Blueeyes Magazine Archives

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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Blueeyes Magazine: An intro

Sometimes when I meet new photographers they get really animated and excited to talk with me. This, however, is almost never because of my own shooting, but because of the other hat that I wear in professional photography as the creator and editor in chief of Blueeyes Magazine. The exchange that occurs is extremely flattering and I'm very happy to receive thanks and support for our celebration of an incredibly difficult and important genre of photography (more on that later), but I'm stuck every single time that their admiration has almost nothing to do with me... which is exactly how it should be. They love the creation of a place that loves documentary project work...

Creating a home for the photography that I immensely respect has been a very important part of my life for almost four years. As I've watched Blueeyes grow its been astounding to witness how much people in the industry were looking for a place to grab on to. And one of the reasons that I resuscitated this blog was to likewise create a place to talk about Blueeyes and what I think its importance is... in a hope to help create a more open and valuable dialogue in anticipation of bringing that feedback into the magazine sometime soon. Therefore, this is the intro of a recurring segment where I'll talk about Blueeyes. If you have something in particular you are interested in learning about, just leave a comment.

To begin with, Blueeyes was created in 2003 by myself via inspiration from my time at the University of Missouri, where I studied photojournalism amongst a unique and incredibly talented group of friends. We were deeply moved by long-term project photography while students and became obsessed with trying to create our own personal visions of issues and places that meant something to us. But after trying to make our own projects, we were stuck in figuring out what to do with them next. Tragically, over the last 20 years the space reserved in newspapers and magazines, especially in the American market, for serious documentary photography work has dwindled. Actually, that's hardly the word for it -- "lost" is a lot closer to the truth, sadly. And because of this its become extremely difficult to find a place to publish even incredibly good long-term project work. (This is relevant because the point of journalism and photography, as I see it, is to share it with as many people as possible and therefore complete its mission as a medium of communication... this is something I could and will write a few thousand words about, but not now).

Therefore Blueeyes was born out of passion, frustration, need, and zero dollars -- which pointed me directly towards publishing online. For the first 2 years or so it was basically a one-man show where I was the editor, designer, writer, and handy man all at once. During that time we published mostly the work of friends, and friends of friends, and began to attract a modest and ever growing amount of attention and support. There were some awards along the way, including a large one from NPPA's BOP (the only competition that Blueeyes has entered to date, because its free), and the magazine started to gain momentum and a sort of street cred as a place that was trying to do something new and passionate (more on that later too). After 10 issues over a couple of years I was pretty exhausted of trying to run an emerging web publication on my own, especially as my freelance career grew more demanding. In 2005 Blueeyes took a long nap while I tried to figure out what should come next for the magazine, or if it should keep sleeping forever.

The months of rest did the magazine and myself a lot of good, and that fall I began recruiting several friends to help me try to guide Blueeyes towards its enormous potential. Soon after the Blueeyes was a changed place... it now had an editorial board, a staff, and a well-designed and thoughtful design system. In the spring of 2006 we re-launched, had a fun party in NYC to celebrate, and began introducing new features. Currently the magazine is waiting to launch its 14th issue and is developing several more new features to create new ways for people to interact with the photography and create more dialogue about the stories we feature. In short, its an exciting time for Blueeyes but one that takes an incredible amount of energy and effort. Very certainly this is not a one-man show any longer, which is extremely important for Blueeyes' future and my sanity. I'm joined by 2 extremely talented colleagues on the editorial board, who together vote on what gets in each issue, and who are Matthew Ratajczak and Chris Vivion. Additionally we are very lucky to also have technical lead Seth Bro and communications director Jill Thomas on board with us, making the rest of us look way better than would otherwise be the case. The 4 of us work together to create the magazine in addition to our regular jobs and lives. Neither us nor our contributors are paid anything for their efforts... its truly a labor of love.

So that is what Blueeyes is, why it was created, a brief (boring?) timeline of its short history, and where it stands now. To round out this intro post I'd like to talk a bit more personally about what I feel are the main difficulties and pleasures in leading Blueeyes. My next post will deal with what the magazine publishes, why its important, and why its often so hard to find.

Recreating the magazine has been a fun and extremely frustrating process that I'm only now getting my grasp around. Last fall when I began looking for friends to help me out, I had a really difficult time finding not only people who I felt confident about their talents and respected their commitment to truly important work (admiration and criticism are not the same thing), but I was also looking for a range of perspectives on documentary photography that would keep the magazine fresh and encourage us to stretch the idea of what was "documentary." That diversity I sought and found has been extremely difficult to later hold together, which while unsurprising has recast my own position as well. When I created an editorial board I was doing so in an effort to make the magazine not just my own, but all of ours together. But to hold everyone together and keep the magazine moving forward -- without the presence of any type of monetary return, which is why magazines are actually published -- I've had to remain at the helm of the ship and continue to play traffic cop and keep everyone else on task and in communication. It sounds naive that I thought I could have it another way, and it was, but I hoped for a different model than I ended up with nonetheless.

Despite the potential wrangling of cats metaphor in trying to keep myself and the editorial board moving forward and connected even while we are all the time extremely busy and traveling, Blueeyes is wonderful to be a part of. I think my favorite thing is the ability get my hands dirty digging into pictures and projects and connecting with what it is about photography that really moves me. On a daily basis I'm honored by some photographer often half-way across the world sincerely submitting their work to the magazine and asking for our feedback on their efforts. To this day I still try to send my feedback and suggestions to each submission, which is pretty fucking insane at this point.

Another great part of Blueeyes is simply being a member of the staff and our giant debates and arguments in considering what will run in each issue. Some of us are extremely traditional, others more open, and the back and forth is what the magazine a rare place on the web. Each member of the stafff all want to be amazed and reminded of what exactly about documentary photography is important. And though sometimes the last a-ha moment feels too far in your memory, it always happens again, and you open a project that connects you to the world more fully. And that connection is truly what its all about, both inside and ouside the photography community. Blueeyes connects us as staff, and our contributors, to the rest of the world who are passionately trying to do this in their own ways. When the issues are sometimes not that much fun to put together, or things are falling a part in any number of ways, I think about the ways that what I'm trying to do connects me to other people who share in my belief in the power of photography.

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