How To Be A World-Class Creative Pro w/ Joe McNally
The Chase Jarvis LIVE Show
Chase Jarvis
4.8 • 641 Ratings
🗓️ 29 March 2017
⏱️ 72 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Joe McNally is one of the most accomplished photographers of his generation, with a list of achievements that I couldn’t possibly do justice to in this little intro. He’s one of the few people who have managed to be super successful in both journalism and commercial photography, and a few of the highlights of his insane career are working with clients including FedEx, Sony, GE, Adidas and Epson; working as LIFE Magazine’s only staff photographer; shooting cover stories for the likes of Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and Time among many many others; authoring three books on photography and creating several high-profile projects such as the incredibly powerful collection “Faces Of Ground Zero” honoring the first responders to the 9/11 attacks.Â
Today on the podcast,
* He talks about something a lot of people think or claim to possess but not so many actually do, which is tenacity. He has some great stories about being - as he says - “pitbull when he has a camera in his hands” and doing whatever it takes to get the shot
* We’ve talked about the vital role of failure many times on this show and I love what Joe has to say about it - about how his failure shooting a horse race early in his career is specifically what set him up for success later in his career on projects like shooting the launch of the space shuttle
* We get into something that’s very rarely discussed, which is the cost of being a super high achiever - some brutally honest discussion about the tradeoffs Joe’s made in his own career, such as the fact that traveling so much as a photographer meant that he missed a good chunk of his children’s formative years. Very real and raw stuff.
Enjoy!
Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.chasejarvis.com/podcast.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello friends, how's it going? |
| 0:06.0 | I'm Chase Jarvis. |
| 0:07.0 | Welcome to another episode of the Chase Jarvis live show here on Creative Live. |
| 0:11.0 | You know this show. |
| 0:13.0 | If you're new to it, let me tell you what it is. |
| 0:15.0 | This is where I sit down with the world's top creatives, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders, |
| 0:20.0 | and I extract, I do my very best, |
| 0:21.9 | that is, to extract valuable information from their brains to help you do your best in career, |
| 0:27.1 | in hobby, and in life. My guest on this episode is the world-renowned photographer, Joe |
| 0:34.3 | McNally. Now, Joe and I have been friends for, I'd say, more than a decade. |
| 0:37.8 | I think we referenced that a couple times in our show today. |
| 0:40.6 | He is one of the most accomplished photographers of a generation with a list of accolades that I couldn't possibly do justice to in this little intro. |
| 0:49.7 | And if you're sitting there, we're like, I'm not a photographer. |
| 0:51.7 | I'm not sure if I want to listen to this episode. |
| 0:53.3 | Let me tell you something. The wisdom that Joe unpacks in this episode |
| 0:58.0 | is, will, will be for everyone. His focus, the focus of his work, it transcends generations. |
| 1:07.1 | It transcends brand. It transcends purpose. He was the last full-time employee of Life Magazine. And if you think Life Magazine assigns some cool shit, you're absolutely right. He has photographed some of the most amazing humans on the planet. He's also done a bunch of commercial work for the Sonys, the Adidas, the GEs. And one of the things that he happens to be most famous for is an amazing collection of photographs |
| 1:34.3 | that he created called Faces of Ground Zero, which honors the first responders to the 9-11 attacks. |
| 1:42.3 | It is a stunning body of work. I remember when I first saw the first |
| 1:49.4 | pictures to come out, I actually, I teared up. It was incredibly emotional. And Joe accomplished |
| 1:56.9 | this, you know, created this body of work with an amazing amount of humility, an amazing |
| 2:02.8 | amount of empathy and sensitivity to the families, the people who were like at the very core |
... |
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