Interview By Conor Risch

In “ Print First” (“Client Meeting”, August) we profiled Germany’s GEO magazine, a photography driven general interest publication that regularly publishes in-depth stories that run upwards of 20 pages. In addition to the green-bordered flagship magazine, the GEO brand also includes several spin-off publications, making it one of the largest photography clients still in print.
   
Tina Ahrens, a photo editor in GEO’s New York office, started as an intern with GEO nine years ago, working in their Hamburg office before moving to New York three years ago. PDN recently spoke with Ahrens about how photographers should pitch GEO, the changing magazine market, and the types of stories she sees and wishes she saw more of.

PDN: Which GEO-branded issues do you work on?

Tina Ahrens: In the New York office we work for all the different GEOs, because we keep an eye on the market here, trying to find new talent, new stories; we’re buying work from here. Since there are only two photo editors [in New York] we work for all of [the GEO publications], because they all have a need sometimes to work here in the US with photographers, so we’re facilitating that.
   
Apart from the [flagship] green issue, some of the [other GEO publications] are monothematic, so the [editors in the Hamburg office] let us know what they have in mind. If we have a special on Mexico coming up or on Cuba or whatever it is, then we know about those and keep our eyes open, and make contact with photographers here and we contact agencies.
   
For the green issue obviously it’s a bit more loose, we often propose stories as well because we’ve got so many photographers coming through New York to show their work, and if we feel it’s a suitable story that they’re showing us that hasn’t been published previously in Germany we propose it to the editorial team in Hamburg.

PDN: How many photographers do you see on a weekly basis?

TA: People coming to the office to show their portfolio, sometimes it’s several a day, but it probably evens out to one person a day. People who send proposals, it’s endless. For a week it’s really hard to say, maybe 20-30 proposals. People who normally approach us at GEO know the magazines—we run these big, in-depth stories, so people who approach us don’t write us a half-a-page little teaser, they usually go into the details of the story and then often they’ve shot some of it already or completed the project. To go through these proposals takes a lot of time, because it’s not just looking at five images and that’s it; it’s usually trying to look at proper stories.

When we get these mass emails being sent out where they say, ‘Look at my Web site,’ we don’t even have the time to look anymore, because there are just too many.
   
The idea here [in New York] is to keep an eye on the market and in a sense you’re a little bit removed from the everyday [opertations] in Hamburg where you work closely with the graphic designers and you have a lot of meetings with the writers. Here you’re a little bit removed from those daily [operations] and you have a little bit more time to work with photographers on their projects and try to pitch them in the right way.

PDN: If you are picking up a finished story, do you prefer if it is unpublished, or does it not matter?

TA: It actually doesn’t matter as long as it hasn’t been published on the German market and obviously if the story is still relatively new. You don’t want somebody coming in with a story that has been published two years ago, but if there is a story that has been published within the year it’s no problem for us.

PDN: What is the biggest mistake photographers make when they introduce themselves to GEO?

TA: I think a lot of photographers don’t know the magazine well enough when they come in, so I think one key piece of advice for photographers would be to really prepare for who they’re going to see. There is nothing worse than somebody coming in and not really knowing how you run the stories, what kinds of stories have been featured in the latest issues, so they come with a story that has just been published—that obviously doesn’t make a good first impression.
   
Also, we are a story driven magazine, so it’s really hard if a photographer comes in with his best-of portfolio: individual images strung together in a book. That doesn’t give me any idea of how a photographer tells a story, and that’s essential for us.
   
Also I find that lots of photographers are really hesitant to talk about their work. They let you look at their portfolio but they don’t necessarily convey enough of the information. They’re so knowledgeable, they’re the ones who have been in the field, who have worked on the story for many months, and I always find that a big shame when they don’t really show the knowledge that they have about the subject matter, when they’re too quiet—there’s a fine line between that and being too talkative—but when a photographer can clearly articulate what the story is about, why it should be run right now, what the hook or the angle is, where they’re really prepared to talk about the work. Obviously the person has to convince me, and it’s so much easier when people can talk about the body of work they’re created and also talk about why they’ve made certain decisions in the form and the content and the way they approach the subject matter.

PDN: Are there particular subjects you see a lot of photographers working on or other trends you are noticing?

TA: There are always the more news-driven stories that we get a lot of proposals about, whether it’s Afghanistan or other hotspots. We’re in a difficult position, because we do run stories on these conflict countries, but for us it’s usually looking at a much wider issue, so it tries to give more background knowledge, to understand the roots of the conflict or how the conflict affects civilian life. The really news-driven stories don’t work for us; we have such long production times. But more long-term projects that try to highlight something else but the immediate conflict, that works for us. Also there are a lot of projects coming in from those [conflict] areas.
   
Portraiture is on the rise; a lot more photographers are using portraits to tell a story. An example is Jonathan Torgovnik’s “Intended Consequences,” looking at such a tough subject as the children of rape and the women who have been affected by rape in Rwanda during the genocide. I see more of that; there’s more people approaching subject matter through portraiture.
   
What we’re seeing also in recent years is the market gets really saturated by more and more photographers surfacing. The interesting thing is that a lot more photographers are becoming visible nowadays, and they have a much wider outreach, and so I’ve noticed definitely that over the last couple of years more and more photographers from developing countries have contacted me, have sent proposals, and have shown their work. With the market and media budgets shrinking, I think there is more of a need to acknowledge those photographers too, and more of a willingness to work with local photographers if the standard of their work fits with the magazine in question. In recent years we’ve worked more and more with photographers who were from a particular region rather than sending somebody from the West, from Germany, America or Europe, we’ve worked with people on the ground, which I find a really interesting and wonderful shift.

PDN: Are there particular subjects that you wish you saw more photographers working on?

TA: I think sometimes photographers are a little bit scared to go for these intimate slice of life stories. I think they are infinitely drawn to crisis and conflict and suffering, and sometimes these small stories that are less spectacular at first look are really valid and can be incredibly interesting too if the photographer finds an interesting story and works on it in a good way.

PDN: Why do you think photographers consider GEO such a great magazine to work with?

TA: We give a lot of room to photography, and we run these in-depth stories. I think in the US the only similar magazine in that way is National Geographic, and photographers always like working for them because they give a lot of room to photography. I think that photographers feel that when they have a personal project that maybe they’ve worked on for many years, and then they see that final publication, if we run it in GEO it really represents the work that they’ve done. It’s not just three-to-five images but rather 15-20, sometimes even more, so they feel they get a good platform. And we’re not too crazy in terms of layout. I think it’s often quite a traditional layout and I think in that sense it respects the photographs as well. There’s not too much cropping going on and we’re not trying to overload [the design] with different aspects, so the image is really the first and foremost important thing.

PDN: What are the types of stories that are popular with GEO readers?

TA: We do have a very international focus; I think that’s what readers like, that they get a glimpse of the world, what’s happening outside of Germany. In that sense it’s not so centered on Germany. But increasingly over the last couple of years we’ve featured more psychological stories as well, which I guess reflect people’s preoccupation with themselves. That’s something that has worked really well in Germany; I don’t know what that says about us. You have that element where you try to reflect the reader’s universe and what they’re preoccupied with, and then at the same time you give a glimpse into other realities in the world out there, so I think those are the two strands that are most important in GEO.

PDN: What makes GEO unique in the German market?

TA: We have a wide spectrum of stories that we feature, from wildlife and nature stories to geopolitical, scientific and historical features. So GEO is featuring a wide variety of content, and that’s what I think makes it different to other magazines in Germany. Each of the stories we run is visually really opulent and driven by photography.

PDN: Are stories about the culture and politics of the United States popular with GEO readers?

TA: We do have stories on the US, but since we are a monthly and a lot of our readers have subscriptions and they know the magazine very well and follow it very closely, there are only so many stories from the US that we can run, so we limit it. We did something prior to the elections; we did a three part series looking at the state the US is in. We are now about to run another story, Brenda Ann Kenneally’s “Upstate Girls,” so we have stories from America,
but we spread them out.

PDN: Have you noticed any change in the types of stories the GEO audience likes and responds to in the time you have been working at GEO?

TA: Yes, I think it’s something we’ve been struggling with for a couple of years, I think it’s harder and harder to run really harsh stories, we have to package them in something lighter and when you put the magazine together with the different stories that you want to cover in that particular issue, there’s only so much tolerance for heavy, hard stories. I don’t know whether that’s really the readers or the advertisers, who are more and more taking power everywhere in the magazine market. So in that sense it’s becoming harder to publish these really harsh, critical stories. We still do it, but as I said, we try to balance it out; we have other stories to cushion that and to make for a mix that allows for that.

PDN: Is your audience still responding to the longer stories?

TA: I think that’s something where GEO is a little bit the last of its kind. I think we are also trying to find a better balance in the magazine where we run a few shorter stories but we keep the long, in-depth stories. I think we have to cater to the changes in the way people consume a magazine by making some of the stories shorter. It’s definitely a phenomenon that we’ve noticed as well; the patience isn’t as long as it used to be. People are used to getting information very quickly on the net and so on, it’s definitely changing people’s reading habits.