Remembering Arnold Drapkin
By Kenneth Jarecke, Editor in Chief
A legendary photo editor at Time Magazine.
We've lost another legend. Arnold Drapkin passed away last month. Arnold was with Time Magazine for almost forty years. He was the head of their photo department for the last thirteen or those years. He was ninety years old.
As we move further away from the so-called Golden Age of Photojournalism this is bound to happen.
Thankfully, several of us old timers got together to celebrate his birthday with him down in Boca Raton this spring. It was a joyful experience. When Arnold got up to speak, we thought he'd go for five minutes or so. He ended up doing about ninety, one for every year, and the stories he shared were absolutely priceless.
Some were well known, like the one about the Reagan/Gorbachev summit in Iceland.
In preparation for covering the summit, Arnold purchased the use of both (and there were only two) of the film scanners in the entire country. He also kept a lab open over the weekend to develop the Time photographer's film if needed. The summit was scheduled to be done before the magazine deadlines. Arnold made these investments just to have a plan in place in case the summit went longer, and it did.
His investment paid off in a big way when Time's cover hit the newsstands Monday morning showing the two world leaders leaving the summit without an agreement. I don't remember what Newsweek's cover was that week, and nobody else does either.
That week, Time's sales team capitalized on the opportunity that Arnold gave them and got busy gaining new customers at Newsweek's expense.
Just to give you an idea of how logistics worked in the film era. The Time and Newsweek photographers left Reykjavik Sunday morning on the exact same flight. Newsweek's team was hand-carrying their film, while the coverage from Time's team was already on the printing press.
Another story, one that I had never heard, happened as Arnold was retiring from the magazine.
Upon hearing the news that he was leaving, Air France invited Arnold to lunch. He had no idea why, so during the very expensive lunch, he asked them. It seems that Arnold had set a record in buying more tickets on the Concord than anyone else. To be clear, Arnold, on behalf of Time Photo, had bought more tickets than any other entity. They bought more tickets than the rest of Time/Life, more than Warner Brothers, more than any other corporation you care to mention from back then.
Arnold bought these tickets, at around five or six grand a pop, to gain a few hours when needed. Remember, this is pre-digital, so when important film from Europe, the Middle East, or Africa, arrived in Paris on Thursday or Friday morning, the bureau would immediately process the film and then put it on the next Concord to get it to New York as quickly as possible. This allowed the photo editors in New York to have the film processed and ready to be seen immediately when it arrived. The only catch was that you couldn't ship the processed film as freight, as it would then have to go through customs (and lose the time you gained), so you had to have a passenger hand-carry it on the flight.
The money spent was worth the time saved.
I was young, just starting out when these two events happened. I had no idea the kind of money and effort that went into being just a little bit better than the competition every week.
For example, on my very first big Time assignment, I screwed up. I did alright making pictures, I think there were five or six other Time photographers on this story and I had a good deal of images in the magazine, but I lost a piece of expensive equipment.
Back then (I hate that phrase), the Time/Life photographers had their own floor in the building. It was called, appropriately enough, the Margaret Bourke-White floor. (To be clear, I think we only used half of the floor ourselves.) This is where the famous Time/Life darkroom was located. The photographers, both staff and contractors, had offices there as well. To step onto that floor was to walk through photojournalism's history, as it was common to run into Alfred Eisenstaedt, Carl Mydans or someone else in the hallway who was right there at the very birth of the craft.
The Time/Life photo locker was also on this floor. This was the place where you'd go to get any film or equipment that you needed. I had dutifully borrowed a Nikon 300 2.8 for the job I was doing for Time. These beauties ran about $2500, a good chunk of change to the younger me. By losing it, I figured my first big assignment would be my last. Monday morning I dragged my sorry self into Arnold's office to make it official. He didn't miss a beat. Treated it like the serious event that I imagined it to be. Told me that instead of paying for the lens that he'd allow me to work it off through assignments. This was a huge deal for me. I didn't care about losing the money as long as I was still able to work for the magazine. It was a godsend that meant my career might not be over before it started.
Of course, Arnold never brought up the lost lens again. I continued to get assignments and my fees were never docked. He probably got a chuckle out of the whole thing. This young kid who thought losing a lens was a career ending event when he was paying twice that on a one way ticket from Paris.
Arnold was old school smart. When it came to talent and preparation, money was nothing. It was nothing because any investment in those two things usually paid off in the marketplace many times over.
Beating the competition by being the very best mattered to the people running Time/Life, because it directly helped them to make more money.
Even in my case, when Arnold made a tiny investment in a young photographer by overlooking a lost lens, was a move that eventually strengthened his team. He invested in me when I had no value in the marketplace. Then, when I did have value as a contract photographer, his investment kept me at the magazine and out of the hands of the competition.
Thank you, and Godspeed Arnold. You will be greatly missed.
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