Photo Ops | STANFORD journal

Josh Haner was in a flock of fellow photographers, every snapping furiously from a 2-by-2-foot sq. taped on the ground. He needed to beat all of them. He switched amongst three cameras—one which hung from his neck, heavy below the collar of his tuxedo, and two extra holstered at his sides. An Ethernet cable dangled from every digital camera, tethered to the machine that had gotten him right here, to the elite first group of red-carpet photographers on the 2010 Academy Awards.

The cables plunged underground, far under the good migration of Jimmy Choos, and linked by way of fiber optics to a room half a mile away, the place they related to a server Haner had spent months customizing. What had begun as a jumble of tech in a backpack the 12 months earlier than was now a plug-in distant streaming system. It was how Haner, ’02, a relative beginner on the New York Times picture workers, had persuaded his editors to ship him to the occasion.

Haner. (Photo: Emily Van Meter) 

Meryl Streep in a white Chris March robe. George Clooney in an Armani tux. In a flash, Haner’s images had been on the server, after which, by way of high-speed web, together with his editors in New York. With some images, the workforce scooped not simply each different photographer, but additionally the Academy’s stay tv protection—the primary and final time any media outlet can be allowed to publish with such velocity. “That was the moment where I realized I’m beating the broadcast delays that are baked into these big news events and forcing the event coordinators to change restrictions related to photo publishing,” Haner says. 

Haner has an artist’s eye—one which received him the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for characteristic images. But he additionally lives for the most recent know-how: the Backpack. Video. Drone images. Mobile cellphone footage. “We’re constantly racing to have not just the first but also the best image out there,” he says. That drive has propelled him to the forefront of the everchanging world of photojournalism. In 2021, he was named the Times’s first “photo futurist,” accountable for creating instruments, know-how, and workflows for visible storytelling. Today a deputy editor within the picture division, Haner is reinventing the foundations of his discipline for one of many few legacy information organizations with the assets to put money into it, guaranteeing the Times’s 22 workers photographers, 60 picture editors, and hundreds of freelance photographers make photographs and movies related to the 96 % of Times readers who now not search for journalism on a printed web page.

“I’ve always called him Jimmy Neutron because he’s always light years ahead of everybody else,” says Times senior photographer Doug Mills. In 2024, Mills used an upgraded model of Haner’s Backpack to transmit photographs of the primary tried assassination of Donald Trump, together with the picture of the bullet whizzing by his head that earned Mills his third Pulitzer. “If Josh is teaching it, it’s legit, and you better listen, and you better learn,” Mills says. “Otherwise, you’re going to get left behind.”

Perhaps sarcastically for somebody so averse to staying in his consolation zone, Haner lives in the home he grew up in, within the Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. He tinkered his manner via childhood, frequently bringing house discarded rotary telephones or audio system to take aside with a screwdriver or, for cussed objects, a hammer. While attending a free after-school program on the Harvey Milk Center for the Arts, he discovered a brand new outlet for his dabbling: images. “The part that really drew me to photography was the technical side of things,” he says, “developing the film, putting it in an enlarger, seeing it projected, the magic of it appearing.” 

As a freshman at Stanford, the place he double majored in symbolic techniques and artwork, he was intent on turning into a photographer and assured in his photographic perspective. That is, till he shared his images in a Wednesday night time critique session for superior college students.

“They were pictures of, like, windmills at sunset,” says professor emeritus of artwork and artwork historical past Joel Leivick, who ran the course. “They were really corny.”

SCENE-SETTING: During his time on the Times’s local weather desk, Haner photographed a fisherman-turned-mayor on the former website of Bolivia’s second-largest lake, and he shot Yellowstone National Park’s Grand Prismatic Spring from a helicopter. (Photos, from prime: Josh Haner/© 2016 The New York Times Company; Josh Haner/© 2018 The New York Times Company)  

“I think he at one point called them postcards you might find at a 7-Eleven,” Haner remembers. He would want to boost his recreation earlier than coming again to the classes. At Leivick’s suggestion, Haner started trying on the work of photographers similar to Diane Arbus and Bruce Davidson, who didn’t simply seize an aesthetically pleasing second however added to the canon of the sphere. When Haner returned to the critiques, he was extra educated, skilled, and humble. “He became so damn good,” Leivick says. “You can’t just be confronted with a pretty sunset and make a pretty picture. You have to really dig into it.”

Haner spent the primary 9 months after commencement residing in a trailer park in Redwood City and documenting the lives of his neighbors, a part of a longform photojournalism venture he’d began at Stanford. Using a portfolio of these images, he bought a job as a photograph editor at Fortune journal alongside a mentor, Meaghan Looram, ’96, working for Michele McNally. She later introduced him alongside as a contract nighttime picture editor when she grew to become the Times’s director of images in 2004. By 2006, he’d persuaded McNally to make him a full-time photographer.

The youngest and latest on workers, Haner had the three p.m. to 11 p.m. shift, which frequently ended with a live performance. Each night time, after taking a thousand or extra images of Taylor Swift, or Bon Jovi, or Snoop Dogg, he’d head again to his residence, the place he’d spend one other hour or two downloading the reminiscence playing cards, selecting the perfect photographs, coloration correcting them, including captions, and sending them to his editors.

“I started realizing that if I could engineer a way to make that process faster, it would be a huge benefit,” he says. The editorial workforce would have the ability to publish a live performance overview hours sooner, perhaps even earlier than the night time was out, and, importantly, Haner would have extra of the night to spend with mates.

In the spring of 2009, Haner spent a weekend soldering and wiring. Before his subsequent live performance, he shoved a Linux pc, a mobile connection machine, a battery, and a fan mounted to a chunk of plywood right into a images backpack.It was a crude prototype, but it surely labored. He despatched photographs to his editors from the entrance row. He had simply created a distant streaming machine.

“The Backpack was foundational to how the Times does photojournalism today,” says Andrew Rossback, a member of the newsroom design workforce that works on particular person tales in addition to broader product improvement tasks. “It was one of the early experiments in getting content from the field directly onto our website.”

He shoved a Linux pc, a mobile connection machine, a battery, and a fan mounted to a chunk of plywood right into a images backpack.

Haner has since pioneered distant streaming gadgets that use mobile and satellite tv for pc know-how, with instruments like multi-carrier eSIMs and Starlink, in order that photojournalists working from a rustic at struggle or in a pure catastrophe can transmit their images even when mobile networks are down. “It’s not enough for a photographer to be in the right place at the right time to make a historic image if you can’t get it out,” Haner says. And the velocity has pushed large site visitors will increase to the Times’s social media accounts and web site throughout occasions like New York Fashion Week and the Olympics. 

Today, 10 workers photographers journey with distant transmission items the dimensions of a giant cellphone, and a whole lot of freelancers add their images and movies on to the Times’s publishing system—bypassing the necessity to obtain and edit on a pc—utilizing a proprietary iPhone app. Both had been impressed by the Backpack.

On April 15, 2013, Haner was on the Times’s headquarters when phrase unfold of explosions on the end line of the Boston Marathon. He grabbed his gear and sped to Boston, the place he spent 10 days capturing the aftereffects of the bombing. As he was driving again to New York, sleep disadvantaged, his editors requested him to return to Boston a couple of days later to observe one of many victims. This time, velocity wasn’t a part of the plan.

Jeff Bauman, a spectator on the occasion, had been photographed being wheeled away from the scene, singed and bloody. Hours later, each of his legs had been amputated. Haner can be documenting Bauman’s restoration in excruciating element. 

“I told him I thought this was a story he could really sink his teeth into,” Looram says in an e mail interview. (Looram took over because the Times’s director of images in 2018.)

Along with author Tim Rohan, Haner spent practically daily for 3 months by Bauman’s facet, incomes the belief to carry up a lens throughout household arguments, medical appointments, and tender moments. “He was there for more than the photos,” Bauman says. “He wanted to get to know me.”

When Bauman’s sutures had been taken out, a couple of month into his restoration, the process was particularly painful. At house afterward, he threw himself onto his mattress, exhausted. “It was the most distraught I’d seen him,” Haner says. Bauman’s girlfriend, Erin Hurley, arrived house and went instantly to consolation him. Haner adopted. “I had a sense this would be an important moment,” Haner says. As Hurley folded herself subsequent to Bauman and wrapped her arms round his chest, Haner climbed onto the mattress subsequent to them and snapped a couple of photos earlier than leaving the room. The poignant portfolio earned Haner a Pulitzer.

MOVING MOMENTS: A group of Haner’s nonetheless images of Boston Marathon bombing sufferer Jeff Bauman received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for characteristic images, however Haner was equally happy with his efforts throughout that project to study video reporting. (Photo: Josh Haner/© 2014 The New York Times Company)

But images had been solely a part of the story. “One of the things I’m most proud of out of that project is actually the video piece,” says Haner, who hadn’t filmed professionally earlier than. Carrying as much as 4 cameras at a time, he switched between images and cinematography all through the project, debating in each second whether or not he ought to take a nonetheless image or let the digital camera roll. 

“I felt like I was working with a one-man band,” Rohan says.

Haner produced a mini documentary for the Times that includes Bauman, in his personal phrases, describing the second the bomb went off, and his ache and objectives on this new life path. “It was my very first exploration into multimedia storytelling, and [it] showed me that I could reach people in many different ways,” Haner says.

That was how Haner approached his images profession—a solo experimentalist with an eye fixed for a superb story. “Anytime I could get my hands on a new tool, or a new piece of technology, I really wanted to understand it as well as I could,” he says, “and just try to figure out how I could use it to better tell stories.”

By 2015, he was on the local weather desk, working to deliver images to the fore. “Photographs were often considered illustration of the story that the writer was presenting. We tried to turn that on its head on the climate desk,” he says. “It was a visual-first type of storytelling.”

Drones, already widespread with hobbyists, grew to become his instrument of selection. As the FAA issued regulatory exemptions and made the usage of drones potential in movie manufacturing and information reporting, Haner grew to become one of many first drone operators within the nation to take the FAA’s new certification examination, which didn’t require a pilot’s license. He rapidly mastered the handbook finesse of working an airborne digital camera, then circled the globe on project, filming and photographing from the sky to seize migrants in Niger fleeing their drought-stricken homelands and villages flooded by sea stage rise in Micronesia. 

After a 12- to 14-hour workday, Haner would copy all his images in triplicate, handing one onerous drive to the story’s author, placing one other in a hotel-room protected, and sleeping with a 3rd. During one project, in Kiribati, he had to decide on between bringing a pallet of consuming water or his drone when boarding a ship. “I called my wife from the satellite phone and I said, ‘I can either take water or my drone. Can I live on coconuts?’ ” She seemed it up: He may stay, however he’d get diarrhea, she advised him. He took the drone.

His picture sequence, Carbon’s Casualties, received the 2017 Documentary Project of the Year from Pictures of the Year International.

In 2021, after 15 years as a photographer, Haner joined the Times management workforce, and his one-man band grew to become an ensemble.

“Josh is very forward-thinking, a quality that inspired me to create the photo futurist role for him,” Looram says. Now additionally a deputy editor, Haner leads all know-how initiatives in the picture division and helps modernize the workforce’s construction and workflow.

He has assembled a small crew of experimentalists: David Guttenfelder, an eight-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for images, and senior picture editor Cath Spangler, who edited the Bauman video. Together, the trio checks out new methods to seize photographs earlier than establishing greatest practices and coaching the remainder of the picture workforce. “What we’re piloting is sort of where we’re hoping the rest of our visual journalism staff will be in 12 to 18 months,” Haner says.

For the previous two years, essentially the most important and difficult a part of their work has been studying how you can greatest shoot information images and video for the slender, vertical body of a cellphone display screen. A giant picture on the entrance web page of the newspaper—recognized on the Times because the A1 picture—now not has the affect it as soon as did, since about 80 % of their readers will solely ever see a narrative on their cellphone.

Many of the well-established guidelines of images break when the goal viewer is taking a look at a picture on a tiny display screen. The rule of thirds, for instance, which segments a photograph in a manner that appeals to the attention, “almost becomes a rule of fourths,” Haner says. He and his workforce educate new nonetheless images strategies and compress years of cinema research into workshops for the picture workers.

Haner’s efforts to make images a digital-first artwork have been so profitable that images taken for telephones now generally make their manner into print.

“I had to change basically 30, 40 years of looking at things,” says Mills. He and his colleagues have to assimilate new expertise rapidly, making them second nature by the point they’re snapping away in a trench subsequent to a Ukrainian soldier or between ICE brokers and protesters on the streets of Minneapolis. To tilt his horizontal world sideways, Mills has spent many a night selecting Haner’s mind, considering the artwork of filling this new canvas. Mills now retains extra of a scene in focus and makes some extent to create “layers”—maybe a spectator’s hand seen within the foreground—so as to add depth and context to a body with no sense of periphery. “Those are the things that I think bring a reader in to keep them looking at your photo a little bit longer,” Mills says.

When Mills heads to the White House to shoot each photos and video, he makes use of a customized mount Haner added to his Sony A1 Mark II digital camera, so his cellphone can document whereas his digital camera captures a horizontal picture. And Haner has applied software program that shows a secondary grid in digital cameras, so photographers trying via their eyepiece also can see what matches within the crop for a cellphone display screen. 

Haner’s efforts to make images a digital-first artwork have been so profitable that images taken for telephones now generally make their manner into print—even onto A1. Recently the front-page picture was a display screen seize from a video—presumably for the primary time within the paper’s 174-year historical past. In Haner’s thoughts, that success is a part of an effort to point out readers “something unvarnished and true.”

“We live in a world that’s increasingly polished and curated,” Haner says. “Authentic stories provide the friction we need to stay grounded. Without them, we’re just living in an echo chamber, completely untethered from the people and events that are shaping our future.” 

Kali Shiloh is a workers author at Stanford. Email her at [email protected].

^{Backpack picture: Josh Haner; Smartphone image: Edward Wong (textual content), Josh Haner (picture)/© 2016 The New York Times Company}