Bcooter comes up with his usual good sense, based on invaluable present-day experience of what the international photographic business is all about.
The gradual strangulation of print space for photographs has seen famous newspapers shed their photo staff and even the glossy fashion mags cut back on their erstwhile monthly travel fashion features, which was one of the lures that many photographers found irresistible about fashion photography, the hell with magazine pay rates. So where has the work gone? Seems to me that the Internet has become the replacement vehicle for much stuff, including for those mags such as Vogue that have a presence both on paper and on screen. The thing about screen presence, however, is that it has few limits, and you can put motion there whereas it's impossible within the pages of the glossiest of magazines. So yeah, articles on motion will appeal to a lot of young people with their futures ahead of them. Thinking of a career in photography was once a rare concept: most people only thought of pro photographers as those guys on the High Street shooting passports, portraits, weddings, pets and babies (interchangeable?), dances and like that. Naturally enough, with no other rôle models available, few people chose the life of the professional snapper.
Post Blow-Up, however, the blinkers were forever off, and youngsters who'd never touch a fashion magazine (ashamed, would you believe?) began to equate photography with an attractive sort of sexy lifestyle, with photographs a million miles removed from the grim stuff under the counter of their local french letter shoppe. Jerry Hall confirms that she owed her affair with Bryan Ferry to Norman Parkinson's swimsuit shots of her in Vogue. Photography, music, sex, youthfull fashion and makeup, all the things young people love were suddenly upon us during that once-in-a-lifetime epoch called the Sixties/Seventies. You can't stuff those dreams back away again, because now people have discovered that, as with the lottery, folks actually do get to win the prize. It's a different one today, I guess, but for the select few (it was ever thus) it exists and works.
LuLa could be a great vehicle for nurturing this kind of interest; all sorts of photographs get used in all kinds of ways and of all manner of subjects. Landscape, sports, art gallery, think of a genre and somewhere there's its outlet. Mostly, you need passion, freedom and youth to pull it off. Without enough drive - it won't happen.
If anything, maybe LuLa needs to broaden its scope and pull in a lot of new editorial/contributor blood. There is absolutely no requirement for its owners to be wonderful photographers: what they have to be are good editors and writers. Britain's Photography magazine, a far cry from the then stuffy AP, owed its appeal to Norman Hall, a wonderful editor with a great knowledgs of who was who in the photo world. If I had the magic wand, I'd like to see a coming together of three sites: LuLa, Mike's The Online Photographer and Tim's Leicaphilia. Those two guys have charisma, and both write very well indeed on all sorts of topics you'd not think a photographer would necessarily find interesting, which shows how wrong one can be. Tim's also a great photographer in his own right in the sort of photo genre that attracts me today, and remains possible to do without external help, models or money.
Guess we shall just have to wait and see. In the interim, I wish this place good luck; I have enjoyed a lot of it, even if some has had quite the opposite effect on my soul.
Rob
