Q&A: Thorne Anderson

Thorne Anderson was an independent photojournalist who traveled and photographed wars and revolutions in different countries around the world. He has published through TIMES, Newsweek and the New York Times. Over the course of  his journalism career he has traveled to Bulgaria to report on the Bulgarian revolution, Yugoslavia to photograph the toppling of the Milosevic regime, and covered the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. His experience has made him well versed in the art of photography as he has worked through the development of technology within the journalism industry and photographed many difficult situations. Using his own experience he currently teaches a photojournalism class at the University of North Texas to train the next generation of photojournalists. In his personal life he has a wife and two young kids. 

Q: What made you want to be a photojournalist? 

Thorne: I didn’t go into journalism to be a photojournalist. I went to be a writer and I wanted to use journalism as a vehicle to learn about the world. Then I went to Grad school and I was in a writing course that I didn’t enjoy with a professor I didn’t appreciate. At the same time I just happened to have taken a photojournalism course which really surprised me. It was taught by a man named Bill Kerkundoll and he showed me how photography could be used for storytelling in ways that were equal to and, in some ways, better than the way that I could tell stories in writing. I was blown away by the potential for visual communication and I switched from being a writer to being a photographer as a student.

Q: What was it like balancing your career and your personal life? 

Thorne: The way that I practiced journalism it was particularly difficult to have a balance between personal and professional life. I operated as an independent journalist working on short term contracts working with magazines like TIME and Newsweek. When it’s like that your schedule is very chaotic. It’s not like you have a nine to five job where it’s really predictable when you're gonna go to work and come home because journalism in general doesn’t work like that usually. You have to follow stories when or wherever they’re happening and sometimes that’s in the middle of the night or in another country. It can be really difficult to maintain a stable personal life in the middle of all that. 

One of the things I didn’t suspect was that I would make friends with journalists from other places and parts of the world and that there was a sort of cadre of colleagues that I would see again and again from one country to the next. Even though I may have never seen them at home or in peaceful circumstances, over time from country to country we developed relationships. It’s a strange way to develop friendships and relationships but it’s also a surprisingly fun and joyful way to get to know someone even in the midst of difficulty and conflict. 

Q: How did you maintain the relationship you have with your partner? 

Thorne: I met my wife in graduate school. We were both studying journalism. We met in the early 90s and then we moved to Bulgaria together in 1996. We stayed covering the Vulcans for seven years after that and continued to manage our professional careers so that we could stay together through the end of the time that we worked as journalists.

 She is also a photojournalist and sometimes we would be working on projects together but most of the time we would be working independently on separate projects. Sometimes we’d even be working in direct competition for each other. There had been times where I was on an assignment for Newsweek magazine and she was on an assignment for TIME magazine. It’s a funny way to manage a relationship when sometimes you’re in direct competition with one another. 

Q: What in your professional life are you most proud of? 

Thorne: The project that I feel proudest of is maybe the Unembedded project. That was coverage of the Iraq war that I completed alongside three trusted colleagues which was compiled into a book called Unembedded. I felt like that book made a very specific and unique contribution to the history of the Iraq war because we showed a physical point of view of the conflict which was different from the dominant point of view which was from journalists who were embedded with the U.S. or other allied forces occupying Iraq. We showed what it looked like from the point of view of the Iraqi people. While our picture of the war was not a complete picture -none of them are- I felt like ours was a valuable contribution and I feel proud of that. 

Across my career I feel proud of the fact that I’ve been adaptable and that I’ve been able to adapt to things like the transition from film to digital photography and the transition from print to online publications. All of this happened during my career. I’ve personally managed my own transition from being primarily a still photographer to working in multimedia and video storytelling. All of this is to say that I’m proud of the fact that I’ve maintained a fresh approach to journalism through a lot of rapid changes in the industry. 

Q: What advice would you give to someone who wants to be a photojournalist? 

Thorne: I would say that the very first thing you have to do is get a really solid grasp of your technique. You just have to make the technical stuff something that comes to you naturally. It comes naturally to no one at first so you have to work through that difficult period where you’re learning about your equipment and you’re learning about light and you’re learning about how light behaves with your equipment. The only way to become comfortable with technology is to do it a lot. To shoot as much as possible. 

After that you have to work on getting yourself out into the world and making yourself vulnerable and going to places that make you a little bit uncomfortable and spending lots of time with people as an observer. That’s a different kind of skill but also an important skill. 

Then beyond that you have to train yourself on history and culture and politics so that you can understand the broader context of whatever situation you are in. Then you can start to be a good journalist.