Stockland Martel

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The year: 1984. At the time, recalls Maureen, she and Bill were working out of an office on 47th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenue. It was tiny. “There was just enough room to fit Bill and I,” Maureen says. “If we had a guest, they would have to stand in the hallway.”

It was an ambitious operation, but bare bones at best. “All we had was one desk, a typewriter, two chairs, a light box, and a flat file,” Maureen says. “We had two separate telephone lines, and if Bill got a call on the main business line, which sat on my desk, we would have to switch seats.”

She and Bill had been a team for a year and had decided they were going to stay together. Now they were looking to expand their roster, which consisted of two photographers: Joel Baldwin, a lifestyle shooter, and Michael Pruzan, a still-life guy. “Two photographers with a single rep was the traditional repping scenario at the time,” Maureen notes.

She and Bill heard about Walter from their mentor, Bill Rabin, who based in Chicago. They phoned Walter and set up a meeting…

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B: We thought we were going to see a beauty photographer. Walter had shot the Sports Illustrated Beauty Issue, and Bill Rabin, who told us about Walter, presented him to us as beauty, not sports. We went to see him where he lived on the Upper West Side. He was on 72nd Street in a HUGE rent-controlled apartment. He had these sports pictures spread out all over his floor. And Maureen and I looked at them and thought, What are we going to do with this guy?

M: We liked Walter right away, but we had to switch our thinking from beauty to sports. We had no sports photographers at the time.

B: We made something of a career choice with Walter. We decided we wanted to represent photographers who have a passion and live it. Which is not how the industry worked. You didn’t talk about specialties. You talked about content.

M: Walter was 40 and had already had a full career. He had just shot the 1984 Olympics. We knew we wanted to represent him, but we told him what we tell all the photographers: “You need to go out and speak to other agents.” And he said, “I only speak to one person at a time.” Eva, Walter’s wife, was there. Her attitude was, “You must take him on.” She seemed to know something that we did not understand at the time, which was how successful the association between Walter and Stockland Martel would become…

B: He didn’t have a portfolio. We laminated proofs of the photos on his floor to use as a book.

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M: Everything came together within six months of taking this guy on. You had the combination of a famous sports guy, and then cigarettes were at their advertising peak and were being promoted internationally. We got the biggest ad campaign of our career—for Camel International, with McCann-Erickson—at that point. I still remember putting together the estimate. This was before computers. I stood behind Bill at 2 o’clock in the morning as he was typing the biggest estimate we ever did.

B: I had carbon paper in the typewriter. I was so tired, I was crying. Every time I made a mistake, I had to start over again.

M: I remember where I was standing when we heard we got the campaign. I thought I was going to jump out of my body.

B: The first shoot was 30-some-odd days.

M: The campaign lasted for five years. Walter also did soft-drink campaigns—he did Sprite internationally and Camel internationally for years. Walter was shooting all over the world, in Australia, the Philippines, Bangkok. That’s how we became known for doing high-end jobs. We began to build a reputation for quality service and seamless production at a time when there weren’t as many producers as there are now.

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