Last Thursday, Hong, our intern Megan and I hit the road with 37 portfolios ready for a jam-packed day of meetings in New York City. We left bright and early from our office outside of Philadelphia since we had just been hit with a winter storm that left us with 14 inches of wonderful travel inhibiting snow.
After an hour and a half of Lincoln Tunnel traffic, we made our way up to our first meeting at McCann. There, we met with Kaia Hemming and Wendy Leahy from the art production department in their gorgeous newly renovated offices. In a large airy room full of interesting table set-ups and accents, we chatted about Wonderful Machine and how we can help them find appropriate photographers for upcoming projects as they pored over a selection of portfolios. They were particularly smitten with Donna Dotan‘s beautiful new book which you can check out in the video below:
They were also big fans of the quirky conceptual imagery in Toby Burditt‘s book as well as Jeremy Cowart‘s portfolio. As they leafed through his book, we told them all about a moving blog post Jeremy recently wrote about John Schneider which went viral (do people still say viral?).
After saying our goodbyes and leaving them with some WM t-shirts, we made our way to the ever-beautiful Hearst building. Our first stop was at Redbook Magazine, where we met with photo editor Rebecca Kimmons in their sunny conference room. She paged through the books we selected as we chatted about upcoming projects and Wonderful Machine. She particularly enjoyed the innovative take on still life in Thomas Liggett‘s portfolio (below):
She also enjoyed the sleek portrait and fashion work by local Brooklyn photographer Zev Schmitz and the mouth-watering imagery in Dhanraj Emanuel‘s book as well as his yummy leave-behinds (with recipes on the back!):
She grabbed leave behinds from all of her favorite books and we were on our way. We quickly packed up the books and wheeled our cart up a few floors to the offices of O, The Oprah Magazine. Once there, we met with Deirdre Read and her colleagues from the photo department in their conference room, which features jumbo-size versions of some of their covers (all of which feature Oprah–of course!). They were very excited to hear more about our stock request feature, which they plan to use for upcoming research for their regular quote feature in the magazine. We put out a spread of books according to their requests. They particularly enjoyed the vivid portraits of comedians in Erin Patrice O’Brien‘s portfolio as well as the interesting make-up still lives in Ted Morrison’s book. Jane Shauck‘s wonderful portrait work also made a lasting impression.
Their photo researcher requested that we go through some of the other features on our site, such as our ever-growing crew page and our tears page. She really enjoys looking at new work from smaller publications she might not see in her day-to-day research, so the tears page was a really great feature for her to check out. The whole team scooped up a stack of leave-behinds as well as WM T-shirts, and we were off to our next meeting.
We arrived at the office of Men’s Journal where we met with Kat Erardi and the rest of the photo department. We sat at a small round table and passed books around as we talked all about our photographers in locations all over the world, and all of the ways we can help them find the right ones for them. The book of Matthew Coughlin caught their eye, his sport portraits are right up their alley:
The team at Men’s Journal really enjoyed the food work of Tyllie Barbosa as well as Michael Darter‘s adventure work and Sarah Lim‘s conceptual portraits. They also enjoyed the humorous portraits of Christopher Lane and wondered how in the world he was able to make his portraits of President Obama and President Bush. The team was super enthusiastic and after looking through all of the books thoroughly they asked to see more. We left them with leave-behinds and t-shirts, and headed a few blocks away to a happy hour at The Three Monkeys.
After the long day of meetings, we feasted on some of the bar fare and enjoyed the company of photographers Christopher Lane and Erin Patrice O’Brien. Winnie Au stopped by as well to have a drink with us and drop off some new promos. It was really great getting to meet up with some of our New York locals, especially since they all trekked to midtown to meet us during one of the busiest times of day!
We laughed, we cried, we hugged it out, and then us three Wonderful Machine gals bade our awesome photographers farewell and made our way back to the car to head out of town. Another successful day of meetings in the books!
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