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| © Martin Fuchs |
| Mark Lubell |
Mark Lubell
New York Bureau Chief, Magnum Photos
On List Because: His savvy Web partnerships and promotions have reinvigorated a famous but calcified brand name in photography
Secret of His Success: An understanding of the viral nature of modern image management
Quote: "The key is simply to get pictures out into the world, where people can see them. That's the essence of photojournalism."
Website: www.magnumphotos.com
You know the world has changed when the New York City bureau chief of Magnum Photos starts an interview by telling you that his background is in business, not art. So it is with Mark Lubell. A graduate of Syracuse University (major: history; minor: business), he also attended the London School of Economics, then worked in the dot-com world. But that is where the story gets interesting.
Lubell's dot-com office, three blocks from the World Trade Center, was impossible to access after 9/11, and the company itself foundered. With nothing else to do, Lubell became involved with the groundbreaking photographic project Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs. Conceived by photojournalist Gilles Peress, the project was a grassroots memorial in which professional and amateur photographers submitted images relating to the event, which were then sold for $25 from a Prince Street storefront space and over the Internet. It became a genuine phenomenon, eventually raising some $10 million for 9/11 charities.
In hindsight, Here Is New York can be seen as the beginning of what is now called "citizen journalism," and in that sense it may go down as one of the most significant events in photographic history. Lubell caught onto the significance right away. "It absolutely opened my eyes to a new world that photography was entering -- how photographs could be put out into the world in this way," he says.
Peress, a Magnum photographer, was so impressed with Lubell's acumen at running the chaotic business of the project that he brought him into the agency, a notoriously chaotic organization in its own right. Lubell became the New York bureau chief in 2004 and has moved swiftly to apply the lessons he'd learned at the 9/11 project about the modern, viral nature of selling photographs. "You have to get pictures seen out there in the world," he says.
His biggest move was to establish a business partnership with Slate, the online culture magazine, which now features Magnum stories -- both current and archived stories. "Slate, which averages ten million users a month, gets tremendous content, and they drive some two million visitors a month to our own Website," says Lubell. "You get a guy like Paul Fusco, who spent five years photographing Chernobyl, produced a book with a 5,000-copy print run, of which 320 copies sold. We put his essay on the Slate site, they promoted it on the MSN home page, and within 48 hours some three million people saw Paul's work."
With the same goal in mind, Lubell also created a billboard in New York's Times Square projecting Magnum images edited by guest curators such as Spike Lee, and he contracted with hotelier Ian Schrager to put Magnum pictures in the rooms of his chic new Gramercy Park Hotel in New York. He has lined up 15 New York galleries to show Magnum exhibitions for a Magnum Festival in June 2007, which will coincide with the suddenly-hot agency's 60th anniversary. "We're going to be saying not only 'look at what we've done,'" says Lubell, "but also, 'here is the future.'"
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