A group led by the private-equity firm InterMedia Partners and InterMedia’s luxury magazine publisher, Uptown Media, has reached an agreement to acquire Vibe and its Web site. The new owners say they plan to relaunch Vibe.com in the next few weeks.
They intend to bring out the print edition only at the end of the year and then publish it quarterly rather than monthly, possibly increasing the frequency after 2010.
via– WSJ.com.
I think that magazines need to spend more time and effort on the distribution problem. The less time people spend around newsstands and the less there are of them means that they need to seek alternate ways to allow consumers to browse and buy a single copy of a magazine. Also, the inefficiency of shipping magazines all around the country in hopes that someone will pick one up seems like a place where you can save some cash as opposed to say, cutting your contributors fees. Maggwire is a new site where you can view magazine stories (from their websites) by topic and vote, comment on and share them. I like the idea of an aggregator that only deals in magazine content. Looks like a winner to me.
via, Mr. Magazine.
“Yes, the home-page story about the Hudson crash might get more clicks than some uniquely incisive analysis of the economy. But it also makes the home page more of a commodity and less of a brand. Paradoxical but true: It’s possible to post stories that make people who come to a web site more likely to click, yet may make them less likely to come back to the site, and certainly less likely to pay for it.”
“I’m 92 years old, and I’ve survived a lot of crises in photojournalism,” he said. “I find the present situation depressing, but I’m crazy enough to be hopeful. There have never been more images out there, and we need more help in sorting out all the information.”
John G. Morris, a former photo editor via NYTimes.com.
see you next week.
If you’re not following the action over on WTJ ? (here) it’s pretty exciting for those who love cycling and photography (beer, cured meats, naps and lots of logistical hurdles). Tomorrow is the big day. Can’t wait to see what happens.
Jonathan Adams sent me this:
A beautiful piece by Ohio U student Maisie Crow done as part of their Soul of Athens series.
She brings stills, video and audio together in such a simple and powerful way and tells a story that is probably all to common but you really never hear it told.
Yeah, the future is bright. So many great stories out there and young, ambitious, talented photographers ready to tackle them.
We’re building a service to help people make their own newspapers.
Several of my readers have asked me how you get started as a photographers agent. I put the question to Caol LeFlufy owner of LA based agency Eye-Forward who handles photographers Patrik Giardino, Sam Jones, Frank Ockenfels 3 and Christopher Wray-McCann.
APE: How did you get started as an agent? Walk me through the beginning of your career.
My brother and father were both amateur photographers growing up and I spent time in the darkroom with my Dad when I was very young. Then I studied photography in high school with an inspiring and encouraging teacher who I am still friends with. After high school I traveled taking pictures and then returned to Vancouver, Canada where I grew up and started working in a camera store and freelancing as a photographer. In that regional market I did a little bit of everything to stay alive but mostly did editorial portraiture. I started to work for national publications and was successful marketing myself as a West Coast photographer that the magazines could hire instead of flying someone out for assignments in the Western Provinces. After seven years of earning my living that way and also teaching photography at a local community college in Vancouver, I moved to Toronto to expand my business but with my sights really set on getting to NYC. I loved magazines like Vogue and Rolling Stone and I figured that sooner or later I would have to challenge myself on that level.
After some struggles in Toronto I started to feel like maybe taking pictures for a living was ruining my love of photography somehow and I started to think that I was a good photographer but not a great photographer. I began to realize that not every photographer is suited to being a working commercial photographer day in and day out. Then I was visiting friends in NYC one weekend and one of them was assisting Steven Meisel. On a Sunday night there was a call that Steven’s other assistant had put his back out and my friend had to find a new assistant right away for the shoot in the morning. I got the job, loved it and got a long with Steven, so he said if I wanted to stay around and assist I could. Being around a photographer of that level and working on shoots for the major magazines thrilled me. For a while I went back and forth to Toronto still shooting and then coming back to NY to assist.
Steven was represented by Art + Commerce and they represented Annie Leibovitz who was one of my heroes at the time. The agency was very small then and two of the three partners came to Steven’s shoots and I got to know them. Annie’s studio manager quit suddenly so I asked to be considered for the position and with their help and Steven’s I got the job. This was one of the most important work experiences of my career. I realized here that I loved the business of photography and could use my organizational skills as well as my other strengths and work with a photographer and not be one every day. I was thrilled and challenged in a way I had never been.
I began to work closely with Jim Moffat one of the partners of Art + Commerce on all of Annie’s jobs. After working for Annie for several years I went to Art + Commerce to be Jim and Anne Kennedy’s assistant. In addition to helping with them with all the photographers I started to produce Annie’ s American Express portrait campaign because there were no print producers in those days. After several years doing that I went to work for Outline Press to run the NY office and start a representational wing for the company. Outline had tremendous growth over those years in both the stock sales and the assignment work. Art + Commerce had been asking me to come back to be an agent so I eventually returned and brought Frank Ockenfels along with me from Outline. I worked at Art + Commerce for ten years as an agent representing Frank, Mary Ellen Mark, Taryn Simon, Ellen von Unwerth, Max Vadukul, Perry Ogden, Max Vadukul and Richard Burbridge. During this time I began teaching at ICP and actively collecting photography and photography books.
APE: What was it that made you realize it was time to start your own agency?
I moved to Los Angeles for personal reasons and that was why I started my own agency.
APE: For aspiring agents out there what are the essential skills to have? What things should they be working on?
The skills I think you need are in no particular order:
-A knowledge and love of photography – the history of etc. (seems obvious but you would be surprised…)
-Be an organized person
-An ability to multi-task
-An ability to solve problems and think outside of the box
-Good people skills and good communication skills
-Be a good listener and not just to the clients but to your artists (Some times you may feel like you are a therapist)
-Be an effective negotiator
-You have to be a pro-active person not a passive person
-You have to be willing to work hard.
-You have to really want to do it.
APE: This is going to sound insane but how do you land jobs for your photographers?
Hard one to answer…
I think I land jobs by representing good artists and developing good relationships with clients and promoting my artists effectively and trying in every job to make sure that not only the client is happy but that the artists has all that he or she needs (support of all kinds) to do a great job so that we continue working with the client.
There is also a huge element of luck and I am not joking.
APE: What advice would you give aspiring agents?
To carefully research and select the artists that they decide to work with and understand it is a partnership and hopefully one that will last a long time. I would also give the advice that it may take a while to build your business and that you have to be patient. A lot of your time will be spent planting seeds with clients and sometimes the results are not as quick to come as you would like. The whole business is about forming good relationships with your artists and your clients.
Lens Culture has published audio interviews with 38 photographers (here) that I discovered via Gallery Hopper.
I remember a few months back some very provocative quotes coming from a speech Stephen Mayes gave but I’m not sure if the full audio ever made it out. Len’s Culture has it (here) along with those wonderful quotes:
“I wonder if World Press Photo is peeling away from reflecting the media as it is, and is rather reflecting the media the way we wish it were. Of the 376 images awarded prizes this year, I would be curious to know how many have been published in a paid-for context. Maybe all of them. Maybe. But the overall impression that I’m left with from the 470,214 images that I have seen entered into the contest in the current decade, is that they reflect a form of photojournalism that is now more romantic than functional.”
“The overwhelming impression from the vast volume of images is that photojournalism (as a format for interpreting the world) is trying to be relevant by copying itself rather than by observing the world.”
“As one juror said this year, ‘90% of the pictures are about 10% of the world.'”
Stephen is the Managing Director of VII Photo Agency and served as Jury Secretary for the World Press Photo Awards from 2004-2009.
UPDATE: It was originally published with the audio on Notes from Nowhere (here).
I’ve become increasingly nihilistic about photography… photography was much more interesting 50 plus years ago, and now there is just this overabundance of photography. It’s like saying “What type of art do you do?” “Oh, I do Twitter.”
— Alec Soth
via Too Muck Chocolate.
It is not the first time that I say print is not dying, just the folks who owns it are committing suicide. I firmly believe that our salvation is going to be in ensuring that each and every product, we media people produce, must be necessary and sufficient.
via Mr. Magazine.
A Spanish Civil War photo by Robert Capa that shows a Republican soldier at the apparent moment he was fatally hit in the back by a bullet was in fact staged, a Spanish newspaper claimed on Friday (here).
“Capa photographed his soldier at a location where there was no fighting,” wrote Barcelona-based newspaper El Periodico which carried out a study of the photograph taken in September 1936, the third month of the war.
The so-called “falling soldier” photo was not taken near Cerro Muriano in the southern Andalusia region, as has long been claimed, but about 50 kilometres (30 miles) away near the town of Espejo, the newspaper said.
via Yahoo! News thanks Mike.
UPDATE: Great narrated video from the Guardian (here).
It was recently revealed that Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor was one of the judges that ruled on the Chris Usher case where the court awarded him $7 per image for the over 12,000 images Corbis lost. The Lens Blog has interviews with Chris and the lawyers who argued the case.
“’Judge Sotomayor did not get that this is blatantly absurd: to treat one of the top photojournalists in the world as if he was a child who lost the snapshots he’d brought into CVS or Walgreens,’ Mr. Greenberg said in an interview on Tuesday.”
“Following up in an e-mail message, Mr. Greenberg said, ‘It was the impression of my entourage — consisting of clients, witnesses, staff and interested parties who attended the oral argument — that Sotomayor had no understanding of the historical context of the photo business.’ He continued: ‘She viewed — in my crew’s opinion — the case as the last in a line of cases concerning the loss of analog materials, an anachronism. While arguing, I personally could not read that, but others did.'”
UPDATE: Leslie Burns-Dell’Acqua sees it differently (here).
“As I mentioned in my previous post, it sucks for the photographer. However, and note these two things: 1) the court found it impossible to value the images otherwise because of the lousy record keeping by the photographer IN THIS CASE; and, 2) the ruling clearly states that it is a summary order and is NOT precedential, so other cases do NOT have to follow the ruling and so not all images will be valued at this low level.”
“… Participants are encouraged to be honest about work they find boring and hateful, especially if curators consider it stimulating and interesting. “
“This past Monday saw the launch of National Art Hate Week in England, the brainchild of painter Billy Childish and two collaborators. The idea, he says, is to give the U.K.’s art institutions “a necessary kicking” by calling for the public to stage a silent revolt and visit a local gallery, take a closer, more honest look at what’s being shown, and then actively hate it.”
via artinfo.com.
