Grand Master Flash

A funny thing happened on the way to Joe McNally’s career as a newspaper photographer. He never got there.

“I found over the course of various calamities and twists and turns that I was better in the realm of my imagination,” Joe says, “and my imagination was very color-based, so I veered off into magazines.”

He took that turn at the right time. Small flash units were starting to have an impact on magazine photojournalism, and Joe quickly realized that flash did more than open shadows and reveal detail. “It intensified color,” he says. “You’ve got three main components to light—quality, color, direction; all of them influence the color that exists in the scene and the color you infuse a scene with. It’s like an underwater photograph. Down on the reef it all looks monochromatically blue at certain depths. Then you flash the reef, and there’s an explosion of color. You’ve wrung a new kind of life out of a scene that would otherwise remain listless on the page. That was increasingly what my editors wanted me to do.”

It wasn’t only an esthetic choice. “The budgets of magazines started to constrict,” Joe says, “and so did the number of pages. Increasingly, magazines were looking for photographers to hit the viewer over the head with the one-page or two-page picture that gets them intrigued in the story. I started shooting for Life magazine in ‘84, and we used to call it the one-picture photo essay. I knew when I went out that I had to go for that one big lead, the double-truck picture—bang!—to get the reader, and I had to find a way to put as much information, color, drama, snap, interest, anything you want to call it, in that one frame.”

He didn’t find one way...he found many, and today Joe McNally is known for his ideas and concepts, imaginative interpretations and mastery of flash photography. Versatile and resourceful, he’s up for any challenge, willing to explore any possibility.