365 Days Project - Day 201 (a.k.a. R.I.P. JPG Magazine)
Phillip Chee
As someone who loves the DIY creed and community building, it is sad to hear about stories like this. Derek Powazek and Heather Champ gave us amateur photographers a venue to show off our stuff. They created a little community that allowed people to get recognized and help kick start a few Flickr members' careers. Knowing that JPG was around helped me stick with this photography thing when I bought my first digital camera two-and-a-half years ago.
So, today this self-portrait comes to you with the lens cap on...
*update* — someone was kind enough to pull the original letter from Google's cache that Derek and Heather wrote, which no longer exists in the About section of the JPG website:
Letter from the Editors
There are photographers, and then there are photographers, and then there's us.
There are photographers who know their shutter speeds from their f-stops, and which combinations of the two will result in a shallow depth of field. And, of course, they know why that's a good idea, and even what all those words mean. These are photographers who use the word "glass" when they mean "lens" and spend thousands of dollars on equipment to prove it. And why not? These are the photographers who make a living capturing moments with cameras.
Then there are photographers who point and shoot on the default setting. They take snapshots on vacation and at family reunions. They develop their photos at the supermarket. These photographers might not even call themselves photographers. They're everyday folks, shooting the things they want to remember.
Then there's us. People who, for one reason or another, have a camera on us most of the time. We learn what we can about technique when it suits us, and skip the rest. We put up websites to share our photos with the world.
We're the great in between: not quite amateur, not quite professional. Some do it for art, some as a kind of visual journal, some because they want to become a professional one day, and some just because we have to. It's just what we do.
There have always been magazines for the amateurs and the pros. They'll compare every last new camera, give you handy top-ten lists for better snapshots, and tempt you with half-naked models on the cover. ("Really, honey, just look at the lighting on her! Wonder what glass he used.") But they almost never take the time to get at that rare thing that makes us want to capture these moments in the first place. And there's never really been a magazine for us – the in-between folks who shoot for love, not money.
And that's why we're here.
JPG Magazine is a new quarterly publication built by and for the great in-between photographers who, like us, photograph our lives for no good reason except that it brings us joy.
And who are we? Derek Powazek and Heather Powazek Champ, husband and wife, partners in crime. Heather is the founder of the photo community called The Mirror Project, where there lives an ever-growing collection of submitted mirror self-portraits. And Derek is the founder of the personal storytelling magazine/performance series called Fray, which features true stories told online and onstage. Heather was an art major and Derek was a photojournalism major, but we both work as designers today. We're life-long camera junkies with a passion for unique, spontaneous, and original photography.
We've taken the magazine's name from the JPG file format that most digital cameras use to save images, but we're putting out a tangible paper magazine. Yes, the irony is intentional. But we're not just about the digital – we're lovers of all kinds of photography, from the fastest CCDs to the tiniest pinholes, and we plan on featuring it all.
We see JPG Magazine as a way to take the best online photography and honor it in print. If you love photography as much as we do, we hope you'll love JPG Magazine. Thanks for reading.
– Heather & Derek
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