A photography magazine for the artist - OnLandscape

By Bruce Cairns

The market for photographic magazines is overcrowded. There are many titles, competing for the attention of a large and enthusiastic audience, from beginner to professional. That audience has a huge range of photographic interests, and the publishers all have to keep their advertisers happy.  Most photographic magazines therefore devote a lot of attention to new equipment. The themes come round month by month and year by year - black and white and landscape being two of the favourites. Even magazines targeted at advanced photographers or the professional market still have to cover a broad church. A pro magazine, for example, has to devote a lot of material to the portrait and wedding market and to studio photographers, because those represent a large proportion of its readership.

As a photographer whose interests lie in the fields of landscape, fine art and abstract, I have never found a magazine that is full of material that interests me - I have always dipped into the content and ignored most of it, and as a result had stopped buying photographic magazines. I was wasting my money.

That changed in 2010, when I met Tim Parkin, who, with Joe Cornish, had just started an online photography magazine. OnLandscape (originally Great British Landscapes/LandscapeGB when it launched) is different. For one thing, as the title suggests, it is aimed  at landscape photographers. With Joe behind it, OnLandscape inevitably concentrates on the contemplative and artistic side of photography, rather than the purely technical. It focuses on the creative side of our craft, not on the equipment (although equipment certainly features). The mission statement is set out in Joe's introduction, (which I recommend you read - the link is at the end of this article) - "OnLandscape hopes to provide a focus for anyone with an enthusiasm and love for photographing landscape and for what follows that process".

Tim Parkin - described by Joe as "an unreconstructed IT wizard (geek?) who has the wherewithal to create something as complicated as an interactive website" - has an energetic interest in all sorts of artistic and scientific matters that lie at the heart of photography but are seldom drawn out and explored. As well as Joe and Tim, there are regular interviews with photographers, well known and relatively unknown, and regular articles by David Ward to help us think more deeply about photography. Much of the content is in video form, and it is incredibly useful, for example, to have a trip round a gallery with the presenters, or to see a photographer on video discussing some of their work in great detail. Reading an article about a photographer, you can see their work illustrating the article and then click straight through to their web site. What paper magazine can do that?

Some of the content is free. Much of the more interesting content (and which has cost the most time and money to put together) requires  a subscription. You can pay £3 per issue (every 2 weeks), £2.50 per issue if you subscribe for 6 months, and £2 per issue if you subscribe for a year. That is amazing value compared to the magazines you buy in the newsagent. There are other advantages. Your house doesn't get cluttered up with piles of magazines; no trees die in its making; you can always find the content that you remember seeing a few months ago; and the magazine is interactive, with readers commenting on articles and having a dialogue with each other and the writer of the relevant article. Readers can suggest ideas for future content, and Tim follows these up. OnLandscape is genuinely shaped by its readership.

I am not knocking traditional photo magazines. They have an eager, large and eclectic market, and they cover many subjects that do not preoccupy OnLandscape and its readership. But this online magazine is something very different, new and exciting.

I heartily recommend OnLandscape to any photographer with an interest in landscape - just go to the site  and have a poke around some of the free content, and if you like it, sign up! It's also worth following the links to OnLandscape on Facebook and Twitter, and liking and following respectively. Because it is such an interactive way of producing a magazine, you will be kept up to date, with links straight to the content.

By way of disclosure, I have no connection with OnLandscape, other than being a subscriber and knowing Tim and Joe. I have, however, at last found a photography magazine that is aimed at me!

Bruce Cairns

Links

Introduction to OnLandscape by Joe Cornish
OnLandscape home page
OnLandscape Twitter page
OnLandscape Facebook page
Joe Cornish

Bruce Cairns - www.brucecairns.com