CLASSIC #05

I tend to refer to it as “our little magazine”. Well, at least that’s how we started when we launched The Classic at AIPAD in the spring of 2019, with a print magazine and a basic landing page. Within a few months, Mary Pelletier joined our team as social media manager and contributing editor. In spring 2020, we began publishing the digital version of The Classic simultaneously with the print magazine, which resulted in us quadrupling our readership.

Six months later, we launched The Classic Platform on our website, like the magazine, designed by art director Mike Derez. I felt that calendars for photography auctions and fairs would be useful to our readership. The Classic Auction Calendar was launched in November, and this spring we launched The Classic Fair Calendar.

The platform has proved very popular and I’m extremely grateful to all the authors for their contributions. Denis Pellerin however, deserves a special mention. At the time of writing, he has contributed six fascinating articles, including investigations into the mysteries behind Florence Nightingale’s iconic photographs and stereo daguerreotypist Warren Thompson.

One of the reasons for the platform’s existence is that it allows us to spill over from the magazine, so to speak. And this time we are indeed spilling over. We have two lengthy articles on a Hungarian theme in the magazine, the Moholy-Nagy Foundation and the Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde. On the platform, Renate Heyne is interviewed about Moholy-Nagy’s photograms and we present two projects on the Roma people by György Stalter, part of the Neo-Avant Garde during the 1970s.

We also use the platform to publish interesting articles from the past. This time, I’m particularly pleased to able to republish two articles by Julia Ballerini, that would lead to her book The Stillness of Hajj Ishmael – Maxime du Camp’s 1850 Photographic Encounters, published in 2010.

Finally, it’s always good to see new initiatives, be it classic photo fairs, organisations or book publishers. This time around, we feature Fototeca de Panamá, the first organisation in Panama dedicated to the study, preservation and promotion of photography.