About the app
For the latest intelligence on contemporary photography across the globe, look no further than British Journal of Photography. Explore an expansive range of exceptional photographs from the world’s leading professionals as well as rising talent and go behind the image with exclusive interviews, in-depth profiles, immersive portfolios and detailed tests and reviews.
The BJP app is much more than just a PDF version of the print magazine. It is a tailor-made experience for the digital environment, making full use of the iPad’s user-intuitive navigational tools and spectacular display. With highlights from the monthly print edition alongside unique features, engaging articles and extended photo galleries, the BJP iPad application brings the world of photography to your fingertips in a visually stunning Quarterly format.
Exhibiting key editorial from the print magazine, the app is even richer in enhanced content, including multimedia features, extended projects and expanded agenda and exhibition sections. Exploiting the iPad’s design for photo viewing, the BJP app overflows with striking photographs giving way to full-screen portfolios and allowing users to be absorbed into the wealth of photography on offer.
Along with high-impact imagery, the BJP app provides in-depth analysis of the photography industry’s latest technology, reporting essential intelligence on new trends as well as detailed reviews of the latest equipment. Maximising the iPad’s video capabilities, BJP incorporates unrivalled coverage of the emerging HD-DSLR video market, bringing together the best from stills photography as well as motion technology shot on HD digital cameras.
Issues #1 and #2 of BJP for the iPad are now available. To get your copy, click here.
BJP reveals the story behind its new iPad app
After the launch of British Journal of Photography’s first iPad app issue, Miki Johnson, former editor of the Livebooks RESOLVE blog and former senior editor at American Photo Magazine, speaks to Simon Bainbridge, the editor of BJP, to find out more.
Miki:Tell us about BJP for people who aren’t familiar with the magazine…
Simon: It’s the world’s longest-running photography magazine, started in 1854, and given special dispensation to carry on printing through both world wars. So it’s really a record of Britain. Before the Second World War, we didn’t even have photos in the magazine; after the war was when it was aimed at professional photographers, people who are engaged in photography education, and anyone who thought of photography in a creative way. We’re very much about the ideas, the creative thought process, and how you put those ideas into action, as well as photography as a business.
In the UK there are nearly 30 other photography magazines; they tend to focus on gear and, picture-wise, they are what I call “picture karaoke”, taking those photos we’ve all seen before and taking them well. And that’s fine, but we’re speaking to people and featuring people who have a voice and are interested in developing their own visual signature.
Miki: You feature photographers who are not only from the UK. Do you try to be particularly international in the work you show?
Simon: I guess we see photography through British eyes, but we’re looking at the whole world. We cast our net very wide. People come to us, we go to portfolio reviews and festivals, or we take part in juries and competitions. But really what sets us apart from other photo magazines is our deep research. We pick a topic – it might be looking for hot new fashion photographers – and then we talk to the editors of fashion magazines around the world. And that has a global outlook. We recently did an emerging talent issue, and we especially made an effort there to find contacts in every corner of the earth. Our readers, the professional photographers, are working in a global climate, so it would be crazy not to reflect that.
Miki: Can you tell me about the impetus and philosophy behind the redesign you did?
Simon: We did a radical overhaul in March 2010. The magazine actually started out as a monthly in 1854, but within 10 years switched to weekly. So we switched back to monthly, mainly because we looked at the future of publishing and saw that, to survive in print, you’ve got to play to the strengths of print. You’ve got to have beautiful reproduction, beautiful paper, offer an in-depth read. When you’re doing a weekly you throw it together quite quickly, and you can’t use beautiful paper.
For me, sitting at my computer is generally something I do for work, and the opportunity to sit down with a beautiful magazine with long-form journalism is a bit of a treat. So we decided that’s the direction we need to go in print, and then online would focus on the news. As a weekly, we generated a lot of news, but of course people were reading it before it got into print. It just didn’t make sense. By splitting things off, we really played to both of those strengths separately, and in a complementary way.
I also think the internet is all about sharing short bits of information. So if we couldn’t do that as well in print, what was the point of doing it at all? You have to offer something different in print. For me the key difference is, when you go online, you’re generally searching for something. You’re following your own desires and prejudices. Whereas a magazine should present you with something you never even thought of looking for, and then encourage you to look in different directions. It’s pushing something at you and hopefully surprising you. That’s why we do so much research.
Miki: And how have you applied that philosophy to what you’re doing on the iPad?
Simon: We’ve had the chance to examine other magazines online and on the iPad, and see what works and what doesn’t. Magazines don’t translate onto the web very well; they do in terms of content, but not in terms of that experience of long-form journalism, coming together as a curated whole. Our idea was not to completely re-imagine a magazine, as some people say they want to. We wanted to translate the elegance and authority and intelligence of our magazine on a digital screen, to be able to show moving images, and to have something that is navigationally intuitive and fun to play with. But we didn’t want to do anything too tricksy that took away from the content.
The number one thing with the redesign was that photographs would be the prize content, the thing that everything else pays respect to. We never put text on images, for instance, and obviously we don’t crop pictures. Likewise for the iPad. It had to be about showing photography at its best rather than trying new tricks just for the sake of it.
Miki: Why was an iPad app a priority for you? You have a small staff, so this took a large part of your resources to develop. Why did you feel it was worth it?
Simon: As we were finishing the redesign last year, our designer, Mick Moore, was already talking about this thing Apple was going to launch, before we really even knew what the iPad would look like. It’s his enthusiasm that has driven everything forward. The real cost of developing the app was taking Mick out of the print magazine to let him focus on this app, and bringing in a freelancer to cover him. Luckily we were able to persuade our publishing company to back the project, and we set up an iPad team that’s now spreading its experience around the whole company.
It’s also the perfect time for us right now, because there is a similar change going on in photography, which is this convergence with moving images, and generally more open thinking about photography, because the old model has changed so much. So we get to talk about this crossover, and then we get to actually show it on the iPad.
Plus there is this sense of interaction. It really has been exciting – almost addictive –to look at the feedback as it’s coming through. You know, publishing something and within a couple of hours getting feedback on that content… You get that with blogs and social media, but it’s more dynamic when you’ve actually put together the whole designed experience, like a magazine, and you’re getting that feedback.
Finally, there are no fixed parameters. This technology is constantly evolving. We’re using a platform to develop the app called Mag+ from some Swedish designers, and their job is to constantly come up with new tools and new things for us to play with. So some of the things we might be doing next year, we don’t even know are possible right now.
Miki: And you were also talking about how this also allows you to go outside the usual distribution routes for the physical magazine…
Simon: Yes, one of the frustrations of British Journal of Photography is that it is fairly well known throughout the world, but no-one really got to see it as a weekly magazine; it just cost too much money to distribute. Now the monthly is on sale around the world, but it’s a pretty expensive thing on the newsstand. So, for the first time, we can present, in an elegant way, what we do and take it to a global audience. We are already getting feedback from everywhere from Melbourne to Buenos Aires. Hopefully this will allow us to be part of a global debate in a way we haven’t before. We’ve always reflected photography as a global medium, but now that’s going to be a two-way conversation.
Miki: We get BJP in the US, but if you’re not in a large city, you probably can’t even find it without ordering it online…
Simon: Absolutely. I think we’re in about 150 stores across the US, which is not much at all. For me, the most exciting thing about the iPad is to find all these obscure publications that I didn’t even know existed. We’re getting closer and closer to this original idea the Egyptians had of a library that has all the printed matter of the world. Now we can explore all these new voices, and no longer do Britain and America and Europe get to dominate the conversation going forward.
Miki: You’re obviously excited about this, but as one of the first magazines to go to the iPad, is it kind of nerve-wracking too?
Simon: Definitely, everything about developing this app is an unknown. How long it will take, what the workflow is, how it will be received, will anyone advertise with it, does it work, is it doing enough, is it too big? All of these questions are totally open, but we see that as a big experiment. Since we’ve gone live, we’ve had dozens of emails through our feedback forum. It’s been an overwhelmingly positive response about the content, but they’re also telling us where we’re crashing and where we can improve on navigation. Immediately we are learning how we can improve for Issue 2. And more long term, hopefully we can be part of changing the language of magazines and developing something new that really makes the best use of this unique format. So we’re very keen to hear from people, and hear any ideas they have.
