This post is long overdue. Last month I got to spend a week with the lovely Maren Levinson of Redeye Reps helping her out with advertising agency showings. To start out, I asked my good friend Janessa, a rep for Marnie Rose, to give me the low-down on what it is a rep does: In my eyes, I feel being a rep is acting as a liaison of sorts between the client and talent. A typical day can range from cold calling, setting up general portfolio reviews with ad agencies, obtaining meetings between the artist and client, estimating, negotiating rates, and taking care of any production that might be needed for an upcoming shoot. Overall, a large part of time is spent planning and strategizing, as well as researching innovative ways to effectively land the artists work in front of the client. Of course, building and maintaining relationships with both current and potential clients, I feel, is one of the most important roles of the rep.

Redeye has six photographers on their roster and let me just say right off the bat, I love them all! They are the type of photographers I aspire to be. Redeye specializes in photographers that straddle the fine art and commercial world. As Maren explains ‘the idea being that when a photographer’s fine art work is noticed, they become more commercially viable. And when a photographer has a strong commercial and editorial base, they have more freedom to pursue their personal projects.” Here are her photographers:

Clockwise from top left: Meiko Arquillos, Corey Arnold, Elena Dorfman, Noah Webb, Noah Kalina, and Olivier Laude

Redeye is based in Los Angeles and Maren makes the trip out east about twice a year to work the New York circuits. Before arriving, she has set up meetings, sometimes three in one day, primarily with advertising agencies but also with anyone willing to fit some face time in who is in the business of hiring photographers. Visiting ad agencies is extremely fascinating in terms of their physical spaces, as they are all trying to be on the cutting edge of what’s cool in design and architecture. Our contact is with the art buyer and they often will have reserved a conference room for us for a few hours and tell all the creatives (creative directors, art directors, art buyers, etc) to stop by when they have a free moment. We will have laid out all the photographer’s portfolios and promos on the table 

and by ‘table’ I mean available surface as one ad agency had us set up the books on an actual pool table!

The creatives will stroll in, lured by the promise of food (that’s a whole other issue I won’t get into now, but food is a must for these meetings, thank you La Esquina!)  and casually thumb through the books.

Here is where it gets interesting for me. Being in on these meetings I get to see how they look through the books, how much time they spend on each page, what they skip over, what images they dwell on, which promo cards they take, what they discuss with their coworker, who they leave impressed by, and all the other juicy tidbits that I’m sure photographers would love to know about their own books.

Spending a week looking at these books all day long, I almost felt that I was spending time with the actual photographers. Their books are certainly a reflection of who they are and the most successful ones are the ones that have a clear distinctive voice. Noah Kalina was a big hit,

as was Corey Arnold. I can honestly say, that even looking through their books over and and over again all week, I never felt bored.

Maren is kickass at her job and just an awesome gal to spend a week with. Who knows, maybe someday I will be among her esteemed roster!