American Ragazine is an art paper magazine and a website with Arts New Feed, free Events Calendar where you can list your venue and update it as often as you have new programs, shows, and exhibits. The Eye of Photography talked to its editor Mike Foldes.
What About Ragazine?
For the past 13 years, since 2004, Ragazine.CC has been a labor of love produced by an evolving team of contributors, and a number of financial donors whose works and funding, respectively, have kept us going and growing.
We have been fortunate in being able to add features such as an events calendar and a daily arts news feed, and to offer them cost-free to our international audience. Unfortunately, these features are increasingly costly, and we are asking our readers once again to take part in our efforts to keep Ragazine.CC free and independent by contributing to help us cover these expenses. Signing up costs nothing – no credit cards required!
Our contributors and editors have worked from the beginning for free. We would like to change that. We are offering unique advertising opportunities for businesses, foundations, theaters, institutions, and others. No pop-ups; no litter; no wasted space. We are looking for partners seeking marketing opportunities for audiences that share our interests in presenting the most diverse collection of creative materials available on a single site. Income will be used to create a fund to provide stipends for editorial staff, material contributors and others whose collaborative efforts make Ragazine.CC viable.
It is our aim to continue to provide an independent source for multi-genre material you won’t find anywhere else. Please help us as we continue on our way. On your way.
How did Ragazine come about?
I was part of a group of friends in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1970s, who started an alternative magazine called Ragazine. I moved to New York before the first issue came out. The zine lasted just a few issues. In New York I published an alternative tabloid called Monitor East, which lasted two issues, and then Extra Extra, which lasted one. That was all before the internet when having a printer and distributor were key elements to a successful publishing venture. Monitor East featured a bag lady on the cover. I thought we’d secured a distributor – the same one used by Interview at the time – but when the distribution manager saw it, with a necrophilia centerfold by Alex Grey – he said he wouldn’t use it to paper his bathroom. I sat on a stoop in Soho before it was Soho selling copies for 50 cents each. I still have a few issues left in a box in my garage.
When the Internet arrived, I was working long days in the electronics sales business and wanted to get back to writing and publishing. I don’t hunt, surf, climb mountains or rebuild cars. Restarting Ragazine as an online venture seemed like the perfect “obby”.
It started out as a way to present and share the work of many of the same people who had contributed to those earlier publications. I think the first issue in 2004 went out to 50 or 75 friends. Learning how to publish online was difficult. The software was clunky, but I kept at it and after a couple of years had a feeling for the zine’s direction.
The work of those friends and friends of friends where what shaped the face of the zine, which really, then, is comprised of many different faces.
How did you arrive at the format for Ragazine?
Early on I envisioned something along the lines of an amalgam of The Saturday Evening Post, Look, Life, National Geographic, the village Voice, and Time, with some Hustler and High Times thrown in. I like the tabloid and large magazine formats with full-page illustrations, and the educational content, the worldview – for example, of National Geo. But I also liked the personalities of The Village Voice, Truthout, and other disruptive on and off-line publications.
Our independence has allowed us to publish works that don’t fit with mainstream media. Pressure is always on to keep the money flowing – mine or the friends of Ragazine.CC who always seem to come through.
And the content?
I have a degree in anthropology, which gave me a broad appreciation for much of what I see in our own and other cultures, especially when expressed in creative, meaningful and satisfying ways. Being able to take from diverse sources, collect and display that variety under one cover, has been a privilege, really. So many people have contributed so much over the years to make this happen. We’ve been able to draw the attention of – and include the works of – new and exciting artists and writers, as well as people who have been working in their respective fields for decades. It’s really amazing to me what we’ve been able to publish, and the positive effect it’s had on many of the people’s careers whose work we’ve brought to light, sometimes years after it was originally produced.
And so much of that support was provided gratis… The local newspaper where I’d once worked published a short article about Ragazine.CC around 2009. I got a call from Jim Palombo asking about it. Jim became politics editor. Myron Ernst, who with his wife Shirley ran the Montessori School in Binghamton where a couple of our children attended, writes poetry. Myron introduced me to Joe Weil, who was a strong supporter early on and who as poetry editor brought dozens of poets and writers to our pages; Mark Levy, at the time a lawyer in Binghamton associated with Binghamton Imaginink hooked us up with that 501(c )(3) (non-profit) organization, and became a regular contributor with a legal advice column “for the starving artist.” Don Ruben, Doug Goff, Valerie Brown, Candy Watkins, Rob Mustard, W. D. Snodgrass, Albert Watson, Christie Devereaux, Steve Poleskie, Jose Rodeiro, Nick Buglaj, Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret… The list just keeps growing. All you have to do is check out back issues to see work from artists and writers around the world. What we’ve been able to do with so little is just hard to believe.
Where does your broad interest comes from?
I grew up in Upstate New York in the 1950s and 1960s. My father was an Hungarian immigrant whose parents sent him to live with an uncle in the States to escape the anti-Semitism surfacing throughout Europe. My mother was fourth or fifth generation American from Schenectady. They both placed a high value on education, and encouraged my sisters and I to take an interest in art, music, dance, and so on. Later, in college, I changed majors from accounting and finance to economics, to industrial sociology and eventually to anthropology. I was taking courses in pottery when I was forced to graduate for having too many hours, or I probably would have changed my major again to art.
What about fundraising? You seem to have an ongoing fund-raising effort. Do you have any major sponsors?
We have no major sponsors, but we do have several contributors who continue to support our efforts. We have tried fundraisers and participated in various events such as the recent New York City Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island, but individual donors are still the mainstay. We are working on an online store to sell books and artworks that have been created by — and donated by — our editors and contributors, to help our fundraising. We have intern developing a formal advertising plan that conforms to the look and feel of Ragazine.CC, at the same time it promotes their products. We’ll see how that works out.
Is there anything else you’d like to add that we might not have covered?
Thank you for the opportunity to share our project with your readers. The Eye is certainly in the vanguard in this golden age of photography we live in. We publish every couple of months, and now have a rolling deadline to ease the pressure of putting out a specific issue on a certain date! We have a small staff, and everyone works at it, so it really is a labor of love. I hope your readers will find in us another venue for their work, and that they will, if able, consider making a contribution to help us keep the show on the road!
