Recently I was contacted by VIEW magazine who had selected 11 of my photographs which they wanted to publish along side features by several other photographer's in their interactive, I-Pad only, portfolio journal. The images they had chosen, for issue number 5, were from my on-going body of work made in America and were selected from my Flickr photo-stream which covers almost 5 years of largely unedited material. Their final edit was, because of this, an unusual one and personally speaking it was not entirely the photographs I would have suggested as being truly representative of my overall vision and I understand this must have been a difficult task for them. The selection does cover, though sparsely, the entire 5 years, and I was happy to find that it also included a few of my latest photographs, made in Florida earlier this year, which I intend to write a separate post about shortly. My decision to be part of this magazine was because I have never been involved in this branch of publishing before and find the interactive element and the technology involved exciting with interesting potential(s).
Flamingo City, FL, 2012
Cape Canaveral, FL, 2012
"VIEW is an art photography magazine developed for the iPad by multimedia design studio, FusionLab. Partner and photographer, Alon Koppel, tightly curates this magazine with great works from around the globe by photographers he knows personally or discovers on the web."
Jefferson City, MO
Please follow this link to download this issue of View magazine:
Alternatively a non interactive, but free PDF of the entire issue can be seen here, where you will also find the work of the other photographers involved, some of which are excellent:
Miles, Overland Park, KS
Simon, I think it's a plus to 'be out there'. Like you I am always concerned about how selections are made. I'm surprised they didn't ask you to short list their initial selections before proceeding. Things like this seem to be from another time. Now it's all done with little feedback between the artist and the 'publisher / curator'
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Jan
They did send me a list of about 20 of my photos, but there was no invite to help make the selection. I hoped they would have gone another way with it, but it wasn't so. I've since seen the entire magazine on the I-pad and it's very good, with a great interactive element to it, so I'm not too regretful. You're right saying that it IS still a plus to get the work out there, but as time has passed and with a little more experience I am going to be a bit more selective now. For a non-profit magazines, I'm happy to support them if I like what they're doing, but when it's a money making venture, it's another thing altogether. Last summer I was contacted by an independent film director who was making a zombie movie, saying he wanted to use some of my own zombie pics to promote his yet to be made movie, and I must send my image files to him ASAP. It was said pretty much just like that too - rude and direct. I wrote back to saying I was happy to support the local zombie walk here in KC - who were welcome to use my photographs for free for promotion and such, but as this was a private money making venture, we would have to talk about it. I got a mail back suggesting I should be grateful for the opportunity and publicity this movie would offer me.. I declined. Maybe this was a mistake, but I'm thinking it wasn't..
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