Pushing the boundaries of “possible”

Patrick Witty shows his favourite TIME cover. Photo Courtesy: Wahid Adnan / Drik

What is it like, being the International Photo Editor of one of the world's most powerful magazines? Patrick Witty said that the feeling was mostly of guilt -- to be sitting behind a desk and sending brilliant photographers to some of the most perilous places on earth. It is also a matter of pride when the photographers win big international awards like World Press, he added.
The first slide of his presentation read, “Magazines are Dead”, and he went on to draw the example of Newsweek, the once-mighty magazine that ceased its print publication recently. Despite the budget cuts, fewer assignments and shrinking of the magazines, great photographers will survive, Witty said, and in an engrossing hour of slideshow and lecture at the Goethe-Institut, Dhaka on January 28, the photo editor of TIME showed some of the most striking images to have been featured on the magazine in recent times.
Beginning with covers of the magazine featuring portraits of US president Barack Obama, Burmese crusader of democracy Aung-Sun Suu Kyi, footballer Mario Balotelli, he moved on to covers on the 20th anniversary of Bosnia and al-Qaeda in Iraq. A story on Afghanistan was his favourite Time cover of all time, said Witty.
He then moved on to images from the Arab Spring, varying in subject, intensity and subtlety: from photos of rockets being launched by rebels, close-ups of angry mobs and bleeding faces, to a boy sitting beside a body-bag containing the corpse of his father -- bandaged torso, belt undone, a shoe missing and a hollow gaze in his eyes, representing countless such stories in a single frame.
Witty went on to discuss the challenges of getting photos from conflict zones; there was a time during the uprising in Syria when the only source of photos were YouTube videos, and an Italian photographer contacted him saying he could get into the country and send pictures. Although it was a risky call to work with a complete stranger, it paid off as the photographer sent some great shots from the heart of the protests. Once the office lost contact with a photographer in the Middle East and for 12 hours. The photographer had to escape through a 2-mile pitch-dark tunnel on a motorbike; that is how challenging the work of photographers can be in a conflict zone, Witty said.
The photo editor then moved to images of Hurricane Sandy, talking about the challenges of a weekly magazine to stay relevant. When the storm was hitting New York, the magazine gave its Instagram (social photo-sharing portal) username and password to several people, who snapped and uploaded photos of the storm instantly through their iPhone devices.
The question-answer session mostly focused on the importance of a photo editor, and Witty said it was difficult for him to comprehend the concept of a newspaper or magazine without someone shepherding the photographers, making holistic decisions about how the pictures would go to the online pages, on the print magazine, and on web slide shows. The photo editor's job is to look at a picture like he's seeing it for the first time, just as a reader would, and assess its impact. It is the teamwork of photographers and editors who can see outside of themselves and push the boundaries of what is possible, he said.