When I saw my first copy of Photo District News (1982?) I was young and hungry for real information about professional photography. Not the photography practiced by thousands of mom & pop portrait and wedding shops but the way commercial photography was practiced by the people whose images wowed me in the great magazine advertising of the day. The brilliant stuff that made young photographers aim to be better and more.....premium.
In its heyday Photo District News was an oversized, rough print, tabloid with hundreds of pages and articles that went into depth about....everything that seemed relevant to the stars working in NYC, London, Paris, LA, and Berlin (and the legion of us wannabes). The gear articles were almost non-existent while profiles of working pros and their methods were always on the menu. And we're not talking short bursts of chatty dreck made for the vast population of people with the attention spans a squirrel, we were able to sit down and dive into deep articles that really inspired. Also many articles about the business side that worked to elevate the profession and increase the incomes of real working stiffs. Premium content.
It's gone now. I read about the end over at the horrible website that helped to drive so many print magazines about photography out of business. Now we are left with two ends of the spectrum: Precious little fine art publications that believe "photography" really means "landscape," and at the other end of the spectrum are the few glossy magazines who interpret "photography" to mean very pedestrian "wedding and portrait" businesses. In the later magazines the ad to content ratio is now skewed to about 90:10. Especially so when you consider that nearly every article about yet another wedding lighting technique is a very, very thinly veiled advertorial for more junky, plastic stuff.
Makes me want to start a magazine for working professional photographers. Ah....If I only had an extra ten million dollars or so to burn as a sacrifice on the pyre of journalism.....
Sad times. One more pillar of rational information pulled down....
18 comments:
Sad news indeed. I subscribed for a few years back in the day. Reading PDN was about the closest I ever got to the big time.
The website is one of my regular bookmarks and now I'm feeling guilty I never popped for a subscription.
The disappearance of well-edited, fact checked and at least somewhat objective publications in various trades, e.g., photography, as well as in the broader realm of news, is leaving the field to outlets with a specific ax to grind, often not really disclosed, and more along the lines of advertising or propaganda than journalism. It also leads to "news deserts" in large swaths of the country, which isn't good for anybody who cares if their local government is playing a straight game.
I wonder if enough folks will miss these outlets when they are gone to figure out a way to bring them back in some form, almost certainly electronic and behind a pay wall, which is fine (nothing is free). I hope that we are not so far gone along the path to full tribalism that it will be impossible to bring these things back.
I completely agree with the notion that PDN was aimed at the bulk of pros seeking to improve and be inspired. The information about the world of commercial photography at the higher end was also useful for those of us on what was (hopefully) an upward trajectory in our careers. This is where we often learned bits of pro lore and jargon that lent us a veneer of credibility when we were desperately afraid that the client would realize he just hired a hack.
The problem today is the population of pros working at that level is slightly larger than it was but that it is insufficient to depend on them for audience.
The rest of the would-be audience are siphoned off by videos panting over unboxing gear and legions of blogs and YouTubers offering up the latest "tips" to make your photos "sing" or at least squawk less.
Add to that Instagram feeds with a tiny image captioned with the mandatory "awesome" or "insane" some other insincere drivel followed by endless hashtags that fall off the bottom of the page.
Magazines in general are going the way of the Dodo. Everything is on line and online video. Having said that I very much enjoy 2 photo magazines.
#1 is LensWork. Nice reproductions and the commentary is very encouraging.
#2 is B&W. Not the UK version (which is ok) But the USA version that has many contest versions and reports on the B&W photo scene in general and features talented photographers and their works. B&W is amazingly affordable considering the size and quality of the magazine.
I'm sorry to hear it. I was an early subscriber and enjoyed the magazine for quite a few years. I have to say that it was never quite the same after the original people sold it -- more gloss and less substance -- but still a worthwhile read.
The Canadian magazine Photo Life is still publishing. They also have a web site on which issues are archived. There is a lot of photo content in it, some photographer bios, and a little bit of tech stuff. I subscribe because I think it should continue to exist. Eventually it will probably go online only, is my guess.
I will play devils advocate here. Yes pdn produced good work, and yes we are losing many established magazines... However we have more access to richer and greater amounts of information than ever before.
There are writers and video makers educating, informing, entertaining millions more frequently than ever before. I feel there problem is a problem of curation. Magazines, as long as they have a good editor, were good curators of content. Today there is more garbage, but also some incredible content, far better then anything these magazines could have ever produced.
So, an era ends, as they all do, but it ended because of a better, more successful medium... Is that a bad thing?
I just received a notice this morning from Rangefinder Magazine, a publication for which I've written a number of articles over the years, that they are dropping their print version and will henceforth be online only. I'm sorry for the Rangefinder that used to be. It usually had several worthwhile articles in each issue, but since it was bought out a few years ago it has been mostly gloss and not a lot of substance. On balance, no great loss. The real loss occurred several years ago.
Good question you ask, ODL. I guess you can make the argument that what you paid for when you subscribed to a magazine was the curation. The ads and tech content was pretty much the same everywhere. It's a rare web site that is not ad-based these days, and there are still people who balk at paywalls, as if online content should be free a priori (instead of it being an historical fluke). I'm no different than others, though, in that I see problems but have no idea how to address them.
On your other point, yes there is a lot of fantastic web content out there these days, we're lucky as hell. The most obscure techy questions can be answered after a quick search, less so with non-techy stuff but that's probably normal.
I should have mentioned that Emerald Expositions owns both Photo District News and Rangefinder.
Mark, Robert and ODL, you are correct that there is a lot of photography-related content on the web, but it seems to be overwhelmingly technical. Where are the good, general interest articles, the profiles of significant photographers, the travel-with-your-camera features that once made photography magazines such enjoyable armchair reads?
Sad to hear the news, particularly so as I was featured in the February 1982 issue - "On Staff - Nine to Five photography" (as if it ever was.....)
Mr. Jenkins, the sad thing is no one wants to know what "you have done", they only want to tell you what they have done. Instagram is a prime example.
Dave Jenkins echoed my thoughts on the good that Rangefinder once was, compared with the fluffy content and the endless ballyhoo for WPPI that it is now. Emerald Expositions should drop the Rangefinder name and call the digital version WPPI News.
If you'd like to know a bit about why print publications, specifically newspapers, are dying off just do some research on Alden Global Capital and the often-renamed incarnations of Digital First Media which they own and re name regularly to obfuscate their evil intent. It's a hedge fund that has been buying newspapers, strip mining them for their assets, then using that money in other (often risky) investments to produce sometimes gigantic returns for investors in the hedge fund and consistent gigantic investment advisement fees for themselves.
It's a business model that hasn't gone un noticed in other quarters. Other publication owners are figuring out they can generate a temporary burst of liquidity by cutting or eliminating publications, then investing that "found" money elsewhere, seeking stratospheric one time returns.
Journalism is dying in this country at the hands of these vulture capitalists. All of my friends from my years as a full time photojournalist, save 1 or 2, are all, unwillingly, out of the field entirely. Death by a thousand cuts comes to the trade press ...
Seems we've traded a taste for well curated collections of information and profiles of real creatives for dopamine producing, breathless, lines/mm in the corner reviews, arguments about pixel densities and fanboy unboxing videos.
don't underestimate the attention span of a squirrel...if something is of interest to a squirrel, e.g.' nuts, you better believe the squirrel be paying attention to it and its environment.
I have kept all my old magazines circa 2010, and I occasionally look on kijiji and Facebook marketplace for old mags. I think these mags are priceless, to me anyways.
Kirk, any photography magazines still remaining you would recommend?
Sorry Terence, but no. I just haven't seen a good photo magazine along the lines of PDN in a while. When I need a fix of photography I just look at Vogue or Elle or one of the other fashion magazines. If anyone can recommend some publications please let the rest of us know.
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