How to Become an AP Photographer

Video Transcript

"My name is Anthony Maddaloni, and I'm going to be talking about how to become an Associated Press Photographer, or AP Photographer. A press photographer, Associated Press Photographer, is an agency. It's one of the biggest agencies in America, in the world. They use photo journalists to do spot news stories, around the world. In becoming one, one of the first things that you would want to do, is get your foot in the door, at AP. You'd have to make phone calls. I can't stress the professionalism one needs to do this. You can't just wake up one day and start making phone calls, and say, I want to be an AP Photographer. Unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way, so one thing that you're going to want to do, and this is really a cool way to start, is get a job with a small town newspaper. You might not make any money. You probably won't make any money. In fact, you'll probably lose money, but you'll get a taste of what it's like to show up for a news story, let's say about a local high school student, running for mayor of a small town. Things like that really do happen, and to show up as a photographer and try to tell a story in images about that, and to build a portfolio, to be able to show newspapers, and then you can potentially go from a smaller town newspaper to a bigger newspaper, to a bigger newspaper, to Associated Press, which is really the biggest, and again, it's what your style as a photographer is like, and again, really a lot of your professionalism. How fast do you answer emails? How fast do you return cell phone calls? Are you on it? Are you always looking at what you can go out and do that day? What kind of story? You're going to have a lot of phone calls from editors, saying you need to be there an hour ago, go now. That's really what the life of a photographer like that is. It's not very glamorous at times, and at times it's incredibly competitive, and incredibly, incredibly tough. That is how I would go out, and become an AP Photographer."