Blueeyes Magazine: Content

After a nice long cry - oh, wait, I mean a nice hard slap in the face from the girlfriend (thanks baby, I needed that) - I'm a way more focused today and ready to tackle part 2 of my series about Blueeyes. This episode is going to be all about the photography that the magazine publishes, supports, and sometimes has a very hard time finding and crafting in order to produce each issue.

As weird as it feels to type (weird because shouldn't it be this way at every publication?!), content is the only thing that is important at Blueeyes. The magazine was created, designed, and is solely focused on publishing important documentary projects. It only exists to be a home for good photography, and its only agenda is to try to celebrate really kick ass new work. Period. That being said, content is both our greatest asset and purpose, and also the source of nearly all of our problems.

Content problem #1: Blueeyes is broke.

Well, we aren't actually broke because we never had money, or wanted it really, but the magazine operates without a budget, which means that it doesn't pay its "employees" or contributors anything. Additionally it does not receive any revenue from any source. As anyone who reads this already knows, money is a very powerful motivator and helps do just about anything more quickly and efficiently (and by this I mean the motivation to make money encourages people, especially poor photographers, to get things done and return e-mails). Because the magazine doesn't use or have any money, we depend on the good will and passion for photography of the staff and contributors to keep the magazine moving forward. The lack of money, thank god for this, has never been a huge problem, and we've worked with any number of extremely talented and award-winning photographers from around the world who were excited to be a part of this labor of love.

Content problem #2: Where's the beef?

Even though I put money as numero uno, its not nearly our biggest challenge we overcome to publish Blueeyes. The single largest content problem at the magazine is finding really good and important photography. That's also not surprising... finding good content is the big job of every magazine. Duh. But the thing is that Blueeyes is devoted to publishing a very certain kind of photography... so right off the bat our total content becomes very limited (that's one strike). That certain kind of photography also happens to be, as I've written several dozen times before, extremely difficult to create well (that's two). And as you already know, Blueeyes was created to publish a certain type of extremely difficult photography (documentary project photography, wahoo!) because the editorial space for it has ever been in great decline; which is to say that because there are many fewer publications paying and publishing project work, there are also fewer photographers willing to invest their hearts, meager paychecks, and lives in order to work on projects (strike three, yer out!).

This is really one of the hard things to realize about Blueeyes from the outside. Even though I know you feel like there is really, really great project work everywhere that you see, there really isn't when it comes to the things we are trying to support. That sounds cynical, but believe me I've been looking for almost five years. And when you sometimes notice that there hasn't been a new issue of Blueeyes in longer than the normal 2 months, the lack of content is often the only reason.

Documentary photography projects that won't ever be published in the magazine usually wind up in one of several categories: great idea, but no execution; giant huge life-long project idea (eg. Religion in America), but not nearly enough time invested; decent idea, decent photography, but no where near finished; good idea, ok execution, but no personal vision; none or very bad idea, but great photography (which sometimes we can turn into a portfolio). There are more but you get the point. The limited reagents are almost always either not enough time, not enough passion, or not enough talent.

So why aren't people putting more time into their projects? Well, why should they? I truly hope that they are and will, but I also recognize that there is very little economic incentive in this business for a photographer to go back again and again, which is what it takes to create a story that is special and that can run from 16-60 images (our desired length). Even the big guns of the photography industry that do documentary projects rarely have the ability to return and spend the time to produce long bodies of work. (One of the things that I believe distinguishes some of my favorite photographers is that they are so fucking talented and experienced that they can arrive somewhere and immediately begin to make interesting pictures, covering so much more ground than others can).

The way that time most often shows itself is through projects that have a lot of potential but that just cut off right when things would get complicated. A lot of these projects are from newspaper photographers who have started something really great, but at some point in the process their editors decided it was ready for print, and so, "snip," that's it. The story stops. Again, its economics. If you are going to run 8-16 pictures it makes a lot of sense to stop right there. You've already gotten everything you need and more would just complicate the story. But if you are trying to publish a larger essay, then you are probably only half-way there and need to keep working. Publishing longer essays isn't just something to make Blueeyes a bit different than the hundreds of other photography zines, its also something we really believe in and something that ultimately is very important for documentary photography.

Passion is not nearly as easy to just pick up as time is to give. A really easy way to get disillusioned with this job is to look through some of the several dozen submissions we get (we average about 50 a month) in which a photographer has gone to a third world country to photograph poor or sick people and obviously has nothing to say or zero compassion for the people in the pictures. Why in the fuck are they there? I know why they are there, but it makes me insane seeing it again and again. And as fickle as passion is, the most difficult thing to work with and communicate back to a photographer is that their project and idea was more than their talent could handle. I would never tell someone that they don't have what it takes to be whatever they want to be. What I do, and what everyone on the editorial board tries to do, is to share our honest feedback with each person who submits their work in order to try and make their project and the entire genre of documentary photography better. So many times the personal feedback that I have to share is all about connection between photographer and subject or story and how much better their photographs would be if they dug deeper and asked themselves the simple but tough questions. Why am I here? What is this story about? Who are these people? What do they fear? love? dream about? How can I connect my viewers with their lives?

Content problem #3: Deja vu

A freakishly large percentage of our submitted work is all exactly the same, not only as a body itself (I once had 5 essays on Burlesque sent to me in the same week) but also to lots of other famous work that all of our editors have seen before. This is a slippery slope of course, and I'm not going to get into a discussion of whether there are truly any new ideas left in the world, etc. But seriously, why would a photographer want to spend a very large amount of time rehashing an extremely well trod story once again unless they had something new to say. You should rightfully be thinking that I sound like a prat here, but really I'm just trying to be practical. And to be even more clear, I'm excluding any work that is connected to big news events, because lots and lots of people cover and have things to say about that, as they should. I'm happy to look at another tsunami essay, or dilapidated Katrina homes, for instance, but I'm fucking tired of anything from the Burning Man Festival.

Think about what you are working on and if its not unique then make your approach to it personal to make it say something more than, "I once saw an essay by Gene Richards about this and that won an award, so I thought I should do the same thing." And if you don't shoot like Gene, then don't shoot like Gene. I can't shoot like him, and I've fucking tried my ass off, so I just shoot like myself and try to focus on telling stories, which is already hard enough.

There is more to say about content, and I'll finish with some advice on submitting your work to the magazine, but I'm going to begin wrapping up here. In the coming posts I'll get into some other related aspects to content, such as my delicate position towards multimedia and our upcoming plans for bringing new features into the experience at Blueeyes.

Advice for submitting to Blueeyes Magazine:

Follow the posted guidelines and be professional. Those 2 things should be so obvious that I needn't mention them. Take a look at our recent archives... if we've just published a story on Lebanon, for instance, then we aren't going to publish another one for quite a while. And while you are at the archives try to get a sense of the work we are dedicated to supporting. If you have an art photography project on decapitated roosters, then we probably aren't going to be very responsive. If you aren't sure if your story is ready yet, go ahead and submit it and take advantage of our feedback. However, if you've only shot for 3 nights at the county fair, please don't submit yet... it's not ready. Like any other essay or story your project needs to have a story arch, characters, a quasi-plot, process, details, etc. If you don't know what I'm talking about, consider picking up a book. I've learned as much from the first 2 chapters of All the King's Men about story tellling as I have from any photography class I've ever taken. In a long essay something has to happen... the issue or place or people need to change, or have conflict, or take a long journey, etc. Life is not static, do not try to force it into a little box that way. Incredible photographic talent without passion or an idea is just masturbation. Ah, nice, a great place to end.

I've spent a few thousands words basically dissuading any reasonable person from investing themselves into being a long-term documentary photographer, or at least from submitting to the magazine. But I really believe that the project is the most important and rewarding and effective format for photography. Through it photography finds its greatest power and more sophisticated and enriching tool for transmitting meaning and challenging ideas. I can't imagine doing anything else in photography.

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