I created webphotomag one year ago, wanting to praise the work of photographers I kept finding while wandering the web: there is an awful lot of talent online! The idea was to create a medium that would be as convenient to read on screen as in print. The idea of a landscape format PDF file soon came up and rapidly felt quite obvious. Looking at photographs on paper rather than on screen is a different experience, more tactile, with more of a place in space. It also allows for more details in the reproduction of the work, better quality.

For all its advantages, the format used this first year has big drawbacks. The main one is that it isn’t fast enough for the web. The hungry web wants new content on a daily basis, on an hourly basis, on a click basis, even! webphotomag in pure PDF form can’t do that. I don’t want to either, the whole point of the project is to give space and time to the selected authors rather than a quick flash of light.

The second drawback is that webphotomag isn’t interactive enough, in pure PDF form, you can say it isn’t interactive at all.

So today, taking the “month of photography, 2006″ as an opportunity to start again, I’m exploring this “blog” format. This will let me post links to sites I like on a more regular basis, but also to talk about the news in the world of exhibitions and publications. This will address the issue of content update rate. It will let people comment on each article, too, in a better format than the forum that was there before (before it was shut down, the forum was used by spammers only!)

You may wonder if this is the end of webphotomag in PDF format. Rest assured, this is not the case, the PDF mag still is what is the most important to me: issues you can collect, print and display.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 5.06 pm and is filed under webphotomag. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.