Josh Haner was in a flock of fellow photographers, each snapping furiously from a 2-by-2-foot square taped on the floor. He wanted to beat them all. He switched among three cameras—one that hung from his neck, heavy under the collar of his tuxedo, and two more holstered at his sides. An Ethernet cable dangled from each camera, tethered to the device that had gotten him here, to the elite first group of red-carpet photographers at the 2010 Academy Awards.
The cables plunged underground, far below the great migration of Jimmy Choos, and linked via fiber optics to a room half a mile away, where they connected to a server Haner had spent months customizing. What had begun as a jumble of tech in a backpack the year before was now a plug-in remote streaming system. It was how Haner, ’02, a relative newbie on the New York Times photo staff, had persuaded his editors to send him to the event.
Haner. (Photo: Emily Van Meter)
Meryl Streep in a white Chris March gown. George Clooney in an Armani tux. In a flash, Haner’s photos were on the server, and then, via high-speed internet, with his editors in New York. With some photos, the team scooped not just every other photographer, but also the Academy’s live television coverage—the first and last time any media outlet would be allowed to publish with such speed. “That was the moment where I realized I’m beating the broadcast delays that are baked into these big news events and forcing the event coordinators to change restrictions related to photo publishing,” Haner says.
Haner has an artist’s eye—one that won him the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. But he also lives for the newest technology: the Backpack. Video. Drone photography. Mobile phone footage. “We’re constantly racing to have not just the first but also the best image out there,” he says. That drive has propelled him to the forefront of the everchanging world of photojournalism. In 2021, he was named the Times’s first “photo futurist,” responsible for developing tools, technology, and workflows for visual storytelling. Today a deputy editor in the photo department, Haner is reinventing the rules of his field for one of the few legacy news organizations with the resources to invest in it, ensuring the Times’s 22 staff photographers, 60 photo editors, and thousands of freelance photographers make images and videos relevant to the 96 percent of Times readers who no longer look for journalism on a printed page.
“I’ve always called him Jimmy Neutron because he’s always light years ahead of everybody else,” says Times senior photographer Doug Mills. In 2024, Mills used an upgraded version of Haner’s Backpack to transmit images of the first attempted assassination of Donald Trump, including the photo of the bullet whizzing by his head that earned Mills his third Pulitzer. “If Josh is teaching it, it’s legit, and you better listen, and you better learn,” Mills says. “Otherwise, you’re going to get left behind.”
Perhaps ironically for someone so averse to staying in his comfort zone, Haner lives in the house he grew up in, in the Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. He tinkered his way through childhood, regularly bringing home discarded rotary phones or speakers to take apart with a screwdriver or, for stubborn objects, a hammer. While attending a free after-school program at the Harvey Milk Center for the Arts, he found a new outlet for his dabbling: photography. “The part that really drew me to photography was the technical side of things,” he says, “developing the film, putting it in an enlarger, seeing it projected, the magic of it appearing.”
As a freshman at Stanford, where he double majored in symbolic systems and art, he was intent on becoming a photographer and confident in his photographic point of view. That is, until he shared his photos in a Wednesday night critique session for advanced students.
“They were pictures of, like, windmills at sunset,” says professor emeritus of art and art history Joel Leivick, who ran the course. “They were really corny.”
SCENE-SETTING: During his time on the Times’s climate desk, Haner photographed a fisherman-turned-mayor at the former site of Bolivia’s second-largest lake, and he shot Yellowstone National Park’s Grand Prismatic Spring from a helicopter. (Photos, from top: Josh Haner/© 2016 The New York Times Company; Josh Haner/© 2018 The New York Times Company)
“I think he at one point called them postcards you might find at a 7-Eleven,” Haner recalls. He would need to raise his game before coming back to the sessions. At Leivick’s suggestion, Haner began looking at the work of photographers such as Diane Arbus and Bruce Davidson, who didn’t just capture an aesthetically pleasing moment but added to the canon of the field. When Haner returned to the critiques, he was more educated, experienced, and humble. “He became so damn good,” Leivick says. “You can’t just be confronted with a pretty sunset and make a pretty picture. You have to really dig into it.”
Haner spent the first nine months after graduation living in a trailer park in Redwood City and documenting the lives of his neighbors, part of a longform photojournalism project he’d started at Stanford. Using a portfolio of those photos, he got a job as a photo editor at Fortune magazine alongside a mentor, Meaghan Looram, ’96, working for Michele McNally. She later brought him along as a freelance nighttime photo editor when she became the Times’s director of photography in 2004. By 2006, he’d persuaded McNally to make him a full-time photographer.
The youngest and newest on staff, Haner had the 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift, which often ended with a concert. Each night, after taking a thousand or more photos of Taylor Swift, or Bon Jovi, or Snoop Dogg, he’d head back to his apartment, where he’d spend another hour or two downloading the memory cards, choosing the best images, color correcting them, adding captions, and sending them to his editors.
“I started realizing that if I could engineer a way to make that process faster, it would be a huge benefit,” he says. The editorial team would be able to publish a concert review hours sooner, maybe even before the night was out, and, importantly, Haner would have more of the evening to spend with friends.
In the spring of 2009, Haner spent a weekend soldering and wiring. Before his next concert, he shoved a Linux computer, a cellular connection device, a battery, and a fan mounted to a piece of plywood into a photography backpack.It was a crude prototype, but it worked. He sent images to his editors from the front row. He had just created a remote streaming device.
“The Backpack was foundational to how the Times does photojournalism today,” says Andrew Rossback, a member of the newsroom design team that works on individual stories as well as broader product development projects. “It was one of the early experiments in getting content from the field directly onto our website.”
He shoved a Linux computer, a cellular connection device, a battery, and a fan mounted to a piece of plywood into a photography backpack.
Haner has since pioneered remote streaming devices that use cellular and satellite technology, with tools like multi-carrier eSIMs and Starlink, so that photojournalists working from a country at war or in a natural disaster can transmit their photos even when cellular networks are down. “It’s not enough for a photographer to be in the right place at the right time to make a historic image if you can’t get it out,” Haner says. And the speed has driven huge traffic increases to the Times’s social media accounts and website during events like New York Fashion Week and the Olympics.
Today, 10 staff photographers travel with remote transmission units the size of a large cellphone, and hundreds of freelancers upload their photos and videos directly to the Times’s publishing system—bypassing the need to download and edit on a computer—using a proprietary iPhone app. Both were inspired by the Backpack.
On April 15, 2013, Haner was at the Times’s headquarters when word spread of explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. He grabbed his gear and sped to Boston, where he spent 10 days capturing the aftereffects of the bombing. As he was driving back to New York, sleep deprived, his editors asked him to return to Boston a few days later to follow one of the victims. This time, speed wasn’t part of the plan.
Jeff Bauman, a spectator at the event, had been photographed being wheeled away from the scene, singed and bloody. Hours later, both of his legs were amputated. Haner would be documenting Bauman’s recovery in excruciating detail.
“I told him I thought this was a story he could really sink his teeth into,” Looram says in an email interview. (Looram took over as the Times’s director of photography in 2018.)
Along with writer Tim Rohan, Haner spent nearly every day for three months by Bauman’s side, earning the trust to hold up a lens during family arguments, medical appointments, and tender moments. “He was there for more than the photos,” Bauman says. “He wanted to get to know me.”
When Bauman’s sutures were taken out, about a month into his recovery, the procedure was especially painful. At home afterward, he threw himself onto his bed, exhausted. “It was the most distraught I’d seen him,” Haner says. Bauman’s girlfriend, Erin Hurley, arrived home and went immediately to comfort him. Haner followed. “I had a sense this would be an important moment,” Haner says. As Hurley folded herself next to Bauman and wrapped her arms around his chest, Haner climbed onto the bed next to them and snapped a few pictures before leaving the room. The poignant portfolio earned Haner a Pulitzer.
MOVING MOMENTS: A collection of Haner’s still photographs of Boston Marathon bombing victim Jeff Bauman won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography, but Haner was equally proud of his efforts during that assignment to learn video reporting. (Photo: Josh Haner/© 2014 The New York Times Company)
But photos were only part of the story. “One of the things I’m most proud of out of that project is actually the video piece,” says Haner, who hadn’t filmed professionally before. Carrying up to four cameras at a time, he switched between photography and cinematography throughout the assignment, debating in every moment whether he should take a still picture or let the camera roll.
“I felt like I was working with a one-man band,” Rohan says.
Haner produced a mini documentary for the Times featuring Bauman, in his own words, describing the moment the bomb went off, and his pain and goals on this new life path. “It was my very first exploration into multimedia storytelling, and [it] showed me that I could reach people in many different ways,” Haner says.
That was how Haner approached his photography career—a solo experimentalist with an eye for a good story. “Anytime I could get my hands on a new tool, or a new piece of technology, I really wanted to understand it as well as I could,” he says, “and just try to figure out how I could use it to better tell stories.”
By 2015, he was on the climate desk, working to bring photos to the fore. “Photographs were often considered illustration of the story that the writer was presenting. We tried to turn that on its head on the climate desk,” he says. “It was a visual-first type of storytelling.”
Drones, already popular with hobbyists, became his tool of choice. As the FAA issued regulatory exemptions and made the use of drones possible in film production and news reporting, Haner became one of the first drone operators in the country to take the FAA’s new certification exam, which didn’t require a pilot’s license. He quickly mastered the manual finesse of operating an airborne camera, then circled the globe on assignment, filming and photographing from the sky to capture migrants in Niger fleeing their drought-stricken homelands and villages flooded by sea level rise in Micronesia.
After a 12- to 14-hour workday, Haner would copy all his photos in triplicate, handing one hard drive to the story’s writer, putting another in a hotel-room safe, and sleeping with a third. During one assignment, in Kiribati, he had to choose between bringing a pallet of drinking water or his drone when boarding a boat. “I called my wife from the satellite phone and I said, ‘I can either take water or my drone. Can I live on coconuts?’ ” She looked it up: He could live, but he’d get diarrhea, she told him. He took the drone.
His photo series, Carbon’s Casualties, won the 2017 Documentary Project of the Year from Pictures of the Year International.
In 2021, after 15 years as a photographer, Haner joined the Times leadership team, and his one-man band became an ensemble.
“Josh is very forward-thinking, a quality that inspired me to create the photo futurist role for him,” Looram says. Now also a deputy editor, Haner leads all technology initiatives in the photo department and helps modernize the team’s structure and workflow.
He has assembled a small crew of experimentalists: David Guttenfelder, an eight-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for photography, and senior photo editor Cath Spangler, who edited the Bauman video. Together, the trio tests out new ways to capture images before establishing best practices and training the rest of the photo team. “What we’re piloting is sort of where we’re hoping the rest of our visual journalism staff will be in 12 to 18 months,” Haner says.
For the past two years, the most significant and challenging part of their work has been learning how to best shoot news photography and video for the narrow, vertical frame of a phone screen. A big photo on the front page of the newspaper—known at the Times as the A1 photo—no longer has the impact it once did, since about 80 percent of their readers will only ever see a story on their phone.
Many of the well-established rules of photography break when the target viewer is looking at an image on a tiny screen. The rule of thirds, for example, which segments a photo in a way that appeals to the eye, “almost becomes a rule of fourths,” Haner says. He and his team teach new still photography techniques and compress years of cinema studies into workshops for the photo staff.
Haner’s efforts to make photography a digital-first art have been so successful that photos taken for phones now sometimes make their way into print.
“I had to change basically 30, 40 years of looking at things,” says Mills. He and his colleagues need to assimilate new skills quickly, making them second nature by the time they’re snapping away in a trench next to a Ukrainian soldier or between ICE agents and protesters on the streets of Minneapolis. To tilt his horizontal world sideways, Mills has spent many an evening picking Haner’s brain, contemplating the art of filling this new canvas. Mills now keeps more of a scene in focus and makes a point to create “layers”—perhaps a spectator’s hand visible in the foreground—to add depth and context to a frame with no sense of periphery. “Those are the things that I think bring a reader in to keep them looking at your photo a little bit longer,” Mills says.
When Mills heads to the White House to shoot both pictures and video, he uses a custom mount Haner added to his Sony A1 Mark II camera, so his phone can record while his camera captures a horizontal image. And Haner has implemented software that displays a secondary grid in digital cameras, so photographers looking through their eyepiece can also see what fits in the crop for a phone screen.
Haner’s efforts to make photography a digital-first art have been so successful that photos taken for phones now sometimes make their way into print—even onto A1. Recently the front-page photo was a screen grab from a video—possibly for the first time in the paper’s 174-year history. In Haner’s mind, that success is part of an effort to show readers “something unvarnished and true.”
“We live in a world that’s increasingly polished and curated,” Haner says. “Authentic stories provide the friction we need to stay grounded. Without them, we’re just living in an echo chamber, completely untethered from the people and events that are shaping our future.”
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
Backpack photo: Josh Haner; Smartphone image: Edward Wong (text), Josh Haner (image)/© 2016 The New York Times Company
