Magazines and books. Problem with both, you have to have people willing to read, or at least able to look. In that sense, as it relates to those two media, might I suggest that perhaps their time has passed?
I can only speak with any personal understanding for the period from the late 50s and I have to say that things have changed dramatically in the photo mag world. In those earlier times, Popular Photography magazine used to publish both Popular Photography Annual and a second one called their Color Annual. From the main magazine and also, no, particularly from the annuals, I picked up on most of what I came to see as the state-of-the-art photographic world. There, I first saw the works of Sam Haskins, of Ernst Haas, Bruce Davidson, W. Eugene Smith, Bert Stern, the list was a never-ending one of the best in creative photographic art or, perhaps, let´s call it best of commercially successful photography. Perhaps it´s all the same thing.
Some time ago I bought, purely because I was surprised to see it in a Spanish kiosk, a copy of Pop Photo. Dear me - what an emasculated version of its old self it turned out to be! I was also a habitual buyer of French Photo, big sister to the current American Photo. I bought the American one for a year or two out of a sort of misplaced loyalty to the French parent, but eventually I had to call down the curtain on it because it really bore nothing more than a vague stylistic resemblance to its French counterpart. It seemed to be nothing much more than a doormat to travel companies and the marketing of photographic trips - a whore in print, is what comes to mind, to MY mind and quite possibly ONLY to my mind, in case anyone mistakes this post as a libel.
And, worst of all, the photography left me totally unmoved. This might well be that I´m old and half-way (on a generous day) into my dotage, but it was probably the feeling that I got from the actual pictures so proudly on display. How depresing and unremarkable. As John Camp wrote, saving a tree a year makes more sense, so I stopped buying. Also, I might add, I have given up on the French version too. Not because it is not still good, but that I have to decide whether to DO photography any more or just decay into a world of reminiscence and reading/writing about it - as here, perhaps?
Books on photography, I´m assured, only sell if they are of the how-to genre. Is this only because there is so little work out there that is really worth spending any money purchasing? Or is it because so many people put their work on the web and rather than making sales, it removes the need to buy? Interesting quandry. Or, as I indicated at the start, it might just be that peopleare too paced out to read much of anything - on a screen, or it doesn´t exist?
Oh well, does it matter?
Rob C
