In the fall of 2021, the Los Angeles Times sent me to Stanford to photograph a tax law professor. The story was about tax filing: Joseph Bankman had spent years fighting to make filing free and automatic for ordinary Californians, and the Times was covering how the tax prep industry pushed back. We made portraits around the law school, under the sandstone arches and out in the campus gardens. A good assignment, filed and done.
A year later, his son’s cryptocurrency exchange collapsed, and those portraits became some of the most requested images of a man almost nobody had photographed.
Joseph Bankman photos: how one session became the record
Joseph Bankman is the father of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX. When FTX imploded in late 2022, editors everywhere needed a photograph of the professor who suddenly sat at the center of the story. There were almost none. He is an academic, not a public figure, and academics do not accumulate press photos.
But the LA Times assignment existed, and I kept the copyright. The original story ran in 2021. Since then the take has been licensed again and again: the San Francisco Standard used it when Bankman stepped back from teaching, The New York Times ran the coverage of the family in the collapse, and licensing requests still arrive years later. One afternoon of portraits has now been published more times than most full assignments.
Why this keeps happening
This is not luck. It is how editorial portraiture works, and it is worth understanding if you ever commission portraits or license photography.
News value is unpredictable, so coverage is an asset. Nobody at that 2021 shoot knew the subject would be in world headlines a year later. The photographs earned their keep on day one, and then kept earning. The same is true of executive portraits: the CEO who is a private company founder today is an acquisition headline in three years, and the only usable photograph is the one somebody had the sense to commission properly.
A real portrait session produces range. We shot serious frames under the arches and relaxed frames in the garden. When news broke, publications telling a somber story had a somber frame, and publications writing about the man himself had a human one. One look would have aged into one usability. Ten strong frames from one session is the difference between a photo that gets licensed once and a take that keeps working for years.
Copyright is the whole game. I shot this on assignment, but I kept the copyright, which means I can license these images directly to any publication or production that needs them. Photographers who sign it away watch someone else collect on their best work. Companies benefit from the same clarity in reverse: when you commission portraits, the usage terms decide what the pictures are worth to you later.
More frames from the same session
Editors pick different frames for different stories, which is exactly why a portrait session should produce range rather than one look. Two more from that afternoon at Stanford:
Licensing these and other images
I hold copyright on a deep archive of editorial work: portraits like these, plus more than a decade of news coverage distributed through AFP and Getty Images, much of it with unpublished outtakes that I license directly. If you are a photo editor, researcher, or producer looking for imagery, the licensing page covers rates and rights, or just reach out through the contact page and tell me what you need.
And if the lesson you take from this is that your own executives should be photographed properly before the news decides they matter, that is the right lesson. That is what executive portrait sessions are for.