New Focus Magazine

A new edition of Focus Magazine has just been published. The magazine itself and news about Focus‘s publication plans are both most welcome!

As Random Sights readers know, I’ve been highly complimentary of the content in Focus Magazine. While Focus Magazine has been primarily directed to the art photography and collecting market, the quality of the photography included is so consistently great, the magazine is a great resource for all interested in fine art photography.

Focus has finally announced their publication and subscription plans for the two new magazines. And it sounds like the two new magazines are nearly ready to go!

Focus Magazine itself will continue as an article-based magazine focused on fine art photography and collecting.

Focus Portfolios will publish portfolios of work by photographers around the world (especially emerging artists?). Focus Exposures will publish fine art nudes from photographers around the world.

All subscribers to Focus Magazine will automatically receive a free copy of each of the first issues of Focus Portfolios and Focus Exposures. Thereafter, both Focus Portfolios and Focus Exposures will be sold, alongside the original Focus Magazine, in both Zinio and the Apple Newsstand.

Focus Magazine is available through the →Zinio iPad app, as well as directly through →Focus’s own ipad app.

Photography Book Publishing

The current issue of Focus includes a good article surveying the current state of fine art photography book publishing and the pros and cons of “p-books” and “e-books.”

We are at somewhat of a crossroads and a new frontier in the photobook business, and it’s something that all serious photographers should be interested in. Focus‘s Jain Kelly writes:

The news … [is] both discouraging and encouraging … Such factors as cost and distribution [are] working against the art book in the form, of the p-book, but fine-art photography books , increasingly, are regarded as art objects that attract and hold devoted collectors around the world; hence, the photography p-book is unlikely to disappear. In regard to the fine-art photography e-book, one view is that the market is just getting started, and there are many unknown factors for publishers; another view is that the art e-book,  with its potential for unlimited distribution, will lead to a renaissance in the art book field.

In my view, the Focus article creates a distinction between the two classes of books, p-books and e-books, but the distinction is incomplete. In reality, a third format should be a category of its own, the print-on-demand book. The e-book technology is not only impacting the market but greatly influencing book production and bringing [printed] book production within the scope of what can be done readily by many more photographers.

This Focus Magazine issue also includes for the first time an extensive list of recently published photo books, along with short descriptions, and also a number of longer in-depth reviews.

Focus Magazine remains, in my opinion, highly recommended.