The 9th issue of YET magazine aims to analyse the theme of “Control”. On one side, photography has been used since its beginnings as a tool of control and supervision by government, political and hy is assessed in greater extent depending on the context of use and presentation, and most of all it is subject to dynamics of dissemination and sharing beyond its creation. From interviews with Anouk Kruithof, to a discussion on publishers and curators’ selecting process and essays by Erik Kessels and Brad Feuerhelm, “Control” aims to analyze the ambiguities inherent in the opposition ‘control VS free circulation’ of images through the works by Kurt Caviezel, Esther Hovers, Daniel Mayrit, Adrien Missika, Jenny Odell, Sasha Kurmaz, Erik van der Weijde, and many others.
When back in 2012 I started YET magazine together with Nicolas Polli, we were moved by the wish to launch a publication which could, in a way, be a source for photographers and professionals to start a conversation on contemporary photography.
A lot has changed over the past years and the publication expanded, offering several kind of contents which stress the importance of being a sort of index able to collect, edit and show to the audience the most relevant trends and debates around photography.
Actually I see YET magazine – the printed publication – as a starting point rather than an ending one. I mean, each issue we publish is made starting from a topic which is relevant in the period YET comes out. We leave the topic wide in order to analyze several matters that make it relevant, going through photography series, expert’s voices and the connection between photography and the world itself, crossing over several approaches and implications. This allows the audience to have an in-deep view on the main arguments connected to this or that particular trend. YET magazine is, in a broaden sense, a curatorial project and we care about generating a debate around the trend also through a series of interventions such as speeches, exhibitions, essays happening right after the launch of the issue. I think that as photography changes, we need to find new ways to speak, show and present it. Running a magazine, of course, is a lot different than curating an exhibition, but the work behind starts from a similar approach. Although the difficulty of running a printed publication brought by several implications, magazines are still a needed resource – even more now than before – to put a sort of order in the chaos of the massive production of images. That’s why we’re living a kind of change where also historical publications are adapting themselves to fit the new challenges the market is bringing. As Simon Bainbridge, editor of The British Journal of Photography, stressed during a panel talk at the ISSP, we need to understand the changes of the market in order to rethink publication strategies. It is happening quite often to be questioned about the implications of running a printed magazine in the digital era. A smart question which needs a thought answer. I think it is a matter of perspective. YET magazine lives both in the printed matter and the web. We create different content referring to the media in which they are going to be shown. The content you can find on our website substantially differs from the ones we feature in the magazine. The web is faster so it needs a proper structure and strategy. YET is one of the few examples of a publication which gives the audience brand new content in both the platforms. We launched, for instance, a section in our website called ‘Focus On’ in which, in collaboration with curators, photographers, writers, we present a selection of pieces on a specific country we consider interesting for the quality and importance of the works produced. It is extremely important to be able to reach your audience, both online and offline, through strong editorial choices which allow you to put yourself in a piece of the market where your content is unique. Not that easy, of course.
But in this sense I think that a good example is made by collaborations between the actors. Let’s be honest, photography world is wide but at the same time very small. This implies also a sort of natural redundancy which suggests a paradox about the content itself. On a side there there are commercial needs that vehicular the publication of a certain type of content, on the other side there is the need of uniqueness I mentioned before. In this context the questions about “what to publish?” and “how to publish it?” become peculiar and, since the strategies adopted by the various publishers differs in form, timing and space, I think opening up a dialogue between the different groups can be a powerful way to spread messages and create a strong debate on photography.
We did an experiment in the 9th issue of YET magazine, inviting Der Greif Magazine to curate a section of the publication, bringing their experience in our magazine, controlling and working on the same content. It has been extremely interesting to see how, in a practical way, the perception of the same images changes depending on the way one uses them. We are all working in a field that it’s changing massively, we are not sure where it is leading us yet. It is already out of date to speak about digital revolution, we’re already in that time in which we are experiencing the effects of it. This is extremely challenging and it opens up to the possibility to enhance debates and create new experiences. You can blog, run a magazine or a publishing house, administrating an Instagram or Tumblr account but you will succeed as far as your content is unique and brings an experience with it, a deep research. Here at YET magazine we are constantly working on it, on several layers and matters cause I believe that it is still very important to bring back a discussion on what is photography today and what kind of possible futures we can imagine.
MAGAZINE
YET Magazine
Issue 09
[email protected]
http://www.yet-magazine.com
TALK
Panel talk at the Krakow Photomonth
On Collaborations: gaining & loosing control over the use and life of images & words
On May 20th, 2016
Krakow, Poland
http://www.photomonth.com
