PDN - August 2012

During the lead up to the premiere of the
redesign, Lawson, Garcia and their colleagues
had been experimenting with new styles of
photography, and they assigned Monika Höfler and Jens Schwarz to photograph a
story about Madrid that focused on the city’s nightlife. The accompanying article,
by novelist Gary Shteyngart, “had all of this wonderful imagery of nightlife, couples
making out in bars at 4 in the morning,” Lawson explains. “We knew we wanted to
honor the story and its specificity, its weirdness.” For the opening spread they used a
photograph of a male flamenco dancer in drag crossing a busy street. Another image
showed a piano bar full of revelers. The image,
Lawson notes, “has all these little interesting
dramas going on everywhere you look. Nobody
is posing or smiling for the camera. They’re all
completely lost in the moment.”
The opening spread of the article pairs an image of a beautifully appointed
suite at the Residenza Napoleone III—showing an eighteenth-century landscape
painting above the bed—with a photograph of contemporary art installations at
a nearby gallery.

Leventi’s favorite photograph, which was made from the balcony of a Prada store adjacent to Piazza di Spagna and the Spanish Steps, ran over three quarters of the second spread. His assistant negotiated access to the balcony with the store’s manager.

It was Leventi’s second job for T+L. He says he always wanted to be a regular contributor for a travel magazine. “It’s an adrenaline rush from the beginning to the end,” Leventi says of travel work. There are only so many arrangements that an editor in New York City can make so it’s up to the photographer to talk his or her way into restaurants or, for instance, onto someone’s balcony. Attitude is key, Leventi says, as was an Italian-speaking assistant in this case.

Dave Lauridsen delivered a photograph of a
rainy night in Milan that ran as the opener for
a story in the February issue. “It is a gorgeous,
lyrical shot” that breaks with travel magazine
convention, Lawson notes. “I am so glad that
Dave did not decide there was not a shot there,
put his camera away, stay dry and just quit for
the night. As someone who also shoots, I really
respect him for that.”
“What it comes down to is you’re a represen-
tative for the magazine,” Leventi notes. “As long
as you have a good attitude and you’re having
fun and you’re excited about what you’re do-
ing then [local people] are going to be excited
too and they’re going to help you.” You invari-
ably get “Nos,” Leventi says, but there is always
something else to do, which makes it easy to
just get on with it.

Lawson agrees that photographers who want to shoot travel have to “drink the travel Kool-Aid,” which means they need enthusiasm for the work. “It comes out really quickly that a photographer thinks it’s all just headaches,” Lawson says. “When a photographer asks, ‘Why do you want to send me on a flight to another city to make one portrait?’ that is not a good sign.”

Top, left: The opening spread of a story on the hotels of Abu Dhabi, United Arab
Emirates, featuring photographs by Hugh Stewart. Top, right: The opening spread
of a story on Milan, photographed by Dave Lauridsen. Above: From a story on
Bangkok, photographed by Christopher Wise.

For a June story on Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and its “jaw-dropping hotels,” Hugh Stewart was asked to shoot fashion, travel, architecture and interiors. The opening spread juxtaposes an image of a placid hotel pool lined with palms with a fashion image of a model posed against an audacious elevator wall made of fragments of beautiful blue marble. Says Garcia, “I love how in-your-face the model picture is, coupled with the soft, dusky light of the pool shot.”

Another goal of the redesign was to make images bigger throughout the magazine, and to have more large images in the front-of-book. “Now we are shooting more with spreads in mind,” Lawson notes, adding that “big, beautiful photographic moments that inspire the reader to travel” are what differentiate magazines from other media. “Of course I am thrilled that there are many more large photographs. And needless to say, it’s a wonderful platform for photographers.”