For our final portfolio event of 2014, Jillian, Alexandra and I packed up our rental car and headed for New York City. We knew this year had to go out with a bang, so we scheduled a series of meetings in Manhattan with M. Shanken Communications, Departures, Wieden + Kennedy and Tom Ford.
We arrived in NYC early on a windy Thursday morning, unloaded a number of our member photographer portfolios and hustled through Times Square for our first meeting with M. Shanken Communications at their brand new offices on Eighth Avenue. M. Shanken is home to a variety of popular magazines including Wine Spectator, Market Watch and Cigar Aficionado. After an elevator ride to the 33rd floor, we sat down with director of photography Alex De Toth, photo editor Laura D’Abate and assistant photo editor Nicole Warren to talk about Wonderful Machine and look at some great work.
Alex, Nicole and Laura are already familiar with WM, mentioning that they find our location-based search tool useful for finding photographers in remote locations. In addition to our in-depth conversation about our photographers, their business and their new office, we shared our interests in the hit podcast Serial, burly mountain men and wine. Although all of the books we brought were enjoyed, the ladies were really impressed by portfolios from Jamey Guy and David Arky. You can check out a video of Jamey’s portfolio below:
As we wrapped up our meeting at M. Shanken and packed up the remaining portfolios, Alex offered to show us the view from their office. It was absolutely stunning.
Next, we met with assistant photo editor Valeria Suasnavas at Departures, a luxury travel magazine with an office on Sixth Ave. Here, we discussed our services and some of Valeria’s recent projects, including a story featuring interiors shot in Paris (sounds dreamy!). Valeria was also already a WM user— the Departures staff frequently utilizes our stock request tool. She particularly enjoyed books from Ben Pipe, Tom Parker and Joe McNally.
After Departures, we headed to Tribeca to pay a visit to Wieden + Kennedy. Their office was adorned with an incredible variety of holiday decorations, including a jumbo Christmas tree, wooden reindeer and a virtual fire displayed on an iMac. It even made a crackling noise!
The fun staff at Wieden + Kennedy showed us up to the second floor, where we met with junior art buyer Pietro Clemente, creative assistant Tory Nettleton, art producer Hosanna Marshall and director of art production Deb Rosen. We paged through many portfolios, and everyone had their favorites, but a few stand-outs were Hillary Maybery (they have a project based in her home state of Idaho that they are currently looking for a photographer for) and Mike Basher.
Finally, we headed back downtown in the mid-day traffic (that’s about as fun as it sounds) for our final meeting at Tom Ford. We sat down with brand image coordinator Alexine LaSala and producer Minha Khan. Alexine and Minha were new to WM, but were happy to hear about all the different ways we help clients. We were able to set up our laptop at this meeting to check out a few of our photographer’s websites— the creatives really enjoyed seeing Max Riché’s unique cinemagraphs and checking out Janine Joffe’s PDF portfolio.
We wrapped up our successful day with some delicious mini-cupcakes from Baked By Melissa, and headed back to the City of Brotherly Love. See ya next time, New York!
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