Photos from Home

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AP: This is certainly an interesting moment in American history to be focusing on people's relationships with their homes.
RS: Somebody asked me, how can you do a book about homes during the worst housing crisis ever? And my reaction was, every news story you read about the crisis is all about money, money, money. But this book actually shows why it's so poignant that people are losing their homes.

AP: You do cover the fact that people are losing homes.
RS: Even though this was a sponsored book, like all of our books, those sponsor companies had no editorial review or control over the product. We're a group of photojournalists, and the book isn't a Hallmark card about home. There are homeless people in the book. There are people being thrown out of their homes because of subprime mortgages. There's a statistic included that says that more than two million Americans were evicted from their homes in the last 12 months as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis.

AP: Yes, but overall most of the pictures present a positive view of American lives.
RS: I think that's an accurate assessment of our lives. It wouldn't be journalistically accurate merely to show how much pain there is out there. Most people are fairly happy in their lives.

AP: Sometimes I think photojournalists and editors forget that.
RS: Absolutely. There's this idea that the only right way to show the world is by showing all the horror that exists out there. But I don't think that's right.

AP: How do you select the photographers for a project like this?
RS: A lot of them are people we know and we're sure they'll produce something great. But we also look for new people we've never worked with because they can bring so much energy to the project. We look for people based on location and subject matter, too.

AP: How long does it take to produce a book like this?
RS: We start about three or four months in advance of when the photographers go out into the field. We have a whole team of researchers who set up assignments. It ends up looking spontaneous, but it's spontaneity on top of a lot of planning. Then we always tell the photographers that despite the assignments we set up, if they get out into the field and find a better story, go with that. I'd say only about half of the images in the book came about from the assignments we set up in advance.

AP: This is the type of photojournalism that used to define magazines.
RS: The pictures in the book are obviously important, but they don't live on their own. The essays don't live on their own. The statistics don't live on their own. But when you weave them together you get something really powerful. Doing these books is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and you've got all the pieces but you've lost the box the pieces came in, so you don't really know what the picture is that you're supposed to be making. So you put it all together and say, "I hate that," and you throw it out and then start over. We had a wonderful designer, Brad Zucroff, who had the unenviable task of taking these 25,000 pictures and trying to figure out how to put them together. He was helped by photo editors like Karen Mullarkey, Eliane Laffont, and Michele Stephenson.

AP: Magazines just don't do that kind of photojournalism anymore. They don't have the space or budgets.
RS: This book represents an interesting trend in terms of publishing photojournalism. No publisher can afford to do the kind of books I do. We're not trying to do books as cheaply as possible. We do French fold covers, where the cover jacket has a extra fold at the bottom, and thick mat paper with a fifth-color varnish that makes the images pop. These are very costly. The publishers we work with are distributors, but we deliver a final product. And we can charge $40. That's the same as we charged 20 years ago, but the prices for paper and ink and printing have all gone up. And the way we manage that is by getting sponsors.

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