‘New Mexican’ photo editor wins prestigious award
Weber, who joined newspaper in 2021, named photographer of year for South region by NPPA
Jim Weber doesn’t shoot pictures at Christmas — or birthday parties or almost anything else that might go in a family scrapbook.
But when he points a camera on behalf of a newspaper, he’s as deadeye-true as they come.
“I’ve always shot pictures for money, you know?” he says, noting his first published photograph came when he was 13 in his hometown paper, the now-defunct Sunbury News in Ohio.
Weber, 51, recently was named the photographer of the year for the South region by the National Press Photographers Association, the result of a monthly clip contest in which pictures in a variety of categories — sports, news, features, to name but a few — are judged on a monthly basis by fellow newspaper photojournalists.
Weber, The New Mexican’s photo editor, has been named NPPA photographer of the year five different times in his career — 2009, 2012, 2019 and now 2023.
Like most good journalists, Weber said he’s always looking to find a way to tell a story through his camera in a way that’s compelling and unique — a goal that isn’t always easy to hit. There have been a lot of pictures shot of, say, the burning of Zozobra, or a legislative news conference or a high school basketball game. But that’s the challenge — making the assignment of the day the best photo in the newspaper or the website.
“In photography, you can approach an assignment from a surface level, but what I appreciate about Jim is that he can find unexpected moments that surprise you even in the mundane situations,” said New Mexican photographer Gabriela Campos.
Weber said the search for the photo less expected drives him as he goes about the work.
“I’m trying to do it, you know, a little bit different than what [other] people see,” he said. “If I feel like I’m going and shooting a picture that anyone could shoot with their cellphone, then I don’t feel like I’m doing my job. I’m going to provide somebody with — provide readers with — something more. I’m trying to provide more information about the event, and I’m trying to provide it in an interesting and engaging way.
“That’s kind of the goal there.” Weber came to The New Mexican in 2021 from Memphis, Tenn., where he was the photo editor of the Daily Memphian, an online news source. Before that, he worked at The Memphis Commercial Appeal, one of the largest newspapers in the mid-South. New Mexico is the most recent stop in a long career that also had taken him to newspapers in Illinois, California, Ohio and Mississippi and Florida.
“He’s just passionate about the whole, whole thing, whether it’s documenting or teaching.
It is everything for him,” said Weber’s wife, Holly Weber, a copy editor for Pasatiempo magazine.
Like many longtime journalists, Weber has seen head-spinning changes in the newspaper business — and the tools it employs. He began at a time when photographers’ cameras were loaded with blackand-white film, then moved to color film, then had no film at all. Today’s photographer has to be able to shoot from the ground up or, with the help of drones, from the sky down.
Sometimes, they’re also shooting video.
Weber, whose first camera was a Mamiya C 330 twin lens reflex and now uses a Canon EOS-1D Mark II, said the best newspaper shooters rely on an ability to connect with people and stories — reporting — while also being quick-fingered and quick-minded enough to anticipate what could make a great photo.
“That’s the hardest thing to do,” he said, adding, “that bothers me because it’s one of the few things I can’t teach. I can teach composition, I can teach people how to shoot a certain way, but I can’t teach them to read the future the way a really good photojournalist has to in order to be able to kind of imagine where things are going so that you can be in the right place.
“People think: ‘You know, he just kind of showed up and it was lucky’ or something like that,” he continued. “There’s not a whole lot of luck involved in it. There’s a lot of trying to figure out where somebody’s going to be, and then you kind of read them and you wait for those moments to happen.”