Gregory Garry has seen a few magazines come and go. He was photo director for Budget Living (folded 2005), Weekend (folded 2006) and Radar (folded 2008). At Radar, Garry oversaw the wacky celebrity photo-illustration covers that earned the magazine a reputation for satire and snark. Garry had the good luck to leave Budget Living and Weekend before they closed, but he was working at Radar when the axe fell just before Halloween. Garry recently took time out from his job search to chat with PDN about photography, Radar and the future of magazines. Excerpts:

PDN: What are you up to now?

GG: Catching up with friends, watching “The View,” drinking a lot more, doing some writing. I’ve been talking to different publishers and I know it’s a really hard job market. It’s definitely a hard time for magazines.

PDN: You had talked about blogging...

GG: I’m trying to think outside the realm of where I’d been before. I worked in film and TV up until 9/11, and then everything ran into the shitter after 9/11. The same exact thing happened: Budgets were gone, people were closing down. So I just revamped and I switched over to magazines. So I think it’s time to switch over to something else.

PDN: Radar looked like it must have been a lot of fun to work for.

GG: It was. I had been there since the re-launch of it. At first, we were doing Photoshop composite covers, which are really fun to do and obnoxious. Then we went to asking celebrities to be photographed live for the cover. It was a hard transition at first. I think the celebrity PR were coming around.

But magazines are expensive to put out. Photo shoots cost money. That said, my entire photo budget for an entire issue at Radar was like the cost of catering for one shoot at Vogue.

It was a very small staff so we all wore a lot of hats. I love the politics cover we did last year with Hillary and Barack naked. We got a lot of flack for that. I wish we had put John McCain in instead of Giuliani. I didn’t think McCain had a chance. Who knew? I love the Nicole Kidman plastic surgery cover. As far as the live covers, Lindsay Lohan and Pamela Anderson were great. I got to introduce Terry Richardson to Pamela Anderson. They had never met before, never shot before, which I found crazy. It was good to get them together. That was an out-of-control fun shoot, trashing the Chateau Marmont’s penthouse. Pamela’s quite a character. It’s hard to get her to sit still for the pictures.

My favorite shoot of all time was shot with Gavin Bond. I bought this medical skeleton, went down to Miami, and we shot bathing suits on it all over the beach of the Raleigh Hotel. My favorite comment was this old woman who walked by us and said, “Jesus Christ, has it really come to this?”

PDN: I don’t want to make you relive a bad day, but what was it like when they came around at Radar and told everyone the magazine was closing?

GG: It’s big business, the corporate style. I didn’t take too much offense to it. I’ve been through it before. But it’s never fun. I have a friend who works at Citibank and they’re laying off one fifth of their workforce. It’s across the board. It’s not even a recession, this is a depression.

PDN: It seems to be hitting New York really hard.

GG: New York is like the bellwether for the rest of the country. It starts here first. We go into the shitter and the rest of the country follows after. I think the magazine industry needs a bailout.

PDN: Are there any signs to watch for when a magazine is about to go under?

GG: Obviously they get thinner, less ads. Then you start hearing rumors about people going unpaid. I don’t want to talk shit about other magazines, but right now there’s five or six magazines where everyone’s like, “I haven’t been paid in six or seven months from so-and-so.” That’s never a good sign.

PDN: Are you looking around and seeing any photographers who have found a way to do well right now?

GG: The big names are doing well right now. If you’re really tenacious and pushy and getting yourself out there...

PDN: Does that help, being pushy?

GG: I don’t like photographers who call you every week: “Oh, I’m calling to touch base.” That annoys me. But if a photographer does a project on their own that’s really clever and smart and funny, and they send you either a Web site of it or a mailer of it, and you stop in your tracks and say, “Hey, that’s cool.” – That’s the best thing to do if you’re a new photographer.

I think the future is going to be more like that: Spec shoots. Photographers doing their own shoots and selling them to magazines. When magazine budgets are slashed like this, that’s just a smart thing to do. Do your own thing and hopefully the world will catch up.

PDN: Do you think there’s much a market for Web content, particularly photography?

GG: If you have a budget to actually buy photography for a Web site, that’s great, but usually you don’t. But magazines, books, ads, they’re all going to need pictures for their content, so it’s not going to go away. Just for a while it’s going to be a bargain-basement, everything-must-go kind of thing.

PDN: What do you think went wrong with Radar?
 
GG: It’s hard times for magazines, especially independent magazines. There aren’t vast wells of advertising money to pull from. I’m afraid we’re going to see a lot more closings in the next few months. The fact is that people just aren’t buying as many magazines. Magazines: we’re living off the fat of the land. We’re a luxury item; we’re not essential. So when you have less money, what’s the first thing you do? You cut away the nonessential stuff.

I have no regrets. I had a great team that worked with me in the photo department. We had a lot of fun, we got away with murder for two years. The magazine world is a lot more boring now that we’re gone.