Page 14 - Capture Nov 21-Jan 22

a look back at 2021 editorial
ABOVE: Part of a campaign for Common Hours. CD: Bruna Volpi. Makeup: Linda Jefferyes.
Hair: Daren Borthwick.
RIGHT: Published in the Mother’s Day edition of Sunday Life.
FAR RIGHT: Victor Roman Castro
(41) and Gertrudis Ortega Ramirez (38), take a
portrait with their one-month-old daughter at the El Buen Samaritano migrants’ shelter in Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico on 28 April, 2021. Photo by Gertrudis Ortega Ramirez and
Adam Ferguson.
American West, and a cover story about COVID long-haulers for The New York Times magazine.”
There was no real surge of work after lockdowns ended in America because it was a slow, state-by-state process, but Ferguson had been working steadily through them. “I had work during the height of the pandemic. I covered the presidential election in Wisconsin when COVID numbers were going through the roof. I went to a Trump rally and was unmasked for about two hours in a sea of people who had no masks on at a time when the COVID numbers were super-high and I thought it would probably be mathematically impossible for me to leave without contracting COVID. But I didn’t get it,” he says.
While he hasn’t noticed any stylistic changes in editorial photography, he feels that the pandemic exacerbated other industry trends. “Editorial budgets have definitely gotten smaller. It has definitely become harder for smaller publications. Ultimately, I don’t think it is really possible anymore to work the way I did for a large part of my career as a documentary photographer, as a photojournalist. It’s possible for a period of your life, but I don’t think it’s a sustainable work model. The budgets of magazines and newspapers have been continually declining over the years and there’s also been a large diversification in assigning by newspapers and magazines.” He adds that he sees these as positive changes because they’ve come out of the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements. “But what you have is less work and more people getting hired, so it’s really difficult to work regardless of who you are, how old you are, and what gender you are.”
The pandemic definitely made it harder to cultivate personal work, Ferguson stresses. His current personal project depends on him being in Australia so he has had to suspend that. “A lot of people have had stalled projects and stalled travel. People in the middle of book projects have had to stop. That’s challenging for most photographers in all spheres of photography, whether you’re a wedding photographer, an advertising photographer, or a documentary photographer.” He adds that while here’s been a lot of flux in everyone’s careers, it would have been so even without the pandemic. “Old fields of photography are becoming increasingly challenging to survive in. The pandemic just added to that,” he notes.
This year became a turning point for Ferguson. He began to write about his work on subscription platform, Substack. He does a weekly newsletter-masterclass, sharing his career knowledge and teaching. “One of the things that I’ve realised through doing it – and to be honest, it wasn’t the total intention, but became apparent really quickly – is the way it has benefited my career. By being an author, I’m taking a bit of power back from just being a photographer and being hired by people. All of a sudden, I’m making my own stories and crafting my own narrative. The whole photographic landscape has been equalised by technology and social media has changed photography fundamentally, both in how we disseminate photographs and who sees them, so by becoming more of an author around my own work and explaining its conceptual process I’m adapting as more of a teacher. It feels like a new career developing.”
Georges Antoni: Testing, loving, and recalibrating Georges Antoni has continued to win commissions from fashion magazines as usual this year, but he has also shot fashion advertising. “I was lucky enough to shoot a Hugo Boss campaign that was
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