Matthew Beaman

Matthew Beaman is the Director of photography at Monocle Magazine. He went to Staffordshire University in 2004. Since then he has worked for Red Pepper Magazine on a voluntary basis. He gained an internship at Wallpaper magazine for 3 months where he learnt more about layout and assisting photographers. He ended up working at Wallpaper Magazine for 6 years.

He then moved onto working for a design agency for 3 years which involved more advertising work.

In his job now as a director of photography for Monocle, he spends a lot of time finding and sourcing photographers.

As a photographers, he likes shooting on film, he started with analog and he sees a lot of students shooting on film. He believes film suits Monocle magazine. He tries not to retouch the images so analog suits them. They just adjust the colour.

The photography they do at Monocle is mainly using daylight in their portrait work, but the still life work is studio based. Matthew likes the work of Juergen Teller as he uses flash but in a snap shot style.

As the director of photography, he knows the look the magazine wants. He usually likes to put a mood board together and sketches shots, he thens moves onto sourcing the photographer right for the shoot.

He is constantly hunting photographers, blogs, exhibitions. He get 10-15 emails a week looking for work globally.

They commission 80% of photography. Beaman does a lot of office work but he goes out to source people and exhibitions. He also goes along to the big shoots.

Per issue Monocle Magazine commission 30-40 shoots.

Matthew Beaman goes to many festivals in his search for photographers to work with including Photography festival, Unseen Festival in Amsterdam, South of France Festival, Brighton Festival, Photo London and Paris Photo.

Monocle Magazine is changing quite a bit, using a lot more snapshot style photography and working with more fashion photographers. The March issue shows this change.

Monocle will have evenings where they invite graduates and the editor can see their work and choose interns.

Will print die?

Matthew believes that print can’t keep up with digital. Wallpaper and Monocle will always be there and a lot of big brands want to advertise in print. He believes that product has to be more considered and more of a collectible to stay as a photobook not digital. The line between magazine and photobook lies with advertising and how much there is.

Questions and answers

Do the website and magazine cross over?

Some articles go onto the website but they are different. The website offers other features like podcasts. There are not many articles created solely for the website. They wanted it to be primarily print so put off making the website for a bit, however readers do want a print to read not just a webpage.