Thanks to Jim Casper at Lens Culture for his tweet mentioning the interview with Antoine dAgata at Gomma magazine, which is worth a read. One of the people he mentions is Joan Liftin, who I met some years ago when I attended a Charles Harbutt workshop at the late and lamented Peter Goldfield‘s Duckspool. Joan sent me a copy of her book ‘Drive-Ins‘ which I reviewed on About.com when I was writing for that site, and is unfortunately no longer available. d’Agata goes on to mention Nan Goldin, who I wrote about at some length for About, and later produced a revised and updated version of my piece on her, Nan Goldins Mirror on Life for this site .
One of the last posts that I wrote for About, back in May 2007, was about Gomma Issue 3, when I noted:
there are some good interviews, with Daido Moriyama, Anders Petersen, Boris Mikhailov and Boogie. Along with Lise Sarfati, they also provide some great photographs, and there is plenty of other interesting work in the issue, for example the ambrotypes of Stephen Berkman (I mentioned his work with the Camera Obscura briefly eighteen months ago) and the highly personal black and whites of Danish photographer Jacob Aue Sobol.
Those names were all those of people I’d written about on About, and in the original there were of course links to those pieces, some short, but all linking to other information on the web. I’m still upset that the New York Times (the owners of About.com, at least when I dismissed) not only took all that resource off line, although without constant upkeep much of it would now be out of date, but more that there is still nothing on line which really replaces what I did. It was more or less a full time job, and I could not continue it without the financial support that About.com provided.
Gomma too has changed. Here is what it says on the web site:
Gomma Magazine, the printed six-monthly publication, was edited in London, printed in Italy and distributed worldwide through major distribution companies.
Unfortunately the publication of the magazine has been put on hold due to logistic issues, – however a relaunch plan for the magazine is currently being discussed. Also there are talks to create a small publishing house of high quality photography.
The Online platform Gommamag.com continue to be a valuable resource for photographers and visual artists. Its use and registration is free, although some new pay-per-entry structure has been installed so to avoid duplicate and flooding of the same info.
Having looked at the site, I’m not too sure what Gomma is, but there is certainly some interesting material there.
