Interesting - f11 Magazine

[gregmeister_admin]

Ran Across this today and thought I'd share it.

http://www.f11magazine.com/all.html

Greg

[julie]

Hi
Thanks for this. II have really mixed feelings about many of these images.

Julie

[gregmeister_admin]

How so?? I figured this would be interesting for you...

Greg

[Tildy]

I do too -- but I'm not sure they're the same mixed feelings. I work in magazine publishing so it's difficult for me not to notice the tricks of the trade, which tend to distract my attention from the photos themselves and, I feel, make them all look like the same kind of thing within the context of the magazine layout. This probably isn't what Julie means though

[julie]

I have mixed feelings. So a bit hard to explain. These are award winning images and i just dont like a lot of them. Mostly i think it is the 'style' i dont like. I have thought about why quite a bit as obviously they are higly thought of by this prestigious organisation. And i feel a bit presumptuous questioning this. While can recognise the skill I think some are a bit clichéd and very slick.Too slick for me. I think i have lots of cliched images but i am not winning awards. And i guess i just dont really like slick.

Julie

[Ganna]

Julie, we better get you into a photographic club; they will explain the value of "slick" to you

[artmar]

One problem, for me, is that there are too many photographs by each photographer, page after page of them. There's not nearly enough variety within each photographer's work to sustain interest. I'm not sure if this is what Tildy is referring to, but the layout, basically one photograph per otherwise blank page, seems to enshrine them as part of the tradition of "masterwork" culture -- a museum in a journal. Given the potentialities of print media, this feels like very unimaginative curatorship and design. It would be more interesting to see works of different photographers creatively juxtaposed -- the magazine as a composition in itself, rather than just a glossy catalogue.
One more point (maybe along the lines of what Julie is saying): there's nothing here that pushes the boundaries of what we already know what photography is, and can do. So, it's a celebration of The Known, rather than a series of explorations into the unknown.
Oh, and one more -- the placement of a Leica advertisement at the beginning of each issue goes a long way to define who the targeted audience is.
Which ain't me, or 99.99% of photographers. But then again the photographs themselves are consistent with this idea -- the image as status symbol.
Other than that, it's fine

[Tildy]

I think we may all be saying the same thing here, albeit from different perspectives.

As a magazine editor, the thing that bothers me about this magazine initially is the (quite standard -- advertisers request this) placement of the ads in RHP position -- i.e. on the right-hand pages, so that when you turn the page, you look at them first. In the kind of magazine I work on, which is mostly full of text rather than images, this doesn't bother me so much, but here it confuses the issue of what you're looking at. If you look through the book, you'll see that the big, lavish, full-page photos are also mostly in RHP placement, and sometimes (Issue 59, pp 38-39, for example) you can't tell whether what you're looking at is an ad, or an Award-Winning(tm) photograph. So, for me, it all tends to very quickly start to look like advertising, which is reinforced by the slickness of the images, the glossiness of the presentation, and the use of white space.

Julie's response makes sense to me in that it implies that, for her (I may be wrong, Julie, sorry -- I'm interpreting you ), all of these photos look like the same kind of thing -- i.e., the magazine itself has a style that sucks all these potentially disparate images into it. And, I don't like this style -- as Art says, a glossy catalogue. And, yes, the museum-like presentation is both unimaginative and, well, pretentious, but more in the way that 'high-end' airline magazines are pretentious -- implying that an ability to appreciate the finer things in life comes from having a lot of money.

I can feel that I'm working up to a rant here, so I'll quit while I'm ahead

[Tildy]

In looking more closely at the actual photos, which were of course chosen and arranged by someone which is why they seem so uniform despite their diversity, another reason they look like advertising is that they resemble the aspirational/"motivational" quality of a lot of ads -- see pp 80-81 for a good example -- featuring a central subject reaching or striving toward future success. This really bugs me

For an antidote to this, I recommend: https://despair.com/collections/demotivators/BestOf

Shutting up now...

[gregmeister_admin]

Wow..this took on a much bigger life than I expected. this will make for some interesting conversation this week.

I'm not offended just interested in the discussion.
Greg