To stay in Jeremy’s world:
L’histoire se répète.
I saw it happening on several websites. Some will move to Kevin’s site and some will remain.
If the gear geeks move on, it looks not good for Lula, because it are the gear geeks who spend money, not the art loving philosophers.
Lula forum will dry out and at a certain moment the cost to maintain the forum will be to much for the tangible and non tangible benefits.
The site owner will decide to kill the forum and focus on sponsored reviews and articles, trying to get revenu out of this. Soon it will become obvious that Lula without his enlightened leader or the beholders of his legacy is ideologically death and the site will be brought back to a low maintainable relic of the past, or abrupt disappear.
Or maybe it will be different.
You may be right.
I made a similar point in the thread about the anniversary of Michael's death.
As said at the writing, I have no inside track from which to extrapolate, just hunch and gut feeling. There may be problems around the corner if the tech. stuff that many readers crave slows down simply because the market slows down; you can't write about new gear if there ain't any, but then as many of us already enjoy writing about gear we don't have, there may be mileage in theoretical gear we would like if we could afford it.
If there's a common thread to the few photography websites I frequent - used to be three, but now down to two - then I think it's that not many people write about the art, or what you described as the philosophy of photography. I don't know why this is. The opposite is true for me, and I enjoy reading/watching interviews with people I respect and whose pictures excite me. I think I've read every Sarah Moon, Peter Lindbergh, Hans Feurer and Deborah Turbeville interview out there on the Internet! The ones in LuLa I can no longer access, and truth to tell, none of them were with people for whose work I can find any interest.
It's a tough call for survival after the novelty wears off, and new, interesting blood doesn't appear to feel inclined to join in to replace those gone.
Today, I thought of looking for French
PHOTO on the Internet, found it, and realised that it seems to have shrunk down to six issues a year; when I bought it, I think it did ten per annum. Also, it gives me the impression of having become totally sex based. It used to have a reasonable supply of fashion/pin-up stuff, but as far as I can see there's now little else. Tellingly, the 'amateurs' issue seems to be still going strong, which kinda indicates the perpetual dream of folks turning pro, now more difficult than ever, when you consider that publications like
PHOTO itself are printing fewer times a year.
Yes, if Michael ran LuLa for fun, then I guess that's where it may end up again, but who knows?