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Click to access interview.

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What are you working on at the moment?
I have been working with the New York Times on a portfolio, which will be out in early March I think. I’m also getting ready for a show of my life-sized nudes – a series of nudes of men and women which try to ignore the common perceptions of beauty.

What projects do you like to be involved in?
I would say I do so many different genres of work. There are lots of different types of advertising I would like to do. I would love to do things that involve collaboration with the possibility of a great outcome – collaboration with both agency and client.

Who do you admire most in your industry?
I admire great art directors and writers who with so much heart and positivity go after their ideas and in trying to get them through are so often being thwarted. I admire the persistence and hoops they have to jump through.

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Nadav Kander (right) at the Aral Sea. Photo by Felicity McCabe.

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There needs to be less fearfulness from clients and more trust in good creators doing good work. There is less of a need for the lowest common denominator to understand every ad and be part of every ad. Advertising in magazines would altogether be of a far higher standard if creatives were just trusted more.

What was the last song you listened to?
It was “Sugar on the [sic] Tongue” by Talking Heads.

Read the full interview here.

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I asked Keiko Hindley, Jason’s studio manager, if Jason could tell us a bit about the photo, which is one of three images selected for Lürzer’s Archive 200 Best Photographers 2012/2013 (more on that soon). Here’s what Jason said, along with a larger version of the photo:

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This photo by Jason "Giblin" Hindley, shot at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Asutralia, is one of three images by Jason selected for the new edition of Lürzer's Archive's 200 Best Ad Photographers.

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“I took this photo in Sydney’s Bondi Beach. I’d seen the sea pool whilst walking around the area and had made a mental note of going back to photograph it, as it looked so amazing. (I was visiting Sydney for a friend’s wedding, and we were staying at this beautiful house right around the corner from Bondi Beach). I’d never seen a sea pool before and thought it was a brilliant idea. When I went back to the pool one morning a few days later to photograph it, there was just one guy swimming in it. The waves were crashing hard against the pool, creating all the whiteness with the sea foam and the light turquoise of the pool amongst the darker green of the sea, with this one swimmer in it. It made a great image.”

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Luerzer’s Archive has just published the 2010/11 edition of its venerable photo annual 200 Best Ad Photographers, and nine of our photographers are featured. We proudly congratulate Fulvio Bonavia, Martin Sigal, John Offenbach, Uwe Duettmann, Jason Hindley, Jim Fiscus, Nadav Kander, Kai-Uwe Gundlach, and Michael Muller.

Click on the image below to view a slideshow of their images featured in the book…

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When Lürzer’s Archive invited the creative community to submit congratulatory videos in honor of their 25th anniversary, they learned that in addition to being an award-winning photographer, Nadav Kander also looks rather fetching in pearls.

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For more videos, which were sent in by illustrators, ad execs, and photographers from all over the world, go here.

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Earlier this year, Walter Lürzer was inducted into the German Advertising Industry’s Hall of Fame, in recognition of a decades-long career that began when he joined McCann-Erickson as a copywriter in 1965. Among the many highlights in the years that followed: Lürzer cofounded TBWA Frankfurt in 1972; established the agency Lürzer, Conrad just three years later (it merged with Leo Burnett in 1980); and founded Lowe, Lürzer in Frankfurt and Düsseldorf in the late ’80s.

"Lürzer's Archive Special: 25 Years of Lürzer's Archive."

Of course, he also launched an eponymous magazine that has become a mainstay of the advertising industry: Lürzer’s Archive, a hefty, perfect-bound collection of the world’s top ads that is published every two months. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the magazine, an extra-chunky edition of which is now on newsstands. Lürzer’s Archive Special: 25 Years of Lürzer’s Archive features interviews with George Lois, John Hegarty, Nadav Kander, Rosie Arnold, and many others.

In honor of Lürzer’s Archive‘s anniversary, we asked Lürzer about how the magazine has changed over the years, what makes a good advertising photo, and whether he is as besotted with the industry as he was when he started.

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Tell me a bit about the early days of Lürzer’s Archive and how you brought it from idea to reality.
When I retired from advertising when I was 40 years old, I thought of something I was missing while I worked in advertising. Then I came up with the idea to make a collection of art-director annuals worldwide to have an overview of the advertising trends.

Most magazines that have been around as long as yours go through numerous redesigns and reworking of the content. How has Lürzer’s Archive changed over the years?
The type changed about 10 years ago, and that’s about it. Designwise, we take the backseat. Archive is meant to be about the work it features, not about presenting it in a spectacular fashion that calls attention to itself. Editorially, nothing has changed except that over the years a feature like “New Books,” in which we review books that might be of interest to our readers, has been added, or “Students Contest,” which we’ve had for five years now—basically, just an extra two-page product group in which we feature selections from the work that has been sent in by ad schools, universities, and institutions like that from all over the world. From the published entries in the Students Contest, our readers and a small jury then select the annual Lürzer’s Archive Student of the Year award.

A lot of magazines have websites but are still experimenting with how best to use the Internet to advance their brand. What is the role of Lurzer’s Archive’s website?
The online version contains all the print ad and the commercials ever published in Archive since it was founded in 1984. It’s a huge collection of advertising—and just advertising that is above average, outstanding, unusual, award winning. In addition, all the interviews with creative stars (from the areas of advertising, film, music, etc.)—one of which appears at the beginning of each issue of Archive—are also collected there.

In order to use the online version (which means accessing our search engine to enlarge the ads and to view the TV spots), you need to be an active subscriber of our magazine, so we don’t want the subscribers to only subscribe to our online version. We see it more as an add-on to our magazine.

If someone wants to submit their ad to Lürzer’s, what is the process? By what criteria does your staff make its assessments?
You can submit online and send low-res files for your campaigns (print and TV/virals), and after we select them, we will ask you to send hi-res files. The criteria are really the same as with all international ad awards: 1. Originality 2. Quality of the execution.

Some people feel that a photograph is only as good as the concept it is married to. Do you agree?
I do. We won’t publish any campaigns if there is no concept behind them. Much to the chagrin of photographers or agents submitting work, we won’t publish ads which are nothing but a beautiful photo. If we did, we would have to publish tons of fashion ads—from D&G to Prada, etc. There must be some idea behind it and preferably a good, original one.

There has been a lot of discussion in the photo industry about the rise of new technology like CGI and digital video. What role do you believe these technologies will have in the future of advertising?
Our magazine is mostly about content, about concepts, selling ideas. The technologies play an important part on the level of execution, and, of course, they are constantly changing and evolving.

The anniversary issue is more than 160 pages, which is pretty hefty, especially when most magazines these days are downright anorexic. What is your strategy for success as a publisher?
Providing a tool advertising people can use when they need it. Leafing through issues of Archive when you’re stuck for an idea for a campaign can be very useful. So I guess being useful to our readers is what we aim for and what the strategy for our success is.

What do you see as the future for magazines in general and print advertising in particular?
Well, I think something like magazines will be around for a long time, but whether it will be actually in printed form is rather doubtful.

In the “25 Years Issue,” you’ve published the replies of 25 “advertising greats” to the question, “What has been the single biggest change in advertising over the past quarter of a century?” What is your answer to that question?
The advent of the Internet, for sure, and the shift from copy-based ads to an overruling stronger emphasis on style and art direction with little “content” left.

There will be parties in Vienna and New York on September 25th to celebrate your 25th anniversary. In your editor’s letter, you note that people can also attend virtually via the Internet. Can you explain how it will work?
We want to show on our website movies from top creatives who are wishing us their greetings for our 25 years and a couple of more features which we don’t want to tell right now.

After all of these years, would you say you’re still fascinated by the advertising industry?
I must say that the current advertising industry I find a bit boring. But I did not learn anything else, so I must continue. For your comfort, I think art is boring, but I still visit museums. I enjoy more to teach advertising to young students in my profession as professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

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Photograph by Nadav Kander.

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…this one for the Monte Carlo Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, photographed by Nadav Kander. Nadav shot it for David & Goliath, El Segundo, working with art directors Todd Rone Parker and John Kieselhorst. Our sincere thanks to Lürzer’s Archive for the recognition.

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