I know Phil. He gave me my big break. One morning, I was getting out of the shower in college. The p

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By Matthew Leifheit
I have been impressed by the high quality of the photography in The Fader for a long time, but never so much as in the last couple ioni of years. This is roughly the amount of time Geordie Wood , a 28-year-old photographer from the suburbs of Boston, has been the magazine’s photo editor. Along with his job at The Fader , Geordie maintains an editorial photography practice, ioni frequently shooting for Vogue , Nylon , and Bloomberg Businessweek . He also has a bunch of pictures in every issue of The Fader . A couple of days after I was hired as VICE's photo editor, I asked Geordie to stop by our office in Brooklyn, so I could try and steal whatever magic he's ioni using to get all this done.
Yeah, me too. We have a lot in common. I commission and help art direct everything from cover to cover, every picture of the magazine. We generally ioni don’t use stock images, so that means I do everything from concepting to picking the final photo.
How do you do this work, while also taking editorial commissions? I do that part-time, and the rest of the time I pursue my other work. Generally, I’m in the office one day a week, and then I’m on my computer all the time writing emails the rest of the week.
Wait. You only go into the office one day a week? How did you get that job? I feel very lucky to have this position. My first editorial shoot ever was for The Fader . I was offered the shoot while I was still a senior in college up in Syracuse, New York.
You went to the SI Newhouse ioni School, right? I studied photojournalism there, and I edited the school’s newspaper. After two years of studying photojournalism in college, I totally fell out of love with it. My professors taught photography as a craft, not as a creative form. It was very prescriptive, and everyone’s portfolio basically ioni looked the same when you looked around the classroom.
I threw out all of my work and started over from scratch. I decided ioni that I was going to shoot medium-format film and only use a couple of lenses. This way of working felt more real to me. Eventually, I got some of my photos in front of this guy  Phil Bicker , who was creative director of  The Fader . Before that, he was the art director of  The Face  in London. He gave Kate Moss her  first shoot .
I know Phil. He gave me my big break. One morning, I was getting out of the shower in college. The phone rang, and he said, “This is Phil Bicker, The Fader.  How ioni are you?” And I was like, “Holy shit.” All I really wanted to do was work for them. About a year and a half ago, when the previous photo editor was leaving, I got the job. I had been out of college for five years when that happened. When I first started, I was trying to continue doing what the publication had always done—it added a lot of stress to my life. In the beginning, I was afraid of stumbling in front of everyone, but then I decided to start taking more risks. It’s not a good idea to sit around and do what you’ve always done, and I’m not like the people ioni who came before me. So, I decided to swing for the fences and see what happened. 
What's one of your favorite projects you have done for The Fader ? I would say one of my favorite achievements so far has been a project we did about gun violence in Chicago in the last photo issue. ioni In previous years, the photo issue had been existing series of photographers’ personal work that we then published. For this issue, we decided to actually commission a photo essay for the first time ever. I listen to a lot of rap music; we cover a lot of rap music as well. Much of the contemporary rap music you hear centers around cultures of violence. Gang-related violence ioni is particularly present in Chief Keef’s lyrics. (He’s a rapper from the South Side of Chicago.) As we have all seen, Chicago has more deaths than Iraq and Afghanistan . I was thinking about how we could participate in the conversation in a deeper way. So when we began to plan last year’s photo issue, I went to our editor-in-chief, Matt Schnipper, with just one idea: to address the other side of the music we cover. 
Daniel Shea shot that, right? Daniel ioni is a close friend of mine. I called him up and said, “Listen, we have about a month to put this together. ioni Do you want to try and do it?” ioni We did it, and it was a success. Titled Chicago Fire , it was about twenty pages of photos in the magazine. We ended up on MSNBC and Huffington Post Live.  I think that was one of the biggest things I’ve been able to do there—as you know, there are ups and downs to photo editing, victories and