How to Shoot an Elephant

It took a number of people to capture the proverbial elephant in the room, and not one was an animal handler. Once PT art director Ed Levine decided to depict couples' communication failures by animating the metaphor, photo director Claudia Stefezius began hunting for a photogenic behemoth. The search led her to John Lund, a California-based stock photographer and master of Photoshop (the first image he ever created graced a Time cover).

Lund was the source of a top line of greeting cards featuring animals expressing human feelings, the images deft composites of parts of real critters photographed naturally. On a trip to Thailand, he had visited an elephant sanctuary to shoot one resident from every angle. "I wanted a library of parts and poses," says Lund, who foresaw commercial demand as the animal symbolizes memory and strength. Shown a sketch of PT's cover idea, he offered images composited from his library, the animal set in anthropomorphic poses by his partner, Stephanie Roeser. She wove together 19 parts—an eye from one photo, a thigh from another—to make a seated elephant that exudes awkwardness as if it didn't want to be in the room.

"The emotion is mostly conveyed by the position of the limbs," says Roeser. In New York, photographer Peter Yang had to shoot the couple on the sofa looking both uncomfortable with each other and squeezed by a two-ton animal present only on a computer screen. Nothing worked until two assistants were drafted to sit between them. "Pushing was the critical part," says Yang. "It created credible tension in the couple's bodies and faces."

The Lund-Roeser elephant and the Yang scenario were then wed by technology. Lund got to realize a longstanding dream. "I've always wanted to have a PT cover," he says. "I'm a conceptual photographer, and PT is known for its conceptual covers."