually mine.” I showed them the version of it, and I got the job, and I went out to Los Angeles and we did it in a different way. And we had the same problems. We tried to do it properly, where we cast the baby and created a fiberglass form of the baby. He was going to fit like a glove, but boy did that baby cry. He cried and cried. And because it was Los Angeles, the minute that baby cried, we had to pull that baby out, right? And so he couldn’t be shot in there anymore. So in the end, retouching came in handy. We ended up shooting the baby. My assistant sat on the floor. The baby sat on his outstretched hand, pressed against the wall, keeping this baby from falling off the hand. And then we shot the parts of the tape harness that we had made, and we pieced it together and Photoshopped. That picture is on my website. It’s hilarious.
Scott And if it’s okay with you, Saverio, I would love to post it with the transcript to this because I think people will love it. Put the two together and, one more time, tell people what that website is.
Saverio Yeah, you can always find my work at hellosaverio.com, and Saverio is spelled S-a-v-e-r-I-o, and also on Instagram and socials at @hellosaverio.
Scott All right. Thank you so much for a very enjoyable conversation.
Louanne Very great to meet you.
Scott I’m so sorry that we haven’t found a project to collaborate on yet together, but I’m sure we will.
Saverio That would be great. I would love that. And thanks for the interest in my work and giving me the opportunity to share and having such a great podcast. I’ve been enjoying going back into your archives and learning a lot more.
