| 07/31/2008 |
| Wesleyan students get photographic Exposure |
| By: VALERIE BANNISTER |
But the magazine did not appear until its seven editors had done a lot of work and arguing - and they can't wait to do it again. The glossy, 8½-by-10-inch, 50-page magazine contains about 90 photographs and seven articles about photography, with 36 contributors, including photographs by five of the magazine's seven editors. Sam Jones, a sophomore who was one of the four original editors, hopes the magazine will become a Wesleyan institution that appears every semester and that it will expand its reach through events, such as talks by photographers and displays of student work. Jones said he and a fellow student, junior Josh Koenig, were two "photographer geeks" who spent time talking about photography. But at the beginning of the semester, Koenig thought of a way to expand that conversation to a larger audience when he told Jones he thought they should create a photography magazine. Jones said that other than a couple of photography classes at Wesleyan, there wasn't any sort of forum for photographers even though there are "a lot of people interested in it." Koenig said a lot of people are doing photography, but not thinking too much about it. The magazine addresses that concern though photographs and articles. Did the magazine meet his expectations? "Absolutely, and more," he said.The magazine includes a lot of photographs outside of Connecticut, but they are not the snapshots of tourists. Contributor Max Krafft, deployed to the Middle East as a bass player in a U.S. Army band, wrote that his pictures and those of his friends "stand as monuments to the war we had missed, to the war we were missing; bullet holes burrowed into building walls, helicopters standing on the landing pad, a line of Iraqi tanks rusting in the sand." Krafft said he wasn't allowed and didn't want to photograph more "gruesome" scenes. "They were too real. They were too sad," he explained. Monica Achitoff-Gray wrote about the difficulty of photographing impoverished people in Senegal. "I often felt I was forever treading a fine line between offending and altering the image I hoped to capture." She turned to photographing children to achieve "unadulterated portrayal," but worried that she took advantage of their "innocence." The photographs, she wrote, "beg the question of the role of photography, its intentions and more importantly, its effects in a given context; its capacity to convey or portray or, as I most acutely felt, to alter." Contributor Rod O'Connor, who translated digital sound into images, wrote that "digital translation of an image loses less content in the (printing) process than its film counterpart, though the latter is conventionally perceived as a purer medium." On the other hand, Zac Bruner feels that "film is meant to be printed, which means that there is craftsmanship in the process" and that "when you push film, it can fail in interesting ways." It was after speaking to photography Professor J. Seeley, who wrote in the magazine about Wesleyan's collection of student photography started in 1973, several of which appear in the magazine, that Jones and Koenig learned two other students on campus were also thinking about a photography magazine. The two other students were junior Danica Pantic and Sophie Finkelstein, a photography editor at the student newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus. Pantic said Finkelstein wanted to start a magazine and asked for her help. Until they met the other two students, Pantic said, "We didn't know each other at all." The birth of the magazine was "fairly disorganized," said Pantic. The editors knew the "big stuff" that needed to be done, such as fundraising and getting submissions, but they didn't know where to go from there. Eventually, they got more than enough money and submissions. The students received close to $9,000; the magazine, distributed for free, cost a little less than $7,000 to print, said Pantic. Sponsors included Wesleyan organizations and the Middletown Commission of the Arts. The editors solicited submissions through fliers and Facebook, she said. "There were so many submissions that we really didn't know what to do with them." It was an "obscene amount." "I was really astonished at the amount of people who are really talented," she said. The editors researched general magazines and the photography magazine Aperture for some guidance in producing their own. "In the end, it was really a process where we had to figure out what we wanted," said Pantic. The magazine started with four editors and three others joined later, as the amount of work expanded. But they didn't all agree on what they wanted and as a result, there was "a lot of arguing," she said. "Everyone was really opinionated," she said. In addition, "We all did everything together." She said they'd have meetings where they had "absolutely no idea what we had to do." "It got messy at times," she said, but it was also "a really good process." Next time, the students plan to do things differently, with more structure in the magazine's organization and production. "It was too much work" getting the magazine together this time around, said Pantic. But, she said, she always "knew it was going to get done." And, she said, "It's great to hold it in our hands." For information, e-mail wesleyan.exposure@gmail.com. Copies of Exposure are distributed to downtown Middletown merchants such as bakeries, bookstores and coffee houses as well as on the Wesleyan University campus, and the May issue may still be available there.
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