Our fave photographers share their most memorable Monthly shots.
Phyllis Christopher
I was so nervous to meet
phyllischristopher.com
David Wilson
It’s all a blur of Nobel Prize Laureates. It seems like every third person I shot has one. Back in the mid-‘90s, I took photos of a scientist named George Smoot who worked at U.C. Berkeley and was designing some information-gathering device to go up with a space shuttle launch and take measurements. of stuff. It was the first (and so far only) time I’ve met anyone named Smoot. We had an hour-long conversation about generalities. He appeared submerged in his serious research, but went along with my weird suggestions for setting up his portrait in his lab. Then, a decade later in 2006, I woke up to Morning Edition on NPR, which announced that the Nobel Prize in Physics had been awarded that day to . . . George Smoot.
davidwilson.net
Anthony Pidgeon
My ideal with editorial portraits is to create images that tell the story without needing a caption, and I think this one of Richard Heinberg, the peak oil author, succeeded particularly well. I had just a short window of time in an alley in Santa Rosa to make the shot happen, so we had to work quickly using just ambient light. Richard gave me some great expressions to work with, but it really came together when I asked him to put his finger on the trigger and look at it out of the corner of his eye. I still really like the illustrative quality of the image, though today I would have lit it more dramatically.
anthonypidgeon.com
Averie Cohen
I always enjoyed photo assignments from The Monthly because of the opportunities they gave me to meet and photograph interesting people (or events) whose paths would not have otherwise crossed mine. One of those was the late sculptor Peter Voulkas. I had heard his name but knew very little about him or his work, so had no idea what to expect. I loved his studio, a huge garage with graffiti-covered walls, built-in skateboard ramps for his sons, and a buffalo head sitting nose-up in the middle of it all. And I found him to be charming, playful, and accessible.
Alain McLaughlin
I was in El Salvador photographing Fair Trade coffee growers and heard that the notorious Atlacatl battalion of the El Salvador national army was having a disbandment ceremony. This U.S.-trained and -supplied battalion was organized specifically to fight the FMLN guerrillas and was responsible for many of the horrific crimes of the war, including the killing of six Jesuit priests and the massacre at El Mozote in 1981, where almost 1,000 people were murdered.
This December 1992 dissolution was almost one year after the preliminary peace agreement was signed and mandated by that agreement. It included a symbolic laying down of arms as the battalion members were to be absorbed by other Army units. I was impressed that The Monthly would run a multiple-page picture story with some of the images I made that trip—very progressive!
amphotoblog.com
Pat Mazzera
I did these portraits of young slam poets in my basement studio in San Francisco about five years ago. The boys were a motley group who were smoking and selling pot to each other in my backyard. I had a tough time getting them to leave after the photo shoot because they worked themselves up to a rowdy froth during the session. Even my housemates complained. After the story was published, they called and were interested in using the photos for their promotional material, but refused to pay the most minimal amount for them.
mazzera.com
Aengus McGiffin
The owner of Top Dog refused to be photographed and I had to come up with something for his Kilduff interview. I was up all night doing this thing. I had just met Adair (now my wife) and she was spending the night in my little Richmond in-law unit. She likes to tell the story about how she went to bed and in the morning I was still working on it. You can see how I had the thing set up. Maybe a grid of four photos, or the Mr. Bill one—“Oh, no!” Mind you, we must have done some Photoshop work to touch this thing up.
Lori Eanes
I liked the photos because I love working with my Hasselblad camera. It has amazing detail and looks great in black and white. I really like the square format and your graphic design of using the four photos together. I also liked the assignment a lot. I admired these women [who did a documentary about accepting one’s aging face] and I thought they looked strong in the photo, especially in this age of digital retouching of everything. These photos are not [retouched].
lorieanes.com
Barbara Traub
I got a gig back in ’97 to photograph the Art Car West Fest in the Bay Area, including this early morning shot by Baker Beach of Harrod Blank and Camera Van under a half moon. I used a 35mm. camera with color slide film that was later scanned and converted to black and white. http://home.earthlink.net/~traubleaux.
