Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Rachel Verbin has an MA in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University and a BFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University. She has extensive experience working bilingually (English & French) in media and in the arts, as a photo archivist, arts administrator, editor and researcher, and in copyright and permissions. She has worked as a photographer for nearly two decades — her current focus is on photojournalism. She is also a visual artist and a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT 200).
• Create custom photo content for agencies, small businesses, yoga/fitness/wellness professionals, culinary artists and artisans; submit news and stock content to The Canadian Press Images (photos published widely across Canadian media outlets); shot concerts and music industry content from 2005–2008. • Shoot with: Nikon DSLR; edit with: Capture One Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe Bridge on Mac OS. • Website design and curation; social media marketing and blogging. • Manage client bookings, admin, finances.
• Planning and project management of mass digitization project for historic print and negative archive and subsequent ingestion of content into online digital archive. • Carried out user experience, beta testing and translation work for bilingual English/French online photo/video archive platform. • Updated large set of photo licensing agreements for legacy newspaper photo content.
• Curation of an exhibition section of vintage Canadian Press photos for an upcoming show in the main gallery at the Ryerson Image Centre ("Stories from the Picture Press: Black Star Publishing Co. & The Canadian Press," Sept. 2023-March 2024).
• Project management of the scholarly publication program RIC Books (with MIT Press). • Management of photo research and licensing for RIC Books (bilingual correspondence in French and English with agencies and institutions in Canada, the United States and Europe). • Submission of a successful Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant grant application. • Coordination of a scholarly research fellowship program. • Creation of customized, research-oriented FileMaker Pro databases.
• Carried out digital archive photo editor duties using Fotostation data asset management (DAM) software: sorted, selected/curated and ingested daily photo content from international photo agencies and freelancers; chose photos for daily FTP feed to third party agencies; caption and metadata editing using Canadian Press (CP) style. • Managed CP’s historic photographic print and negative archive of press photographs (1910s–1990s) and managed small team of employees working on scanning project. • Liaised with international partner agencies and freelancers; renegotiated contracts with agencies; signed on new photographers. • Completed research/digitization requests using scanners, SilverFast and Adobe Creative Cloud on Mac OS. • Licensed and permissioned copyrighted, rights managed (RM) editorial photo, video and text content for use in all media (print and digital) to English and French-speaking clients. • Researched/selected images for sales and marketing initiatives.