5 posts tagged “jpg magazine”
I'm hoping that we can all soon put the whole recent mess with JPG magazine behind us. The incident, apart from making me feel incredibly sad, got me thinking about the pros and cons of community publishing. This internal debate that was also fueled by recent podcasts I listened to from Switzerland related to the "We're all photographers now" exhibition; one from a panel that included Derek, and the other an interview with a personal hero, Martin Parr.
Let's get the pros out of the way; blurring the lines between consumer and content creator is a great new model that could help to rejuvenate staid print media. You have a built in subscription base because, of course you're going to buy a magazine you are trying to, or you think you have a real chance of getting published in. From a publisher's perspective (not JPG's I hope, but you can bet other publishers are thinking about this) you don't have to employ or commission expensive content creators and you get valuable content for fractions of pennies on the dollar. The community even saves your editors valuable time by voting on which items submitted for consideration should go immediately into the slush pile and which should really be considered - more on this later.
But there are downsides and here I am specifically speaking as an art photography fanboy. I have no real interest in stock, fashion or commercial photography, a passing interest in documentary work but my real passion is art photography. If you don't know the players in the American art photography publishing field there is one giant that is largely unchallenged; Aperture. I love Aperture but a monopoly is not healthy in either commerce or art, but lets leave commerce behind and concentrate on art. They need to be challenged because they have largely isolated themselves in their designer ivory tower. They, along with a few museum and gallery curators, decide what is of value - I'm not talking financially valuable, although, that of course comes into it too; I'm talking about what is worth seeing, what is worth your time and what is not.
At one time I had thought the JPG might be a grass roots movement that could lead a siege against this ivory tower but I now doubt that will happen. They (the art photography establishment) don't take us (the enthusiasts and amateurs) seriously. Why should they when we hardly take ourselves seriously? Look at a copy of JPG side by side with a copy of Aperture; JPG is fun and beautiful to look at but it doesn't have the weight, gravitas or artistic authority of Aperture. JPG may be a better business model but Aperture defines what art photography is. So which is more important? Of course it depends on whether you want to make money or make art. Being a path maker has a cost. Being dependent on your users to determine your content means that your content is democratic, but democratic often means moderate. Moderation in politics may be a good idea but in art it leads to mediocrity. The crowd is intelligent but does it know anything about art?
To quote Martin Parr in the fore mentioned interview, photography is the most democratic of the arts. Anyone can pick up a camera and if they do it is Derek's assertion, that act alone makes them a photographer. Photography is so seemingly easy - you just push the button and the camera does the rest right? You don't need to develop an visual vocabulary or have any knowledge of the movements or icons (images and photographers) that have defined the medium. When the crowd defines ascetics someone with 6 months experience has the same weight as someone who has been photographing for decades. Not that experience defined by time served is any measure of a person's eye for art, but I hope you get the point that I am trying to make.
Good, new art is rarely immediately popular. Good art is challenging and can take work to appreciate. In my experience the crowd may be smart but it is also often lazy. In our sound bite obsessed, instant gratification, ADD, modern world when we stumble upon something challenging or that requires work to understand that has not been recommended to us, we pass right on to the next, easier thing. For this reason the crowd appreciates and recommends things it can recognize as falling into a previously defined pigeon hole as 'art'. The crowd does not take risks and so good art is easily passed over in favor of easier fare. An art-photography editor who relies on the crowd to filter submissions, even just a first pass, will get to see good pictures but may miss out on real art.
Grass roots, art-photography still needs a champion and, if that champion becomes the establishment, it will need another champion and so on, and so forth. JPG could still be that champion but it is my assertion that it won't happen until it relies less on the crowd and pursues more edgy, less safe work. The art-photography world needs a new forceful, visionary personality to harness the new revolution and revival of interest in photography. It needs a new Stieglitz. It needs a new secession - secession 2.0.
As a longtime photoblogger, flickrite, unpublished contributor and subscriber to JPG magazine with a blog or two to my name it is inevitable that I would have to write something about the past couple of days isn't it? In the online circles that I move in the coup at JPG magazine is huge news.
For those that don't know, JPG magazine is a photography magazine founded, and originally run by the dynamic husband and wife duo, Heather and Derek. For the first four issues they ran it as a print-on-demand cottage-industry and established an enthusiastic community which blurred the distinction between consumer and content creator. Then Derek co-founded 8020 publishing with Paul and JPG became even more successful as a more mainstream publication. According to Derek, Paul, wearing the CEO hat, decide to disassociate the new JPG from it's more humble beginnings and remove Heather from the masthead in the process. Personally I don't understand why 8020 would want to do this or what it could possibly achieve but I do understand that Derek could not remain and work in this environment.
All this is well documented on the web now and so my regurgitating events adds nothing interesting to the debate. What is interesting is the reaction of the enthusiast photographer community on the web. Let's prefix this with the following facts;
- Derek still holds a stake in 8020
- If JPG suffers as a result of any retaliation by Derek's supporters, Derek suffers as much as anyone else.
- Derek and Heather's treatment
- Paul's perceived manipulation of the truth/history.
Derek and Heather are talented movers and shakers who will undoubtly succeed elsewhere. They should be proud of proving to the tech world at large that print publications are still viable. They have invented a new model of publication. When the consumers of a publication are also its content creators they feel as if they have a lot invested themselves in the magazine which is the both the strength and weakness of the model. I hope that JPG continues to succeed despite this bump in the road - I know that Derek and Heather will.
Postscript: In an interesting turn, Paul's wife defends him - coming up, my Mom tells my manager why my I deserve a great raise.
PPS: No one is looking good as a result of this; not the protagonists, not the staff of 8020, not us pundits, nor the JPG user community. It's all a big, horrible, sad mess:
I had one of those days yesterday that makes a photographer want to craw under the covers and hide.
It started off well enough with a graduating student at SFSU, whose campus is just across the road from our house, asking if his small class could use one of my pictures for the cover of their graduation program. There would be no payment of course and could I reply ASAP as they needed to get on with publication urgently. I was flattered so I replied in the affirmative within a very short time of receiving this request. 48 hours later I have yet to hear a peep of thanks. Come on guys; if you're not going to pay for my work at least you could say 'thanks'.
This was followed around lunch time by a San Francisco magazine asking for permission to use one of my pictures to illustrate a piece they were writing. Again, there would be no payment despite them being a for profit publication, but I would get a photo credit. Again, they wanted to put the issue to bed in a few days so could I respond ASAP. Again, I was flattered and replied 'yes' and was already looking forward to seeing my name misspelled, in tiny print bellow a shot of a local landmark. But after a few hours I got a reply - thanks; the picture editor had contacted a few people on Flickr with images of the same landmark but, if they used mine, they would let me know. Hmm, I had thought the picture editor had stumbled across my picture on Flickr and had thought it so perfect for the article that she had had to contact me. It turns out that I'm just one of several images they found that would do and they might use if their first choice fell through. I was feeling less special by the minute.
By the time I got home in the evening I had received my monthly rejection letter from JPG magazine. I'm currently batting 0 for 10. I really didn't care that they had rejected my 3 pictures (one for each theme) but I had spent some time writing an essay that I submitted to them and they didn't even mention that as being received, never mind rejected. I guess that might mean it could still be in the running for some future issue but by this time I was feeling more half-empty than half-full.
These dashed hopes are not conducive to the creative process and my mood was not helped by having to leave work early to get our house ready for two different sets of guests that evening. A little before midnight I was pooped and I hadn't taken a single photo all day. Ordinarily this wouldn't be an issue but I'm taking Project 365 pretty seriously so I had to come up with something so, after clearing up snacks and dead glasses I roamed the house with a macro lens and a high ISO looking for something to inspire me to shoot. I had to settle for a cliched shot of a detail of my Stratocaster. With that obligation done I was finally free to crawl under the duvet and dream of picture editors with huge budgets who love my work, become my patrons, enabling me to give up coding for good and spend my days inspired and creating pictures.
Following on from my previous post on Photography and Rejection I received my ninth consecutive rejection from JPG magazine yesterday evening. I must be getting better at this rejection thing because it didn't hurt at all this time. I must have lost all hope because, when I saw the message from JPG in my inbox, there was no moment of optimism that they might have accepted my work this time; I just assumed it was a rejection from the get-go.
Is that a good thing or not? Hard to say. Perhaps this fatalistic reaction just comes from the place I currently find myself in; I've just got bigger things to worry about than getting published in a hip magazine at the moment. Maybe next month those bigger things will be out of the way and I'll go back to being more effected. Maybe I have to reach a Zen-like state of the total acceptance of rejection before I can achieve success - more likely I'm just full of hog-wash.
Of course, I continue to submit but I won't bore you with my images for issue 10 - the truth is I don't want you to see by blatant pandering to the the magazine's founders as I get more desperate. Congrats to all who did get accepted - commiserations to the rest of of ... again.
As a photographer, how do you deal with rejection?
I'm asking
because for the eighth time I've been informed that my pictures are not
what they're looking for for JPG
magazine. I really like JPG magazine and its
philosophy so this is something of a
stumbling block for me. I vaguely know the people who started
and
run JPG magazine; they invited me to submit to the first ever issue -
they didn't like those pictures either. I thought I would get
a
credit in JPG before moving on to more competitive markets. That was a
couple of years ago. I told you, stuck!
Quite a few of photoblogging peers have been accept in JPG. In fact, I've never heard any of my fellow photobloggers ever admit to not being accepted but then rejection isn't something you brag about. When my photoblogging buddies get accepted for publication in JPG (or anywhere for that matter) I do cheer for them but then there's this little bitter, self-centered voice whispering in my ear, asking me why I didn't get accept; why I am not good enough. Shouldn't you just throw in the towel and try something else, say, knitting? How many times do you need to be rejected to feel really pathetic?
Each time I get that email titled "Your submission to JPG Issue X" I try to suppress a childish optimism that moments later is dashed as I file the email away in my Rejected folder. Why do I even keep them? Why do I even have an email folder called "Rejected"? Do I need to relive the rejection over and over? I couldn't tell you; I never read them again - I just collect and count them. Perhaps I could suggest to JPG staff that their email responses to submissions contain "Rejected" or "Accepted" right in the message title to lessen the emotional impact. Or if that's too subtle, how about "Winner!" and "LOSER! - EOM".
So is rejection a wholly bad thing? Well rejection does help you desensitize yourself to more rejection and I am getting better at handling it. I can now work through my rejection-funk inside 30 minutes with the aid of a double latte whereas, before, it could take a couple of day's and a bottle of Scotch. Rejection does inform you what people don't want or like. It's not like I've run out of pictures to submit - my hard drives are packed to the gills. But rejection is such a binary concept. You are either accepted of rejected. On or off. The form letter says that they liked your work but it just wasn't quite right for the theme of the publication. It's supposed to soften the blow but you know everyone else is reading the same thing (except those who got accepted of course), even the twelve year old who got his first camera two months earlier.
Perhaps a rejection scale would be more useful for us to gage our next submission, or to gage if we should even try to submit again. I was thinking that the rejection form letter could be altered to included the following multiple choice line:
Unfortunately we will not be accepting your submission for this issue of our magazine
- because it was so bad it made me hurl - I'm not kidding - I was eating a Danish when I saw your submission and I up-chucked in my mouth.
PS - Please, for the love of all that is holy, go out and smash your camera immediately.- as it was just too generic and forgettable.
PS - What's your name again? Like I care ...- although you did make it through the first round of the selection process. Unfortunately only one picture editor out of five liked it so you were in the trash can with the rest of the slush pile before the second round of selection.
PS - there are 9 selection rounds to go through to get published.- but you were so close; it was between you and another guy - on the last day before press we tossed a coin and you lost - sorry dude. Better luck next time.
PS - we still hope you will subscribe to our magazine - our next issue is our biggest ever!
PS - if you'd like to contribute to my upcoming rejection for issue 9 I have a couple of photos you can vote on:
PPS - congratulations to anyone who did get accepted for issue 8. I'm weeping tears of joy for you right now. Honestly, I'm only crying because I'm so damn joyous. Or maybe it's allergies, Yeah, that's it, the pollen count is high so you'll have to excuse me while I go and get another box of Kleanex and some Claratin...
