It’s a pretty grim Wednesday afternoon in London but Favela Chic, a trendy bar in East London, is buzzing. Picture Director Amanda Davies from OK! magazine is close to finishing a shoot with TV presenter Holly Willoughby. Photographer Alex James and his assistant are reviewing the pictures on a laptop, the stylist is on hand, and hair and make-up are putting the finishing touches to Holly’s look for a final head shot. When they finish for the day, I get a chance to catch up with Davies to find out more about her role as Picture Director.
Davies has worked on the women’s weekly magazine for seven years progressing from Deputy Picture Editor to Picture Editor, before the role was redefined. She became Picture Director three years ago. She studied photography in Falmouth, volunteered with people with special needs teaching them photography in the charity sector and worked for both the Tom Blau Gallery and its picture agency Camera Press before heading over to OK! magazine.
Amanda Davies = AD
Miranda Gavin = MG
MG: How many shoots do you work on a week and how far forward do you plan?
AD: We work about a maximum of three weeks in advance because it is so fast paced and it has to be newsworthy and current. Sometimes it can be a week’s lead time. This week, I’ve got eight shoots but on average, I would say, it would be about three shoots a week. It’s quite a volume of work because most of the features are over six pages.
MG: What would you say your key responsibilities are? You talked about your role as Picture Editor and then you became Picture Director what does this role encompass?
AD: My main priority now is photo shoots. I brief the stylists, photographers, hair and make up people, and I also work a lot with location agents. One of the biggest tasks is finding the locations. I also have good relationships with the agents that we work with on a regular basis. I work very closely with them all and I’m the key person to organise and take responsibility for all these different things. In the editorial team, we all come up with ideas individually, and then I have to take the ideas and interpret them in a slight OK!-type style. The overall style of the magazine has changed a lot. We are much more interested in the visual side and the layout of the magazine. The style of photography has also changed. OK! is bought by girls from 14 to women of 65. They are interested in the clothes, what people look like, and the interviews with people that they see on television every day, so there are a lot of interviews with actors from Coronation Street and Emmerdale Farm. It’s no longer photographs of celebrities standing at the banisters or in the kitchen of their homes. For example, we took the pop group the Sugarbabes to an airfield recently for a shoot.
MG: You were shooting Holly Willoughby today, how do the aesthetic concepts come about?
AD: We’ve shot her before in an Italian garden in Hyde Park for a daytime shoot where she rode a bike and had a poodle. This time, we wanted a different style. The clothes are from Oli and we used a location which has a shabby chic feel – it’s got interesting colours, textures and shapes, and it fitted well with the clothes.
We recently did Alesha Dixon, who’d just come out of the television programme “Strictly Come Dancing”, and I had to come up with a concept. I wanted to do a Singin’ in the Rain shoot – I’d love to do a shoot with lots of rain and a big Hollywood backdrop but we didn’t have the preparation time. I was going through some cuttings with the writer and came across a shot from American Vogue – it’s kind of like a copy of a Cecil Beaton photograph with a woman wearing a couture dress and she’s standing on a ladder in front of the tube with loads of graffiti. You could tell it was London from the skyline and it gave me the idea to do urban chic. I compiled a list of ideas, sent it to the agent and she loved it. We used Bethnal Green underground and had Alesha standing on the platform with the tube coming in (out of focus) – you can’t have any flash or static lights. We did four shots in daily locations – a laundrette, a pie and mash shop and coming out of a corner shop.
MG: It sounds like you have a production role, akin to film production on a smaller scale, what are the challenges for you?
AD: Coming up with visually interesting ideas and locations so we can discuss the lighting and how to take the idea further. I work closely with the photographers, which is part of the collaboration. I can show them examples and say I like this feel and then they may suggest using ring flash or tungsten lighting.
The challenge is to keep coming up with ideas, giving the brief and seeing it through when I can’t be on every single shoot. It’s not always clear what a Picture Director does and I don’t know whether people really understand what this involves. I did a shoot yesterday on a farm in Kent and it rained constantly, it was windy and muddy, and I had to be super enthusiastic and work out a shot list with the photographer so that most of the pictures were shot inside or in sheltered areas because there was hardly any light. I have to be quite patient and sometimes I feel a bit like a mother or a school teacher; everyone is looking to you for answers and coming to you when they need something. You need to be able to prioritise and make the shoot the most pleasant experience to get the best out of the person and the best pictures on the day.
MG: How many photographers do you work with?
AD: There are about six or seven photographers and one full-time staff photographer.
MG: And what’s the male to female ratio in terms of photographers?
AD: To be honest, most of them are guys apart from the full-time photographer. I recently started working with another female photographer who is brilliant. She’s got this great energy, a really good eye and she’s fantastic with people.
MG: Do you hire someone who has their own style which they bring to the shoot, or do you prefer to use someone more malleable?
AD: Each photographer has their own style. I do commission them for their different styles as well as for what they bring to the team and the shoot. Some of the photographers have this real skill for telling stories about someone’s life. We have hair and make-up people, but it’s the photographer and the stylist that I have the most involvement with.
MG: And how many photos would that generally require?
AD: It depends who it is and where we are shooting, but generally we shoot seven shots so we have six looks to choose from and we always have a head shot.
MG: You have to constantly come up with concepts, where do you get inspiration from and how do you bring it all together?
AD: I love other magazines, for example, Vanity Fair, American Vogue and The
Sunday Times Style Magazine and The Observer Magazine, but I also watch films and look at the work of other photographers like Lee Miller. Locations also inspire me. I am often out looking at locations in London that we haven’t used before and can build a story around, or I could be on the tube and think a station would be a good location. I wait until the right person comes along to match up a location with them, their look and what we are planning to do. In the same way, I would match a photographer with a certain personality, stylist, and hair and make-up artist.
MG: How much of a say do the personalities, who appear in the magazine, have about the visual style and look?
AD: We always make them look nice, so if they didn’t like their hair and make-up they could change it. Sarah Harding (Girls Aloud) wanted to do a shoot with her boyfriend and they wanted to go to Paris to get some more visually interesting pictures, which really worked. We sat down with a map and decided on the kinds of shots we wanted, for example, river shots and the Champs Elysee, but we also had some old black-and-white photographs of Paris which we showed them. We also did a shoot with Nicola Roberts, who is also in Girls Aloud, as a pre-Raphaelite figure, but we were struggling with finding a location and were concerned that she’d get cold if we worked outside. Suddenly, I knew we needed to find a church, which would fit with the Gothic feel.
MG: Who else is involved?
AD: I have a deputy who helps with production and will also do some shoots, especially with lookalikes or if I am away, and a picture researcher who is brilliant. I have to delegate, but the bigger decisions come back to me. The job is good fun and I get to work with so many different people and am not sitting at a desk every day 9-5, which would destroy me. When I see the final result and it’s really worked and looks good, that’s the buzz.
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