David A. Goldfarb said:
I wish you luck, David, but look at how Henry Rasmussen has built his magazine. He's been in the magazine publishing world for a long time. He knows both the technical side of B&W photography and the collecting side and has lots of contacts in the gallery and museum worlds to draw on and write for the magazine, and he knows a lot of photographers personally. He ran an excellent website for some years with some of the best B&W discussion boards, which eventually became the B&W forums of photo.net. There's really a lot of substantive experience behind what he's doing, and it shows in the quality of the publication. It's not a bad model to follow.
I'm very well aware of Henry's background and the quality of B&W. For reproduction and the print/paper quality of the magazine, I'm on the same level as Henry because I'm using the same paper and printer (happened completely by accident that I found the same printer as B&W who recommended I use the same paper). My first issue was with Brown Printing company who I felt had absolutely no clue how to reproduce black and white photos in a magazine.
Chris Winfield from the Winfield Gallery recommended I give a Toronto Printer a call to get a quote. Turns out he was the same printer LensWork uses and quoted me something about $5,000 - $6,000 more expensive than Publisher's Press. Not only that, but there's a limit as to how many magazines he can produce at one time and the turn around time he takes with a publication is almost triple what it takes my current printer.
Back to B&W: You will never hear me criticize B&W's quality. Never. My goal is to have a superior quality article-wise, photography-wise and every other aspect-wise than what B&W has. That's going to a hard goal to achieve but I will do everything in my power to do so.
As far as following his model, one size doesn't fit all. I don't really want another B&W magazine on the newsstands. His magazine has an incredible sell-through rate on newsstands and I'm sure the subscribers that he does have are extremely loyal to his magazine. Like every other publication, he has flaws. I have a lot of ideas for Inked in the future, starting with my 3rd issue. There are a lot of areas in the market for collecting fine art photography that Henry either doens't cover enough of or doesn't cover at all.
Now, as a publisher I have to sit back and say "Is there a reason why he doesn't cover this, even though most collectors are very interested in this?" and assume that either he doesn't have the resources to cover it, he's going to be covering it soon, or it's not worth covering it. Since I doubt I can have a daily phone conversation with Henry, I have to try to make the best decision for the future of the publication. I try it out for a few issues, if it works, then it was a great idea. Then B&W may come out with a similar idea, but do it better than I am doing it, which means I'll then have to change my strategy. Going up against B&W is going to be a huge challenge, but I have never been one to back away from a challenge. I think the market is big enough where people see two black and white photography magazines devoted to the art of collecting, people will take notice at the resurgance of the market for fine art black and white photography and in the end that could help galleries, photographers, Henry and myself.
Of course, I do have a little fantasy that by the time my 37th issue comes out on newsstands for Henry to be chasing me circulation-wise. Whether or not I will fulfill that fantasy or not remains to be seen.
I had curator of a gallery out of California who will be attending Photo San Francisco call me the other day. He said that he likes me almost as much as he likes B&W. He said to take that as a very high compliment because he holds B&W in such a high regard. As I said, I love challenges...no matter how impossible they may seem.
