Judge 2007

Andrea Verdone

DEPUTY PHOTO EDITOR, WOMEN'S HEALTH

Favorite camera: "I've got to say my simple little Minolta. It was the first nice camera I had gotten—I think I was a freshman in college. It's so old! I like and have digital cameras, but I love going into darkrooms."

Sometimes it's the smallest fraction of a moment that transforms us, wedges itself inside our memories and becomes the wheel upon which our futures are shaped. For Andrea Verdone, deputy photo editor at Women's Health, it was an afternoon of rummaging through keepsakes with her mother. "I think I was in sixth grade, and my mom was going through a box of stuff in the garage, stuff from her childhood. There weren't a lot of photos," she recalls."I remember asking her questions, and she said she couldn't remember a lot and wished she had more photos. Ever since then I've been in love with photography."

A semester abroad in Florence, Italy, during her college years at Reading, Pennsylvania's Albright College is what took Verdone from shutterbug to serious photographer, and her tastes since then have shifted from merely cementing personal memories to using images as a way to spark the intellect. Her personal work is more conceptual than concrete, and is often composed in black-and-white. "I haven't shot in a while, a good two years, but when I did I loved shooting things in the abstract so you couldn't really tell what the image was," she says. "I used to love to create images that made people stare at it and think about it." A New Jersey native, Verdone took her abilities behind the scenes in 1999, when she accepted an internship with Elle, has been working in New York City ever since, on staff with such publications as In Style and Lucky before coming on board with Women's Health in October 2005.

On trading the lens for the light table:
Making the transition from photographer to photo editor was a natural one for Verdone, and being part of the production process is something she wouldn't trade for anything. "Being an editor opens your world up to all these amazing talents we have. Every photographer you meet is so different; I always feel like I’m seeing something completely new. There's nothing more impressive when you're flipping through someone's portfolio [than to] see an image that makes you stop, whether it's an emotional moment or physical. In sports photography especially, I just love those fast shutters and getting that great action."