The Washington Post has laid off Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee and made sweeping employee cuts across its Arts section in what’s been described as a “bloodbath” at the Jeff Bezos-owned paper. All of the paper’s staff photographers were also eliminated, raising questions about the future of the paper’s visual strategy.
Staffers began receiving layoff notices on Wednesday, February 4, after weeks of rumors of a mass downsizing. The cuts reportedly impacted one-third of the Post‘s staff, over 300 people, and eliminated entire sections across its newsroom, including Books, Sports, and desks dedicated to international coverage.
Smee, an Australian-born critic best known for his writing on modern and contemporary art, joined the Post staff in January 2018. He was previously at the Boston Globe and the Australian. He has written several books on art history, including his most recent title, Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism, published last year. Smee received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2011.
In addition to Smee, multiple journalists in the paper’s Arts section were also affected, according to sources familiar with the cuts, including the Post‘s arts and entertainment editor, visual art editor, film editor, senior style section editor, and two art reporters, as well as its pop, classical, TV, and theater critics. Senior Art and Architecture Critic Philip Kennicott will remain on staff.
“Serving as theater critic was truly a dream job,” the Post‘s former theater critic, Naveen Kumar, wrote on X. “I’m available for opportunities, and truly hope there’s a future for arts and theatre coverage in DC and beyond.”
Three reporters who cover the Trump administration’s attacks on the arts and culture will remain, sources said. The Post did not respond to multiple inquiries about the cuts.
Among those less frequently mentioned in coverage of yesterday’s layoffs were the paper’s eight staff photojournalists. Most major outlets rely on a combination of freelance and in-house photographers, supplemented by images from photo banks and wire services.
In a phone interview with Hyperallergic, Marvin Joseph, a staff photographer at the Post who spent nearly three decades in the role, described the news that his team was being cut as “a shocker.”
“I really thought maybe we would die another day,” Joseph said.
Joseph got his start at the paper in 1996, working as a news aide before dedicating himself fully to photojournalism. Back then, he said, the Post employed around 35 staff photographers. He views the scaling back of the role as the result of a “sea change” in news consumption habits and the rise of social media, among other factors.
“I think in some ways, quality gave way to the need for speed. We have to take pictures much faster now,” Joseph said. “Coming from the newspapers, we were into the poetry and the intimacy of an image. You used to wait until the bitter end for something to happen — that went out the window a bit.”
Asked about one of his favorite photographs taken for the Post, Joseph immediately pointed to his black-and-white portrait of tennis icons Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, who were fierce rivals in their youth and became unexpectedly linked decades later as they both faced cancer.
“I had them put their heads together, sort of leaning on each other, to talk about that bond,” Joseph said of the image, which he captured in Miami in May 2023. “The photo helped drive traffic, and subscriptions went up. I didn’t realize it was going to take off like that.”
Despite the heartbreaking news for him and his colleagues this week, Joseph spoke with striking clarity and acceptance about the career of a photojournalist in a world where images are produced faster than they can be appreciated.
“What’s my second act? I’ll always be a photographer, and there’s a large portion of work I’d like to do, but there’s a lot I’ll miss about being a newspaper photographer,” Joseph said. “I consider myself a community journalist. I’m going to miss that the most … I love people and telling those stories.”
