Possible Magazines For Submissions

Thought I'd start a list of photography magazines which accept and show fine art photography, along with brief comments, as needed.

If you have any magazines to add to this list, as long as they accept general fine art submissions (eg. not Ducks Unlimited), and especially if they do a fairly decent job showing portfolios or single images, then add your comment to this entry. I will republish the list with additions and corrections as needed in the next week or so.

Lenswork - the magazine is black and white only, is known for it's beautiful printing, only does typically three photographers per issue and for many of us, is the ultimate goal of being published in a magazine. Lenswork Extended is the DVD version of the magazine. It accepts colour submissions. The images are pdf's and display large and detailed and look much nicer than the usual small web presentations.

Camera Arts - I'm afraid I don't 'get' this magazine. The images are often kitchy, heavily dependent on technique over image or use trickery as an end in itself. Black and white reproduction is very poor, there being nothing resembling black anywhere. Colour reproduction is significantly better.

Outdoor Photography - is a mass market magazine more interested in articles and products than in images, but they do show some work.

Popular Photography - not normally thought of as a showcase for fine art.

Phot'Art - great reproduction but quite biased to fashion. Fair number of other portfolios too though so could be worth while.

Photo Life - this issue has a very nice portfolio of David Burdeny's seashore images.

Silvershotz - coming along nicely, decent black and white reproduction and I believe they have opened their publication to digital these days.

Black And White - hard to get in as they no longer accept unsolicited submissions - you either win a place based on one of their contests or you get invited.

Focus - you have to be famous to get in free, the rest pay a significant fee for the privilege of being published, which taints the whole idea of being accepted (are you accepted for your skill, or your money). The publisher is very pushy. Perhaps he has the right idea, and I confess I went for it a couple of years ago, but have had second thoughts ever since, and as for his claims of it going out to collectors and generating business for you - I have heard from several people that this is not the case - you are very unlikely to make back the cost of entry (which is > $1000).

Black and White Photography (U.K.) - under new editorship with Elizabeth Roberts after declining a bit in quality over the last year or two but still a very nice magazine, decent reproduction, the ads at the bottom of the readers page are truly horrible so hopefully they will clean up those soon, they even accept small portfolios for the readers pages, showing a single photographer over a few pages.

Outdoor Photography (U.K.) - good colour reproduction, nice looking magazine, a lot of content, unlike the average American magazine, largely about landscapes and wildlife. It's the same publisher as Black and White Photography and they don't seem to do any monochrome, leaving it for the sister magazine.

Value and Significance Vs. Choice Of Subject

Do we value some photographs more than others because of the choice of subject matter? For example, given that we are human, are images of people inherently of more significance (we're not talking money here) than, say, a landscape? Is a landscape inherently more significant than, say a picture of a plastic candle holder (see Andy Ilachinski's images in the current Lenswork)?

Presumably Andy thinks there's as much value in the images from the candle holder, as must Lenswork since they included them (I happen to think they are extremely nice). I suppose we could argue that the only truly significant images are those of suffering, but clearly that's both absurd and unhealthy. Can you imagine if every one of the images you hung in your house was a 'Migrant Mother' type or even worse, a war image?

Arguably Ansel Adams and his landscapes has had every bit as much effect on policy and public sentiment, as Robert Capa and his war images, perhaps more. Brett Weston is as known for his patches of rust as his nudes and grand landscapes.

Pepper # 30 has no social value, other than as a beautiful image. Rembrandt's paintings were ordered by rich merchants, of their wives so the significance of the person to us is non-existent. Clearly the value or significance of the work is in the work itself, not what it represents.

Conclusion: plastic candle holders are fair game, as is absolutely anything else you care to photograph.

One of my all time favourite images is Bob Carlos Clark's 'two forks facing', an image of cutlery he rescued from the bank of the Thames River.

It may be that the significance of the rust or pepper or forks lies in their allegorical representation of something else - the pepper representing the female back and bottom, the forks perhaps a couple facing each other, perhaps making love. But the rust? And there are other examples in which the beauty is in the image and there are no obvious allegories. Mind you, given what people can do with ink blots, anything is possible.

Out In The Rain

Walked the dog between rain storms but when it came to heading out to photograph, it just got wetter and wetter. Camera held up fine, more than can be said for me, but a hot bath later and I'm just fine, thank you.

Projects Are All Very Well, But...

These days, many editors require photographic projects, a unifying theme to the images, some times even to the point of accepting weaker images just because they fit with the theme, even when the photographer may well have dozens of stronger images at home which will remain unseen because they aren't part of a project.

I certainly understand why an editor would do this. The publication looks better when all the images from one photographer are from a single project or at least theme. The ability to produce dozens of strong images on a single topic says a lot about the abilities of the photographer.

I would point out however that many of our greatest photographers did not work this way much or all of the time. Pepper # 30 is much loved. Ever see Peppers 1 - 29. I suppose you could include Edward Weston's other vegetable images but I have only ever seen fewer than a dozen vegetable images from him - ie. good enough to be published. That won't even get you in the door of Lenswork, for example.

I love 'Chez Mondrian' by Kertesz, but I have not seen any of his other images that remotely look like this image or are on the same theme. Instead his publications show a wide variety of subjects from street photography to 'shot from my window' type work to people.

Other well known photographers definitely did projects or worked within themes. Edward Weston could and has done entire books from nudes. Others did or do nothing but projects.

I guess that for those who don't photograph to an agenda or do projects, the hope would be to come up with enough really strong images that they can do a book, though even there publishers like themes so one may be self publishing which basically won't work if you don't have a reputation which you aren't going to get if you don't get published. Hmmm.

There's always the readers pages in photo magazines but as that generally results in only a few images at best, it really tends to reinforce the message 'these were the only good images'. Black and White magazine from U.S.A. accepts small portfolios of images - 8 if I remember rightly, while Black and White Photography (U.K.) published my badlands images a few years ago based on a submission of only a dozen or so images - but all one theme.

Has anyone had success getting published or shown in galleries without a strong theme or without a specific project?

I wonder what editors think about this - since clearly their needs are not necessarily ours, entirely reasonably.

Now This Is Experimenting

So:

- I really like it.

- It's just Photoshop Trickery.

- Anyone could do it.

- But I'm the one who did.

- Am I just kidding myself?

- Would I dare submit such an image for a show, contest or publication?

- Why the hell not?

- But what if they think it's completely tacky? Gimmicky? Trash? Without Merit?

- Should I care?

-

HIgh Key Hands

At what point does an experiment turn into a project?

Complex Vs. Cohesive

The other day someone commented on the irony of having a very complex image in my book on the page opposite my claim that images should be simple. In fact the image he was concerned about had a very limited colour palette and all the lines worked together and reached upwards to a single point and there wasn't a single extraneous detail in the image to distract from it's strong design.

This then leads to how to make complex multi element subjects work in a photograph. You may well be able to look at your image and discount all the elements that don't help the composition, while concentrating on those that do, but can someone who isn't familiar with the subject or the image do so easily?

Apart from the image features that I referred to in the first paragraph, how do you assure yourself that your images are going to be 'understood'?

1) Survey the image for elements that don't add anything to the story or the composition. If you can't reduce their effect (through darkness or contrast), then you may not have a good image here despite all the good things it has.

2) Is the placement of all the elements of the image (which do work for the story) optimal?

3) If you can't keep things simple in one way (say the number of items or their positions or directions or disparity in shapes) can you keep things simple in other ways? If not,... Sometimes simply switching to black and white can solve the problem.

4) If the many and complex items of your image can be arranged so that there is a virtual 'pathway' around and through the image, then your viewer might well be able to handle the complexity with aplomb.

5) Sometimes complexity can be handled through layering - that is arranging the camera position so that classes of elements are in different planes. Obviously in a two dimensional image this means nothing except where elements overlap so that is what you have to use to simplify the complex design. Two rocks may well be different distances from the camera, but if they don't look it, it complicates things. If one overlaps the other, then the arrangement is made clearer, which if not actually simplifying things, has the same effect in making the image more readable.

6) We tend to assume that smaller things are further away so that even if they aren't further, they tend to be treated as 'background'. Should they overlap something larger though, then you can't pretend they are background material.

7) Sometimes when an image has many elements to it, the elements naturally or with effort on your part can be made to fall into groupings which can simplify the reading of the image and strengthen composition. Four blocks of four is easier to 'read' than 16 random scattered items.

8) Consider the possibility that a complex image will look better in a big print, in which the elements have breathing space and aren't a jumble. This only works sometimes, but when it does...

9) Consider reducing overall contrast in a complex image so that the viewer is left with the impression of a group rather than of a lot of separate elements. In some ways this completely contradicts # 8 suggesting a large print - you just have to see what works in each situation.

10) In the end, if an image is really complex, but you are convinced it works, show it anyway. Who said everyone has to like every one of your images anyway? If all your images are too complex for your audience, you either have to change your pictures or your audience. If the occasional image is important to you and you want it seen, go for it. You might not choose to do it this way when submitting for a contest or hoping to be published, but if you already are, then why not sneak in the occasional challenging image.

Time

Roses

Ditcher

70-200 F4 L IS, Helicon Focus for depth of field.

Pioneer Acres

One of my patients invited me to visit Pioneer Acres, N.E. of Calgary. It's a museum and club and farm and has probably 100 tractors between the club and it's members, plus old trucks and threshers and combines and some thngs which even Tom couldn't identify.

Most cities have something like this, if not displaying farm equipment then mining or steel making or water mill or whatever. Often if they are well out of the city, they have enough land to store the 'somedays', the old stuff that hasn't been rescued yet or is simply being stored as a parts source. This can be a great source of photographic subject matter.