Vincent Laforet Joins the Fray

UPDATE:

Rob Haggart over at APE has a great interview with Newsweek’s DOP, Simon Barnett. Barnett, of course, hired Laforet as one of his Olympic guns– as well as Mike Powell and Donald Miralle. Here’s an excerpt from the interview, explaining this choice.

(and here’s Barnett- thanks for the picture, Rob!)

How did you come up with the dream team of Laforet, Miralle and Powell?


All are ex-Allsport staffers (now gone, an early Getty acquisition), as I was I too. I was Allsport USA’s managing editor in the 90′s and worked closely with Mike Powell, so we go way back. Vince and Donald joined Allsport after I left to be a part of the team that started ESPN the Magazine. Even though I don’t get to do that much sports nowadays with Newsweek, I’ve always kept an interested eye on the sports photography scene, and I know that I have assigned the three best, most original sports photographers available.

Allsport really was an amazing place for photography–at it’s peak it was to sport what Magnum is to photojournalism. There was an incredible hunger at the agency, and often a quite intimidating rivalry amongst the shooters. I remember clearly the harsh ribbing that some of the youngsters would get if they couldn’t follow focus 6 frames of an athlete running at them on a 600mm. They’d all be challenging themselves to shoot difficult pictures, on massive tele-photos, using 50 ASA Velvia in the shade, skillfully timing the peak action at the only possible moment when it froze sufficiently to yield a sharp image at a 1/60th of a second. That era produced the likes of Simon Bruty and Bob Martin, both now at SI, and guys like David Cannon and Clive Brunskill who are still with Getty today. Allsport photographers were always shooting portfolio-type images, trying first to make art, and, in a classic sports sense, driven to
beat the hell out of the competition.

For this Olympics, I thought I’d to try and approach it that way again, this time for Newsweek.  I have given Mike, Vincent and Donald a dream brief at the biggest event in the world–go make great photographs first, worry less about recording every medal.

See the full Q&A here.