A Conversation with Jim Estrin, New York Times Lens Blog David Alan Harvey: You will be the third photographer in a row that I have interviewed, who I know as photographers and who have evol…
JE: There are multimedia platforms for story telling that weren’t available. I love working at the New York Times but for the first half, actually the first fifteen years of my career at the Times, I wasn’t the story teller, even if it was a story I came up with. I was an illustrator, someone else told the story. Now, I can tell the story. I can tell the story with audio, with video, with writing on the web, in a blog…
DAH: Jim, you have really hit the nail on the head better than anybody, and that is the truth. That is the truth of the new media because you and I, when we first started in the business, even though we had salaries, I was also at least three people removed from my audience. You are nobody removed from your audience. You might have an audience of fifteen, but you’ve got fifteen people who know YOU. And actually who you are as a photographer, see, because I had a couple of editors interpreting theoretically to readers whoever DAH was. I had to convince Jack Hunter, one crusty embittered guy on the city desk of my newspaper, that this was in fact a good picture to get published. I mean I had to get to one guy who hated photography to “get” my picture…
