Visual Storytelling

Editor's Compilation: Photo Editors on Editing

3 min · March 2021

Award-winning and expert photo editors MaryAnne Golon (Washington Post), Whitney Johnson (National Geographic), Mike Davis (Syracuse University), and Olivier Laurent (Washington Post) discuss how they fit into the behind-the-scenes photo publication process, describing the work analyzing, selecting, and arranging the images that appear in print out of the hundreds or thousands they see initially. MaryAnne Golon was the Director of Photography at The Washington Post. Before joining The Post in 2012, MaryAnne was the director of photography at Time Magazine and a senior photography editor there for more than 20 years. Before joining The Post in 2012, MaryAnne curated Look 3: The Festival of the Photograph and help guide the 2-year product build of a digital asset management system for a major non-profit organization. Golon was also director of photography at Time magazine where she co-managed the international newsweekly’s photography department for more than 15 years. Golon has received many individual and team picture-editing awards from the POYi (Pictures of the Year International) and NPPA's (National Press Photographer’s Association) Best of Photojournalism competitions. She was awarded Picture of the Editor of the Year from the IFA Lucie Awards in 2013. She was twice selected for American Photo magazine’s list of the 100 most important people in photography. Whitney Johnson was the director of visuals and immersive experiences at National Geographic where she led the visual and immersive staffs, overseeing photography, video, Instagram, and podcast teams. She joined National Geographic in 2015 as the magazine’s deputy director of photography. From 2007 to 2015, Johnson was on the staff of The New Yorker, first as a picture editor and later as the Director of Photography. Prior to joining the magazine, Johnson worked at the Open Society Foundations, where she was a founding member of the Documentary Photography Project and managed an international grant competition and exhibition for documentary photographers. In 2011, Johnson — together with The New Yorker staff photographer Platon and Human Rights Watch — received a Peabody. In 2018, Pictures of the Year International honored the National Geographic photo staff with the Angus McDougall Overall Excellence in Editing Award and recognized Johnson with an Award of Excellence in the Magazine Visual Editor of the Year category. In 2019, National Geographic was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. Mike Davis was the endowed Alexia Tsairis Chair for Documentary Photography and a Professor of Practice of Visual Communications in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Davis taught visual storytelling classes and ran the Alexia Grant competitions at the school. The Alexia is one of the world’s premiere grants that support humanistic, socially significant visual projects for professionals and students. In addition to teaching and the Alexia, Davis now works as an independent photography editor, working with visual storytellers around the world to elevate their way of seeing and editing their projects for books, gallery exhibitions, portfolios and contest and grant submissions. He has worked on more than 500 such projects, which in turn inform and elevate his teaching and the Alexia. He also continues to consult with a range of organizations, publications and competitions internationally. For 30 years before arriving at Newhouse, Davis held visual leadership positions at National Geographic, the White House and several of America’s leading newspapers, as well as running his own consulting business. He was twice named Newspaper Picture Editor of the Year and has edited the work of several photographers who went on to win Photographer of the Year titles and others whose work was widely recognized at the top tiers of the profession. Olivier Laurent is a foreign photo editor at The Washington Post, working with the organization's network of 27 reporters based in 19 foreign locations to offer a comprehensive international report, with a special focus on Africa, Asia and the Middle-East. He also partners with the Post's social team on photo-driven initiatives and contributes to InSight, the Post’s photography section. In 2020, he was part of the climate team that won the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for the 2ºC: Beyond the Limit series, which "showed with scientific clarity the dire effects of extreme temperatures on the planet." In 2018, he coordinated the newspaper's visual coverage of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, working with Lorenzo Tugnoli, a contract photographer with the Post. The photo essay won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography as well as a World Press Photo. He joined the Post from TIME where he was the Editor of LightBox, the magazine’s photography website.