Who Killed WCW?

Dark Side of The Ring Seasons 4 & 5 - 2024 CSA Nominee-Barbara Sears Award for Best Visual Research

Tales From the Territories

Merkley + Partners, an Omnicom subsidiary, is an advertising agency serving a diverse base of clients ranging from luxury automotive titan Mercedes-Benz to the decidedly non-luxury fast food giant White Castle. While at Merkley, my team was responsible for coordinating and executing retouching and color correction for print, digital, catalog, and out-of-home projects as well as releasing all final deliverables to clients, printers, and publications. We worked on extremely tight deadlines, while collaborating with art directors, account teams, clients, and vendors. Mercedes projects often involved compositing CGI-generated product into an organic environment, which presented countless retouching challenges. Brands of lesser prestige presented their own sets of obstacles, often budgetary but occasionally of a technical or creative nature. I feel it is important to note that, regardless of whether one is working with luxury brands, fast food restaurants, or pharmaceutical clients, color accuracy and consistency were always principal concerns; the means and methodology being similar whether one is dealing in $100,000 automobiles or 72 cent sliders. The majority of print and digital content being produced by this 200-plus employee agency was released through our team. Despite tight turnaround times and deadlines, strict adherence to brand guidelines, and the inherent last minute changes of our industry, we consistently exceeded internal, client, and vendor expectations. During my time at Merkley, I helped to implement procedures that facilitated a more streamlined, automated proofing workflow; saving time as well as consumables. Additionally, I developed a collaborative job monitoring system used to track retouching, job status and history, deliverables, and client contact.

For a period of roughly fifteen years, Box was the premier retouching studio in New York City. During my time there, campaign and editorial work for a number of the finest fashion photographers in the world passed through the shop: Steven Klein, Craig McDean, Steven Meisel, Peter Lindbergh, Patrick Demarchelier, Mario Testino, Bruce Weber, and Annie Leibovitz are among the more recognizable names Box held as clients.I was hired as a Mechanical Artist, but my position transformed over time. The role of that position was initially fairly cut and dry: repurposing guideline files created by our in-house agency. This later evolved into our team absorbing a large amount of the work previously assigned to the in-house agency, including the creation of guideline files and further liaising with creatives and photographers. I soon became tasked with producing edition prints for photographers, using our scans of original negatives to match artists' proofs. These requests would come directly from the artist's studio or estate, from whom we would get specific direction for sizing and delivery. Typically, these prints would get routed back to either the photographer for signing or to their estate for stamping, so, needless to say, color and contrast always needed to be PERFECT. The range of work, various papers and print sizes, and tight deadlines combined to create what was indeed a trial by fire at times, but ultimately proved to be a great education in color correction. During my time at Box, I produced edition prints for dozens of photographers and artists, among them Annie Leibovitz, Guy Bourdin, Jean Pigozzi, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Roni Horn, Richard Burbridge, and Adam Bartos.Box would often produce monographs in concert with these exhibition prints, and our team was responsible for not only the color separations, but also the prepress production aspects before providing final files to the publishers (among them our own SteidlDangin imprint, Taschen, and Phaidon).

I was at Urban for over ten years. During that period of time, we saw huge changes in the print industry. In 2005, business was such that we were running Fuji proofs nearly 24 hours a day. Over the next few years, we slowly transitioned away from Fuji laminated proofs and toward inkjet proofing while, at the same time, client requirements began to shift toward a greater amount of digital deliverables. These inevitable technical progressions, along with the 2008 financial crisis, led us to implement new production techniques, introduce clients to softproofing, and generally reevaluate workflow procedures. I started here in what was essentially an entry level position. By the end of my tenure, I was one of two employees responsible for all of the prepress production in the shop. In addition, I also took on retouching responsibilities, and packaging production jobs.Being able to pivot from the days of the early 2000s gravy train, to the belt-tightening era of the 2008 recession and beyond while simultaneously learning the ins and outs of the industry taught me some great lessons in terms of adapting to an evolving professional and technological landscape. Some of the technology is now obsolete, some of the clients long out of business, but I consider the knowledge acquired and relationships forged here essential to my professional growth.