 What It's Like To Work With Influencers
Your lens to the internet's most powerful photographs.
 📸For Your 👀 Only: This is a special edition of JPG! We're running this interview alongside Please Like Me, our newsletter on influencers on the internet. Interview and text by Tanya Chen  Julia Dags For influencers to attract sponsorship opportunities, the photos on their feeds need to look polished. That extra glisten comes from hiring professionals — which in turn has changed the photography industry.
This week I spoke to Julia D'Agostino, a 25-year-old photographer based in Stamford, Connecticut, who works mainly with lifestyle and fashion influencers. "My first ever postcollege client was actually an influencer — I jumped right into the world," she told me. She now has a growing Instagram account to feature photos she takes of social media creators (such as Eva Amurri of @thehappilyeva, a lifestyle blogger and Instagram influencer with over 189,000 followers), and also to modestly start building her own personal brand online, which is a fascinating new layer to all of this.
Julia said lifestyle shoots have changed subtly, but in very revealing ways, over the last few years. In, say, 2015, a standard fashion shoot with an influencer client would be fairly formulaic. "We were primarily styling outfits and photographing them in a cool location," she told me. "I would photograph the shoes up close, grab a detail of a bag, a nice shot of the headband, make sure to grab a full-body image as well."
 Julia Dags As much as the influencer industry has created more jobs for photographers, there are new hurdles too. Common learning curves for influencers are best crediting practices and navigating image rights. It can feel intuitive that if a photo is of you, that you retain some rights to it. Influencers can accidentally issue rights to use their image freely, when that picture actually belongs to the photographer. Julia reminded us that a good, collaborative relationship between creator and curator means drafting up a clear contract — and setting the standard for proper photo practices. For one, always credit the photographer, like @thehappilyeva frequently does, in the post caption.
"I think the digital age is a challenge for everyone to understand copyright and the buying and selling and usage of imagery," Julia said. "If you're just starting as a photographer, it's always a good idea to create a contract with your lawyer. If you're just starting as an influencer, it's always a good idea to credit your photographer if they require that for the usage of their imagery. This also includes passing along their photo credit information if you are sharing their image with another brand."
Her unforeseen career trajectory to working exclusively with influencers has also made Julia respect how tough a gig it is. She gets particularly miffed when so many people on the internet disparage her clients' livelihoods, since she's seen firsthand how much effort goes into a photo shoot.
"I've known from day one how difficult it is to be an influencer," Julia told me.  Julia Dags Influencers are putting themselves in "the most vulnerable place" when they're posing in front of a camera and conceiving how they want to narrativize their brand, Julia said.
"There's so many people out there who throw comments around like 'I can be an influencer,'" she said. "Well, OK, then do it, and I'll be there to cheer you on the whole way."
Over the last three years she's worked with Eva, Julia said she's grown to appreciate how tough-skinned women creators have to be to continue to talk about extremely personal facets of their lives and motherhood, in order to generate revenue — and keep supporting her own business. It's a paradigm that deserves to be examined and also appreciated.
"Eva shares her life with everyone," Julia said. "She tells everyone about her highs, lows, her stories, her own life lessons, and listens back to everyone's feedback."
The reason you and I, and others, are not actively pursuing an influencer career is exactly because that work is particularly onerous. And it's why some of us prefer to be behind a camera, or a computer screen, capturing and writing about influencers instead.
Until next time, Tanya  Julia Dags
 📸MORE FROM OUR DESK 📸 As always, here are some of the best photo stories from around the internet, and what we loved from our desk. SENIOR YEAR: POIGNANT PHOTOS SHOW HOW ONE SENIOR HOME IS COPING WITH THE PANDEMIC  Rachel Wisniewski
THIS PHOTO EXHIBITION IS CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT NATIVE AMERICANS  Kalen Goodluck
PHOTOS SHOW HOW 30 YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP CHANGES FOR A GROUP OF WOMEN  Karen Marshall
LAST LOOK  Hiroko Masuike/Getty Images Tis the shopping season! "We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us." — Ralph Hattersley That's it for this week! Kate + Pia
📝 This letter was edited and brought to you by the News Photo team. Kate Bubacz is the photo director based in New York and loves dogs. Pia Peterson is a photo editor based in Brooklyn. You can always reach us here.
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