An interview with the great Robin Daughtridge, chief photographer at the Chicago Tribune, over lunch at Banderas off Michigan Avenue in Chicago. We talked about women in photojournalism and how it has changed since she began her career in the 1980s.



What is your background?

I was a military brat, so we moved around a lot. My family moved to Japan when I was 5 so the only contact we had with the U.S. was Stars and Stripes and Life Magazine. That was my glimpse into what America was like. That's all I looked forward to for the 3 1/2 years we were there -- that and seeing the occasional Godzilla movie in Tokyo. When I was in high school, I was interested in journalism. I became the editor of the school newspaper and the school yearbook. I did some photography. I wasn't too good at actual picture taking, but I loved looking at pictures, doing layouts and working with photographers. I enjoyed seeing their ideas from conception to completion. So when I was deciding on whether to go to journalism school or theater school, because I was also involved in plays and I didn't know which one I wanted to do, I sort of threw out applications and waited to see who would take me. Northwestern University accepted me into their journalism school and they gave me a lot of money, so that decision was sort of made for me. Because there was no photojournalism sequence at Northwestern, I did the reporting sequence. I minored in art and took a lot of art design classes. At Northwestern they spent one day on page design and photojournalism, where they basically taught us how not to get sued. I interned in Waukegan and in Salem, Ore., at the Capital-Journal which is now defunct and merged with the Statesman-Journal. The managing editor there was a former photojournalist, one of the first photojournalists to be in mainstream management and deal with all aspects of the newsroom. He used to lecture me constantly on the importance of pictures. I then interned at the Chicago Sun-Times on the copy desk and on the design desk. Later I got a call from the Sun-Times to come back and work on the picture desk.

Was photo editing something that you had planned on getting into at the time?

It was always there, but it always seemed to me to be too much fun to get paid for. I thought there wasn't any way that I could be a picture editor because I had never been a staff photographer for a newspaper, even though that's what I really thought would be the most fun job at a newspaper. I was on the copy desk, I was a reporter, I was a designer, I was the entertainment editor in Austin. And the whole time the most exciting part of the job for me was working with photographers. So it was coincidental or synchronicity or fate that the Sun-Times called me and offered me a job as a picture editor. I was the youngest person on the picture desk for a while until we started hiring more people. Most of the people who were on that picture desk were former copy editors, not photographers. But there were great photographers. I learned a lot from John White and Pete Souza, Al Seib, who's now at the L.A. Times and Richard Derk, who's also at the L.A. Times. We worked and partied together, fed off each other and pushed the paper forward, I think. We did the best work I think that paper did in the mid to late '80s. So that's how it happened in sort of a roundabout way.

Since you've been in the business for a while, what has the change been like in seeing more women hired in the newsroom?

Well I graduated from Northwestern in '81, and at that time the majority of the people graduating from journalism school were men. And the women who were graduating from the program were in reporting and broadcasting. There were very, very few women photojournalists out there. The photo departments and the sports departments of major dailies are the last places to have seen a lot of women in positions. It was interesting. At first I think I was very tolerant. I developed a very thick skin. I got comments, like "Hey Toots!" and things like that. I would give it right back to them, call them Old Fart and Geezer. I'm sure that the conversations we had in 1982 wouldn't really be tolerated right now in the newsroom. But at the time it seemed that my survival instinct kicked in. I remember when I got promoted to Director of Photography at the Sun-Times, I was under 30. The chief photographer who I thought was going to be very angry said, "As long as you don't put curtains in the window I don't care. I think you're a good broad." I thought that was a big compliment! And I'm happy to say that in the last five years I just keep meeting more and more great women photographers. In '88 and '89 it was like, "We've got to hire a woman." Now it's like, "We've got to hire a great photographer," and most of them happen to be women. They show a different kind of sensitivity to stories and there are some tough cookies in the bunch. Sometimes it really does seem like a certain story will need a woman's touch. And it's not even a question anymore on who you send to an assignment. I remember when women didn't work nights and women weren't sent to certain parts of town. If it's a dangerous situation in Chicago, it's dangerous for a man or a woman. If they're not going to send somebody then they're just not going to send somebody, and the editors aren't going to question whether or not you can handle yourself in a difficult situation. We hire people 'cause they can handle it. In the '70s and '80s there was definitely this mentality that was sort of overprotective. But what they ended up doing was creating two classes of photographers-- people who could handle the features and the light stuff and people who could handle the difficult stuff. And that's exactly how it was for women reporters starting out in the '30s and '40s. There were the Sob Sisters who only did the bleeding heart stories and never got to do the breaking news. Trail blazing women changed all that. Nancy Stone, who is now at the Tribune, was doing all the stuff that the men were doing in the '70s and '80s. It's definitely changed.

Why is it important to have women and other minorities in the newsroom?

We are in the business of telling the truth, and everyone knows that the truth is fairly elusive. You can't have one kind of person seeking out the truth. You have to have people with a broad base of experience and background making judgments, raising questions and challenging basic assumptions. The bigger the pool of people that you have to choose from and the more sources you have for stories, the better storytelling you are going to do. You're going to be more truthful to the readers. You hear about what papers did in the '20s and '30s, there were huge groups of people that weren't covered and were largely ignored, from black neighborhoods to Latino immigrants. It's sad that we missed whole portions of history and communicating that to the readers. I'm so happy when I walk back into the lab and I see everyone exchanging ideas and opinions about what was on our page one that day and having contentious discussions and heated words about what's right and what's wrong. That's great for a paper. I think when readers see a byline under a photograph like Velasquez or Osorio, some readers think, "Hey, those are people like me covering the news." It gives us so much more credibility. They see that we can empathize with their situation and can see where they are coming from.

Tell me about the daily experience of being a picture editor today.

When I became a picture editor in the '80s, people automatically assumed that if I was a picture editor, then I couldn't understand words. Even though my background and my pedigree was reporting, all of a sudden, I didn't have the credibility to speak or be on equal footing with word editors. Pictures were kind of thought of as adornment, and I don't think anybody now thinks of pictures that way. Photos are content just as much as words are. The opinions of a photo person are just as important as the national or foreign editor. And I've seen the credibility of photographers rise, as the photographers have gotten better, well-rounded educations.

Our status in the newsroom has improved so much. There are still difficult days because you can rewrite words if the managing editor doesn't think that the words adequately describe the situation, but in a news situation, you can't go back and reshoot it. Sometimes having to explain why a moment is significant is a difficult situation because everyone is a picture editor, just like everyone has an opinion about a movie or a television show. Everyone has an opinion about a picture. You have to talk about relevance and storytelling. You can't just say, "This picture's awesome." You have to have the Why? And the Why? can't just be because you like it. It has to have the content and composition, light, shadow, the expressions on people's faces ... You really have to be able to talk adequately about pictures or your credibility is out the window.

Drop Robin a line at RDaughtridge@tribune.com

What advice do you have for women coming up in the business?

Take your journalism classes very seriously, but also take other avenues of education seriously too. I think anyone who knows other languages is going to have a leg up on the competition. We need to have people who can speak Spanish or Chinese. People who have that kind of background are going to find they are a real asset.

Make sure that you can tell a story through photos, that you're not just a one-hit wonder. You can't have a portfolio that's just full of killer singles. Singles are important, but you have to be able to tell a story through several pictures. A lot of times I get portfolios with six or seven great singles, but they don't seem to be able to sustain a story or hang with a person for any length of time. Learning to be a fly on the wall is a very difficult thing to do. The technical skills are important, but I think almost anyone can be trained how to use Photoshop or a digital camera. As long as you know how and have a passion for telling stories, you'll find yourself ahead of the game.

What do you look for when hiring?

You've got to be a great photographer, but you've got to be a pretty good person too. We don't hire just on portfolio anymore. We hire on attitude. We hire on energy. We hire on how we think you'll work with others. We want people who are competitive but not arrogant. We want people who strive to do their best but aren't narrow-minded. Some people have been in the business 20 years before they get hired here. Some people have been in the business a year and a half. Knowing that someone can shoot a magazine story for us then go back and do the bread and butter, that's a real plus for us. We don't hire primadonnas anymore. One of the questions that I've heard our director of photography ask is, "Are you a star?" Because if you're a star, we don't want you. A lot of people don't know what the right answer to that question is. It would be, "I'm going to take great pictures, but I'm not going to be an arrogant son of a gun."

We don't want cookie-cutter photographers, where all the portfolios look the same. We're looking for people whose work has an edge, that has a little fine arts background in it. But you have to be careful because we are still always looking for substance and sometimes people seem to develop their style and forget about the substance. You have to be very careful not to leave the journalism part out of photojournalism. But overall we encourage risk taking.

Who would you like to take out to lunch if you could take anyone, historical figures included?

Wow, there's a few. John H. White, Pulitzer Prize winner who works at the Sun-Times. He wakes up every morning and photographs the sunrise. He never gives up on pictures or any kind of photo situation... takes beautiful pictures. Pete Souza was an inspiration to me when I first met him. I had never met anyone so driven, such a perfectionist and so unwilling to take no for an answer. W. Eugene Smith, Margaret Bourke White, the war photographer Dickie Chapelle. I'm glad to say that I know that heroes are not perfect, but there are some pretty heroic photojournalists out there. I would love to take Robert Capa to lunch! I'd love to talk to someone who was obviously so fearless, who wasn't afraid to be in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, who wasn't afraid to be in Vietnam. He worked hard and had Hemingway as a close friend. He just seems like a very romantic figure to me.

Why do you think it is important to have a strong community for women in the photography world?

When I first started working in the field, there really wasn't a community for women photographers and editors. So a lot of times I felt pretty alone. And when I first went to the Women in PJ conference I was a little skeptical. I hoped it wouldn't be a bunch of people whining about how difficult it is with all these men, and I found out that it wasn't like that at all. People just talked about their common experiences, and it really helped validate your feelings. You find out that there are lots of ways to tackle problems that maybe you hadn't even thought about. It's also just fun. Networking and finding people of common interest and seeing other work out there is pretty incredible. Last year's photo exhibit in Baltimore was amazing. There was some real talent there, names that I hadn't even heard of. It's great. Just when you think things are getting to be a little stale, somebody will blow you away with something you've never seen before.

What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Well I just think that I have one of the best jobs in the world. No day is ever like the day before. The news is always changing. The power of pictures still seems magical to me. I still love looking at film. Walking into the Tribune is pretty awesome too, this giant monument to the freedom of the press. I see how we can make a difference in people's lives, even if we're just doing a story about a wounded coyote on Michigan Avenue. If it's stories from abroad or a magazine story on gang girls, we are educating, enlightening and entertaining the public. Sometimes I'm surprised when my Friday comes. I always think that the week went by fast. I never count the hours, it never seems like drudgery to me. We all have our moments when we get angry that a picture doesn't get used. But it's never boring. When I think about the offers I've had to do other things outside photojournalism, it just sort of terrifies me to think of dealing in the world of make believe. I love dealing in the world of reality. There's no other profession where you can be meeting heads of state and then talking to someone who's face down in the gutter the next day. It makes you a much more tolerant and open-minded person. You don't make snap judgments about people after you've seen the different ways that people live. You just don't.