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Open The New York Times Magazine on a Sunday and you’re bound to find a photograph that surprises you, educates you, makes you smile or causes you to stare. Many of the magazine’s photographs do all of these things. According to Times Magazine director of photography Kathy Ryan, staffers call that stopping power “the ‘glue’ that keeps readers interested.” How the magazine and its contributing photographers achieve that glue effect week after week is what sets it apart from nearly every other magazine in the world. Every photographer seems to want to work for the Times Magazine, and part of the reason must be that, in theory, they can. There is no style or genre of photography that the picture editors won’t utilize if they think it will lead to a unique image. “Many other magazines go for a certain kind of look and they have a certain subject matter, and it’s very defined and it’s not expansive,” Ryan told PDN during an interview at the Times offices in June. “I like to think that with us, everything is possible.” This belief is manifest in a new book, The New York Times Magazine: Photographs (Aperture), edited by Ryan, which covers more than 30 years of the magazine’s history. The book is divided into chapters on portraits, documentary photography, photo-illustration, style, and special projects, and the pages are peppered with anecdotes from photographers, the magazine’s editors and even from subjects pictured in the photographs. Ryan’s goal in editing the book was to present some of the magazine’s best images in an artful way, with a rhythm, a sense of pacing, and peaks and troughs of intensity and wit, in the same way, Ryan notes, that they put together an issue of the magazine. The photo cognoscenti will appreciate the stories from peers and from the editors but, Ryan explains, the text is accessible so that a layman can “learn something about the act of producing photography for a magazine.” As Ryan notes in her foreword, “cross-assigning,” or hiring photographers who do not normally take editorial assignments, is a signature of the publication. Ryan is credited with that innovation, and in the book she traces its foundation to a particular issue of the magazine published in May 1997. “The Times Square Issue,” as it was dubbed, explored the area’s change in the late Nineties from the colorful, seedy district that was both vilified and celebrated, into the relatively clean, corporate tourist trap it is today. “That Times Square issue was a real gift because the subject is so fantastic,” Ryan recalls. “I remember thinking just about every photographer on the planet is going to love this.” The issue was largely photographic, which gave Ryan a lot of pages to work with. “I just felt strongly that one of the ways to keep it interesting and come up with something new and bust through clichés would be to go to artists and people who don’t normally work on assignments for magazines,” she says. 2.2 inch C6 Analog TV FM Dual Cards Cell Phone(Champagne) 3.2 inch TV WIFI i5 Wifi Analog TV Java Dual Cards Touch Screen Cell Phone (White) Fashion Square Shaped Watch Dial Wide Watchband Silicone Electronic Wrist Watch (Red) H8 TV Quad Band Dual Cards with Analog TV Java Touch Screen Cell Phone(Black) s5233 leather case 6018 Round Shaped Blue Watch Dial Colorful Rainbow Plastic Cement Watchband Women's and Kid's Wrist Watch Chic Hong.S.D Round Black Dial Waterproof Stainless Steel Wrist Watch with 3 Roman Numerals Hour Marks - Black Chic FLO A99 Golden Case Rubber Wrist Watch with 12 Roman Numerals Hour Marks for Men - Red Lovely Round Dial Hello Kitty Patterned Wrist Watch for Childen - Red Manly Os.Dandon Quartz Wrist Watch with Dual Dial & Stainless Steel for Males - Silver Multi-function Slim Cigarette Design Laser Pointer Pen with Keychain 4S Quad Band Dual Cards Wifi Analog TV Java FM Touch Screen Cell Phone Chic Bariho A661 Round Black Dial Leather Quartz Watch with Wheel Patterned for Men (Black) MI88 7 inch Google Android 2.1 3D Game Camera Gravity Sensor Table MID gohan costume K1000 Quad Band Dual Cards with Analog TV FM QWERTY Keyboard Cell Phone(Red with Gray) Superpad 745 Google Android 2.2 7 inch 720P Video Support Resistive Screen Tablet PC ec00110k USB Led lights LED Fashion Digital Watch 86409 White Anti-UV Full Frame Fashion Unisex PC Lens Sport Sunglasses High Quality Double Movement Steel Wrist Watch w/ Red LED Light Waterproof (White Dial) multimedia bmw e39 Exquisite Black Chasis Stainless Steel Band Watch with Diamond dv-8786gb M1008C 10.1 inch Google Android 2.3 Amlogic ARM cortex A9 1GHz Tablet PC K508 TV Quad Band Dual Cards with Analog TV Java Touch Screen Cell Phone (Black) wholesale tvs from china upad MID713 Google Android 2.1 7 inch 3G & Bluetooth 10.3 Flash Support Capacitive Screen Tablet PC led watch samurai Sex Dolls series diy grass growing plant Lighters Charming Feminie Quartz Watch with Beautiful Floral Chasssis and KT Pattern (Pink) Without setting foot in Times Square, artist Thomas Demand created a miniature massage parlor scene based on a source photograph the Times provided him. Ryan contacted Abelardo Morell and asked him to make a camera-obscura photograph that showed the Times Square signage reflected in a hotel room. Morell told Ryan he had already been thinking of making the photograph, she recalls. Nan Goldin photographed a drag queen. Lars Tunbj?rk made a Mondrian-esque image of old, boarded-up buildings slated for demolition. Chuck Close created a portfolio of portraits of Broadway actors. Close initially balked when Ryan asked if he would participate, telling her that he didn’t do assignments and always chose his subjects himself. “I asked him three times [before he agreed]. That was a lesson,” Ryan recalls. “Creative people can’t resist a challenge, and that has held true through all these years.” Among the traditional editorial and reportage photography in the issue were Annie Leibovitz’s portraits of elderly women living in SRO housing, and Larry Towell’s photographs of the Port Authority. Towell’s black-and-white image of a police holding cell, which Ryan cites as an example of “classic reportage” and “extraordinary seeing,” depicts a bench where suspects were made to sit. On the white wall behind the bench one can see a record of the many people who’d been held there in four silhouettes of dirt and sweat left on the wall countless suspects had leaned against. At the time Ryan wasn’t thinking about cross-assigning as a template for the magazine’s photography, but during the creation of the Times Square issue it clicked as a way of bringing a “fresh vision” to the magazine week in and week out. One of the central challenges for the magazine is finding new ways to engage viewers visually with stories and subjects that are repeated time and again, be they about politics, events like the Olympics, critical social issues, wars or natural disasters. “If there was some mantra, it’s ‘how do I reinvent it now,’ ” Ryan says. The magazine goes on press ten days before it is released, which in the current media environment further complicates the photography department’s task, because many of the great news photos of a particular story have already been widely seen. “By definition the photo assignments have always called for something that would be a little more interpretive or little bit more of a step back, with analysis, or looking forward and trying to anticipate something others might not have gotten to,” Ryan explains. Artists or other photographers not accustomed to editorial assignments are “seeking something else out of the assignment and the pictures they’re going to make, which then benefits us because it gives us the equivalent of a literary take on something,” Ryan says. While bringing in artists and other non-editorial photographers has expanded the magazine’s visual language, reportage and traditional editorial photography remain vibrant and relevant in its pages. The magazine needs editorial photographers who can deliver a celebrity portrait in a time crunch when the pressure from handlers and publicists is on, or who can execute and expand on the magazine’s vision for a conceptual photo-illustration. In an anecdote about a Nadav Kander portrait of President Obama, which Ryan calls “one of the toughest shoots we ever did,” she recounts pleading with the Oval Office for access for the photographer and an assistant. They were allowed to bring one light and had to shoot the president during an interview. “To Nadav’s credit, he made this extraordinary picture in five minutes,” Ryan writes. In a time when a skeptical public questions whether photos are real or altered somehow, Ryan feels “an urgency to publish documentary work. . . . One way to deal with the skepticism is to present pure photo reportage when the subject calls for it,” she says. Because of the level of trust readers have in the Times Magazine, the publication has provided an important platform for classic documentary work. “In a culture full of skeptical viewers, context is also important,” Ryan notes. “When we present classic documentary work, people do come to it expecting it’s the truth and it’s not something that has been altered,” she says. The “Documentary” chapter of the book opens with a Susan Meiselas photograph of Nicaraguan rebels from 1978—the oldest photograph in the book. Also in the chapter is Eugene Richards’s photograph, made in 1989, of a Guinean man suffering from river blindness, which had infected hundreds of thousands of people in West Africa. Richards was so close to the subject that a portion of his face is cut off by the bottom of the frame. The viewer is drawn immediately and inescapably to the man’s glassy, opaque eyes. An image by Sebasti?o Salgado, of the Serra Pelada goldmine in Brazil captures thousands of workers moving over the landscape of the mine. When Ryan took over the position of photography director at the Times Magazine in 1987 as Peter Howe retired, “I was sad to see Peter go,” she recalls. “My initial thought was just missing him terribly and not feeling ready for this job at that point.” Working at the Times Magazine requires the picture editors to make quick creative and logistical judgment calls, and to “pivot from one thought to the next,” Ryan says. “On any given day I might be on the phone arranging a very serious shoot in Afghanistan and literally 30 seconds later be dealing with a publicist in L.A. You have to constantly be able to switch those gears.” Many top picture editors have worked at the Times Magazine, including Time’s Kira Pollack and New York Magazine’s Jody Quon, both of whom are quoted in the book. (Directors of photography, picture editors and all other members of the creative staff who worked at the Times Magazine in the past 30 years are acknowledged at the end of the book.) The Times’s photo editors also have to “keep that un-tethered creative space open” so that when they need to come up with an idea for an image or a photographer to match with a subject they can do so in a hurry. “You have to be really swift on your feet in making things happen and at the same time not lose sight of the larger picture, which is that you’re trying each time out to create a picture that hopefully hasn’t been done before,” Ryan explains. The editors spend a substantial amount of time selling those ideas. “A huge part of what we do is put something into play,” Ryan says. “You’re pitching a photographer; you’re pitching a subject; you’re pitching the editor of the magazine.” Once a subject gets on board with what the editors and photographer want to do, “that’s what’s amazing to me and magical about this job,” Ryan says. She cites Ryan McGinley’s photograph of actor Marion Cotillard for a portfolio of Oscar-nominated actors. Cotillard agreed to travel a couple of hours out of New York City to Montauk, where she and McGinley spent the day making photographs outdoors. The image that ran in the magazine shows the actor wrapped in a red blanket leaning over the edge of a cliff with the ocean in the background. “At the end of that shoot she turned around and said to me, ‘This is one of the best days of my life,’ ” Ryan remembers. “Sometimes things are counterintuitive: You think, ‘I’m not going to get famous actors to take the whole day instead of going into a studio for three hours.’ But you know what, if you can convince them to do it, it has more meaning for them too. . . . Our subjects, if they’re wonderful, creative people, are often very generous with their creative spirit when they recognize what we’re trying to do.” In the book’s foreword Ryan writes, “A weekly magazine is perpetually hungry for ideas that are timely, newsworthy, and original. This hunger has to be satisfied continuously and at tremendous speed. It is hard to overstate the tempo at a weekly magazine. There is no time for reflection. It is always forward motion.” Putting the book together and going through the magazine’s archives, however, has afforded Ryan an opportunity to reflect on what has worked and what hasn’t, and whose images have been particularly successful and why. Asked to comment on why so many professional photographers want to work for the magazine and what that means to her, Ryan is humble. “I don’t know, you’d have to ask them,” she says, before adding: “It makes me feel good, because that’s the true test. If people want to work for you then they know that you’re trying to do something that’s good.”