Judge 2007

Myles McCutcheon

PHOTO EDITOR, TORO MAGAZINE

Words to shoot by:
"Idea, execution, content, context. Know your audience."

As the photo editor for Toronto's Toro magazine, Myles McCutcheon could use another couple pairs of eyes. The publication covers a wide range of topics-from sports to entertainment to fashion to travel to current events-and keeping its corresponding images not only in line with the magazine's driving theme, but fresh enough to work time and again, is a relentless task. "The demographic is 30 to 40, educated, upwardly mobile; that being said, it's still a men's magazine, so you still have to provide that element of women and sports. So we try to show something that might not be so stereotypical [visually]-see if we can take [the subject] out of context a bit."

Conceptualizing an image from an alternative perspective is, for McCutcheon, vital to stunning execution, and portraits are one genre of photography in which he admires that skill most. "An environmental portrait done well always gets me going," he says, "something that's not necessarily inside the bounds of what we know portraits to be." He names such photographers as Mark Heithoff, Chris Buck, Greg Miller, and Alec Soth as prime examples of bringing something unusual or original out of their subjects. "I get amazed about how someone can work with a celebrity and get something out of them that no other photographer can. You can see the photographer's personality in their work, and that's what makes it stand out."

On his own time, McCutcheon-who graduated from Toronto's Ryerson University with a Bachelor of Applied Arts in photography-pursues his love of fine-art photography, and is currently working on a series of portraits of the landscape settled along a decommissioned rail line in the city, set to become a bike path. He has been with Toro for just over a year, and was previously the associate photo editor at Saturday Night magazine.

On making it look easy:
"Everybody can run and kick a ball, but what these [action-sports athletes] are doing, what the photographers are capturing, is so radical. Very few humans on Earth would ever attempt it, which is part of the appeal to the general public. The beauty of a lot of it is that it looks like it was shot in happenstance, but [every photo] was planned well out. They're athletes themselves [the photographers]. What grabs everybody is the shock and the extreme nature, as well as the beauty. It's just those moments."