When I founded The Phoblographer 13 years ago, I cared heavily about equality. That term has evolved so much over the years. Our vernacular has changed to discussing more inclusivity and authenticity. It’s an idea we still champion heavily. Recently, Space for Arts wanted to talk to me about this idea for their blog. Space for Arts helps easily connect photographers with studios around the world. And they’re very worth checking out.
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I think about inclusivity and equality very often. When I started The Phoblographer, I looked around and found myself surrounded by a very specific demographic. Thankfully, that’s changed over the years. What started as a vanilla ice cream cone has been spruced up with essential chai spices.
As an employer, I’ve worked on this within our own team.
- When this interview was filmed, half the Content Creation Editorial staff were women.
- Our Reviews Team is made up of all women and POCs.
- We constantly feature fantastic women in various roundups.
- We’re always featuring different ethnicities in different roundups.
- We’ve worked hard to celebrate Black History Month by sharing the work of various Black photographers over the years. We’ve done the same with Latin Americans, Asians of all types, etc.
- We were a key media partner for the All-Out photography awards contest.
- We’ve worked with Fujifilm to put the spotlight on other photographers deserving praise.
- We’ve highlighted visually impaired and disabled photographers.
- We’ve tackled issues around mental health.
- The Phoblographer works to not circulate the same photographers over and over again.
I’m very proud to say The Phoblographer does this more than lots of other photo publications. And truly, it’s a hard road. It’s easy to sometimes talk to a famous Magnum photographer with a popular name and a cult following. It’s more difficult to help folks understand why they should be paying attention to others as well. More importantly, it’s also incredibly difficult to get folks to pay attention to authentic works. Algorithms tend to promote and elevate certain trends to the top. But those trends aren’t really photography; they’re just algorithms.
Sadly, it’s taken the world too long to figure this out. Even more insane to me is that it took too many people being killed or raped, and a global pandemic to happen. It’s truly mind-boggling.
Holistically though, The Phoblographer tries to stand out from the rest of the pack. Take a look at our front page and you’ll see tons of original stories. We receive lots of emails from our audience praising us on this. And it’s the reason why folks are deciding to go ahead and buy our banner-ad free membership.
All this and much more are discussed in the video with Space for Arts. And we encourage you to check it out! Also, please subscribe to us on YouTube. Dan has been doing quite an awesome job taking over the Inside the Photographer’s Mind series and making it his own. And I’m super proud of the work he and others do for the site.