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Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Diane Cook And Len Jenshel: Master Of Doubling Up

Diane Cook and Len Jenshel merge their photographic talents into a singular vision that serves both art and commerce

This Article Features Photo Zoom

Oqaatsut, Greenland.

That's not to say it's easy to shoot on command, or to deal with the deadlines and other strictures of editorial work. "I love doing these assignments," says Cook, "but there's a tremendous amount of stress to them, especially with a travel story." One particularly stressful story was for Conde Nast Traveler, about winter in Yosemite National Park. "When we arrived, there wasn't a trace of snow in the valley," Cook recalls. "It was 70 degrees, and the hikers were wearing shorts." A call to photography director Kathleen Klech bought the couple another few days, and on their last day at the park, they were saved by a dusting of snow. "You have to come home with a story," says Cook. Indeed, that's one key difference between editorial and fine-art work. If you're shooting for art's sake and don't get what you want, it's considered part of the process—of "learning to love failure," as Jenshel puts it. In the editorial world, says Jenshel, "You're only as good as your last story."

Getting editorially useful results is even more incumbent upon Cook and Jenshel when they themselves pitch a story to a magazine, which they often do to get to places they want to shoot but might not otherwise be able to afford. They were looking for a way to return to Greenland, for example, to continue their well-known study of icebergs and glaciers, at a time when Travel + Leisure Golf had been sending them out on golf-related stories. They pitched the magazine a story on the first World Championship Ice Golf Tournament—to be held above the Arctic Circle in Greenland. "We said, 'Imagine golfers playing in parkas at 20 below in a surreal white landscape of frozen ocean, using pink golf balls, with 300-foot icebergs as hazards,'" Cook recalls. "We thought we had a snowball's chance in hell of getting the story, particularly given how expensive the trip would be. But they went for it."

National Geographic has come to expect such pitches from the couple, taking them up on surveys of Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and the Na Pali coast of Hawaii's Kauai. Both of those stories were shot for photo editor Elizabeth Krist, who also asked them to photograph the High Line, Manhattan's regreened elevated park, a retreat much closer to the couple's New York City home. National Geographic photo editor (and former contributing photographer) Sarah Leen has asked them to shoot stories on everything from "green roofs" to the border wall between Mexico and the U.S.

For those occasions when Cook & Jenshel create a single image as a team, they typically work in color and they collaborate closely through the whole process. The duo have carved out a unique space in the pantheon of artists, editorial and commercial photographers. They seize the opportunities that come from an assignment to produce compelling photographs in each milieu. Above: Fishing Cone, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.

The border story was a perfect fit with the couple's fine-art work, which has long addressed the issue of boundaries, both physical and psychological. That idea has made its way into other assignments. Jenshel took it on in his landscape with a cattle grid, the hoof-trapping metal grate that's placed in a roadbed to keep livestock from crossing, and also in his interior with a mounted elk's head across from a tiny window that looks out onto a wild landscape, the wall (and death) separating creature from the place where he really belongs. Shot on assignment for Travel + Leisure, those two images went on to become Jenshel's two best-selling prints in the art world. "I had a feeling that the elk picture would work for my own portfolio," says Jenshel. "But I had no idea that the cattle grid, which the magazine ran across two pages to open the story, would do so well."

So is there more to editorial photography than money and glory? Is art photography compromised by paid work? "Yes and no," says Jenshel. "One informs the other. Editorial work is very much about problem solving, for example, and this skill has certainly carried over into our fine-art work."

"Assignment deadlines have taught us to be more efficient in all aspects of our photography," Cook concurs. And, of course, the artist's sensibility at the core of their photography makes their editorial work much more than pretty, factual pictures. In the end, it's a thin line.

"There's little or no difference between what we do in the fine-art world and the editorial world," says Cook. "We work hard in both arenas, and always try to integrate the two."

You can see more of Diane Cook and Len Jenshel's photography at www.cookjenshel.com.