The power of photography is
just its ability to connect with everyone.
Fans, players, whoever, people can look at an image,
they have their own opinions about it,
that’s kind of the beautiful part of art
and photography as a whole,
but it also makes them feel like they were there.
It includes them, it allows them to feel connected.
I am Chase Agnello-Dean,
the manager of photography
for the Chicago Blackhawks.
I oversee all things photo.
From a digital content standpoint,
we’re looking to take our fans
and the people that come to our digital platforms
to places they can’t go
by buying a ticket or coming to the United Center.
We want them to,
when they see our players in the street,
feel like they know them and they’re part of their lives,
and not just they’re paying "x" amount of dollars
to come to a hockey game and watch.
I think everybody wants to feel a connection
with what they enjoy and what they love.
I think hockey is…
because it’s through glass
and they’re wearing helmets and all these pads,
I think it is a sport that you have to spend
the extra amount of time to make those players
look like normal human beings
and not hockey players in helmets and pads,
through a wall of glass.
The 16-35 is always on a camera,
I think the part of photography that most people are
nervous about or have forgotten about
is you need to get close to your subjects.
The 16-35, although it will distort
a little bit on the edges,
forces me to get closer to the subjects than I think
a lot of our subjects are comfortable with
and at the end of the day it produces,
intimate images that our fans are really interested in.
It lets us go into spaces and invites them in.
Luckily, everyone from our owner
to our president to our general manager to our players,
understand the need or our desire to tell their stories
and invite fans into their space,
so everyone’s been very welcoming.
I think a lot of the things we benefit from
is everyone is so used to seeing us every day
that we just become part of the family.
It makes it really easy then to bounce between worlds
and not have to then re-establish yourself every time
you want to come back and do something.
As everyone consumes more and more information,
photography has to keep up with that
to keep up with the demands of our fans.
We produce probably a little under
3 million images a year.
Without applying the proper metadata,
it would just be a pile of junk.
No one would be able to find anything
and I’d spend a good portion of my life
digging through folders,
hoping to find that one image that I know exists.
When I got here I inherited a print archive with prints
and negatives and slides that
was about 100,000 pieces,
and they were in manila envelopes in a filing cabinet,
they were well organized but no one had touched them.
So we have been working really hard over the last
handful of years to get everything
scanned and updated
and input in the system so it is
searchable and usable going forward.
It was the first 80 years, 75 years of Blackhawks history,
had been put in a storage, file cabinet.
1926 is when we started.
And there were three Stanley Cups before our last three.
And there were a lot players that came and went
through here and a lot of interesting stories
and a lot of interesting bits of information
and these photographs are part of that
and we need to find a way to bring them to light
and make them available for the
generations after we’re gone.
Making sure the correct people have easy access to
our historical archive and kind of the day to day history
has benefited everyone greatly.
In our Libris archive,
we probably have about 600,000 images.
Total hands that get get at all of them
is probably four people,
total access from an organizational standpoint
is probably 60.
We have stakeholders in community relations,
PR, marketing, human resources, ticketing,
all these departments that have these events.
I think the easier our digital and social
folks can get at the content,
the quicker and faster it gets out.
It helps them stay relevant,
it helps them connect with the fans
that are watching it
unfold on someone else’s twitter or on SportsCenter,
we’re the team,
we should be at the forefront of that,
not chasing the news cycle.
When images are available or our contents available,
we then become the voice
that shapes that conversation.
I think the new era of photography is more,
you have the instant gratification of digital platforms,
but also the ability to record history.
Through three Stanley Cups we have a lot of images
that generations from now people will still enjoy.
And being able to make sure those are searchable
and findable for the next person who takes my job
is part of why we’re here.
We want to make it so in 40 years when i’m long gone,
they can go find the photo of Patrick Kane scoring
the game-winning goal in 2010
as he comes back down the ice
throwing his gloves in the air.
That’s a sequence in time that will always be
important for the Chicago Blackhawks.