Its the time of the month for a new issue of BJP, and having sat down to read the August issue with my lunch a few days ago, for the first time I was really quite impressed by it as a monthly magazine. While some previous issues have been dealt with and discarded before I reached the cake stage, not only was I still reading this, but there were several features that I’d skimmed briefly and then thought I must read later.
I won’t bother you with the details, as they are on the BJP web site, or rather will be when they’ve got around to updating it for the current issue. One of the many things that caught my interest was a report by the editor on the festivals at Arles and Madrid, the latter of which looked considerably more interesting. His comments on Arles did solve the problem of why I’d found the festival (though I only visited it on line) so uninspiring – and frankly the first hand reports and others that I read made me glad I hadn’t made the effort to get there. It does seem to have become more and more a networking thing rather than showing new photography of any interest.
Simon Bainbridge reveals something of the art-word connections that gave this year’s festival its ‘conceptual’ bias – almost always a bad thing in photography – and unfortunately seems likely to prevent it ever being a real photography event in the future (although he puts a very different spin on it, rating this year as the best since Martin Parr’s in 2004.)
I always find it hard to understand why vacuous images around a trivial and so soon digested conceptual core are put on a pedestal and admired as great art, while truly conceptual photography – and Walker Evans exemplifies this for me – is somehow regarded as old hat and dismissed. Perhaps because the art world has still not managed to understand photography?
The magazine still badly needs a redesign, particularly the cover, which really doesn’t make the most of Lee Friedlander‘s image from ‘America By Car’ (yet another of the features I said I wasn’t going to tell you about) and there is a slightly more proper review of the Hassleblad H4D than I wrote a few days ago (and a perhaps rather less informative piece than I’ve written though not yet posted on Lightroom 3, though some bits from it have leaked out in other posts.)
This is certainly the first issue since the BJP has gone monthly which has made me at least think that I might renew my subscription once it runs out. Though I think it still hasn’t quite found a position in the market, and I’m still not convinced there is a place for it in print. One thing that I really miss is the old exhibitions listing, they now only seem to have the bigger shows that every other listings site will also have.
But perhaps like so many things now (including perhaps this blog) what the BJP really needs, rather than trying to sell a print magazine, is some kind of micro-financing model for viewing web pages which would make a good web-only presence possible. While few of us are willing to cough up the kind of subscription now needed to view newspapers such as The Times on line, some minute fractional payment to view web pages, financed by a levy on our contributions to ISPs, rather along the line of DACS payment for photocopying of copyright materials might provide a viable source of income that would guarantee the future of diverse and useful content on the web. If every time someone read this and my other web pages I received just 0.5p it would actually make me enough to live on.
One way I might consider trying to get income is a donate button, allowing people to make the occasional contribution to me via PayPal. I’m still thinking about it.