CLASSIC #01
The first issue, with a negative by Dr. John Murray as its cover image, has five lengthy interviews, David Fahey of Fahey/Klein Gallery on The Dennis Hopper Archive, Robert Hershkowitz about his career and his upcoming Roger Fenton exhibition at Photo London, Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs at The Victoria & Albert Museum and the French auction specialist Christophe Goeury. There is a preview of the London May season. The section “In brief” has short articles about exhibitions both sides of The Atlantic. In “From a private collection”, Robert Flynn Johnson discusses two prints, one of the Countess Castiglioni and one of her mother.
The Classic is free, available at fairs and selected distribution points in Paris, New York, Los Angeles and London. It’s also available through subscription.
It seems somewhat extravagant to make it a free magazine but as Tartarin explains, “My ambition is to bring new people to the market, as well as rekindle enthusiasm among established collectors. There is no entrance fee at my fair, Photos Discovery, and I felt that the same spirit should be applied to the magazine.”
Tartarin asked Michael Diemar to create the new magazine from scratch. Diemar says, “Bruno gave me a completely free hand, with regards to both its name and contents. I decided to call it The Classic, it described what it was about and was also memorable. There were a number of things I wanted to avoid. I didn’t want it to be an academic journal, nor did I want it to be a promotion brochure, full of articles about “golden investment opportunities” and graphs showing market expansion and price increases for individual artists.
Because it wasn’t the investment opportunities that turned me into a photography collector many years ago. It was the images, the prints, the Polaroids, the cased images, the wonder of the photographic object. And while books and museum exhibitions taught me a lot, they didn’t provide me with nearly enough of the information I needed to operate as a collector. That information came from all the conversations I had with dealers, collectors, curators, auction experts, conservators, archivists, editors etc. And it’s those kinds of conversations I have tried to replicate in the magazine.