Popular Photography

» see popphoto.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

popular photography was a us newsstand fixture i never picked up. camera magazines in turkey around 2005 were the local hobby press, not the bonnier stack that popular photography anchored. what did carry over into turkish photo culture in that decade was the vocabulary, iso and depth-of-field pieces translated or referenced out of the american press.

bonnier ceo eric zinczenko sent a company-wide email on 6 march 2017. the march-april 2017 issue would be the last one popular photography printed. the sister brand american photo, which had been online-only since 2015, was also killed the same day. within about four days no new content was posted to either site. the reason cited in the email was "insurmountable losses in advertising and audience support." the magazine had gone bimonthly the previous year as a last cost-cutting move. that was not enough.

the magazine was founded in may 1937 in new york by ziff-davis, with bernard george davis as the first editor. it ran for almost eighty years. through the 1970s and 1980s it was the largest photography magazine in the united states, and after it absorbed modern photography in 1989 the circulation was over 689,000. by the 2017 closure that number was around 320,000. the drop is not really about magazine economics on its own. between 2014 and 2016 standalone camera sales collapsed by roughly half. the audience that had needed a specialist magazine to think about gear was now buying phones.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

each issue was built around gear tests and reader-submitted portfolios. technique features filled the space between. the lab-report format for camera and lens reviews was the reason a lot of the audience subscribed. norman rothschild edited color technique pieces that photographer edward steichen once described in a quote that stayed in the masthead for decades. the yearly photography annual, published from the 1950s through the early 2000s, functioned as a standard us gear-and-technique reference before the internet took over that role.

~ the smartphone problem ~

the specific number the coverage kept citing was the roughly fifty percent drop in standalone digital camera sales between 2014 and 2016. that was the underlying problem popular photography could not out-edit. the audience of hobbyist buyers who needed a lab-report review to decide between two dslr bodies had shrunk to a fraction of what it had been in the pre-iphone era. the ad pages that filled the back half of every issue in the early 2000s were the first thing to go. by 2016 the magazine had already gone bimonthly. the closure email in march 2017 was the confirmation of a trend the finances had been showing for years.

~ what remained ~

recurrent ventures relaunched popphoto.com as a web-only publication in december 2021. that revival lasted until november 2023 before it was shut a second time. the archive stayed accessible for a while under recurrent's ownership, then thinned. the print magazine is not coming back. what is left is the archive of technique writing and the specific memory of the 1990s newsstand rack where popular photography sat next to shutterbug.

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