In January, the dsm team and our BPC colleagues moved from downtown’s old train depot to bright new digs at the Plaza. My office window now faces east toward the Neal Smith Federal Building and, off to the side, the World Food Prize Hall of Laureates and its garden.
It’s a stately building, all pillars and pink sandstone bricks stacked up to house the public library in 1903.I’ve always admired it, but I look at it differently after talking with some folks from the Des Moines Metro Opera for our behind-the-scenes story (see here). They arranged a photo shoot there when they needed a spot that could pass as 18th-century France.
The imaginative photographer Ben Easter, who shoots for the opera and often contributes to dsm, told me he likes to run and bike around town, always on the lookout for cool places to photograph. He keeps a mental database of locations that could stand in for an old factory, say, or a castle. He works closely with the opera company’s creative director, Kim Dragelevich, who explained why they don’t just use Photoshop. “We’re really proud of Des Moines,” she said. “We want people nationwide to lookat these images and to be surprised that Des Moines is producing something like this.”
I get it. I could say the same thing about dsm.
Like the opera, which annually draws fans from across the country, dsm recently received some out-of-state praise. For the third year in a row, the City and Regional Magazine Association has named our magazine an award finalist for “general excellence.” And another three-peat: The wise, distinguished and probably very attractive jury has also singled out our annual Inclusion issue (see here), in a category with much bigger publications from Chicago, Denver and Philadelphia. The association plans to announce the winners on May 20, during this year’s conference in Cleveland.
But enough horn-tooting. Let’s get back to the opera. The team organized one of its more elaborate photo shoots, for “La Bohème,” a few years ago at Woodland Cemetery. Zoom in: Two lovers in 19th-century costumes huddle on the stone steps of the Hubbell Mausoleum. Zoom out: One of the opera staffers runs around with a smoke bomb to create the illusion of fog. Zoom out further: Traffic on Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway slows down to see what the heck is going on.
“We want people nationwide to look at these images and to be surprised.” Sometimes, they surprise us, too.
