Letter from the Editor #7

“I’mma fix Wolves.” This tweet (it was still Twitter, at the time) from Kanye West (who was still – debatably – Kanye, at the time) sparked some debate as to the degree to which it is acceptable for music in the public sphere to be altered. This incessant post release fettling felt like a new phenomenon, one uniquely enabled by the very nature of the way the vast majority of us had grown accustomed to listening to music. Distributed streaming platforms gave us much the same sense, from an interaction perspective, as iTunes had for years earlier, but with one key difference; we no longer owned the music we listened to. It was not stored on our devices, but rather in a cloud, for which we paid (and may continue to pay) monthly to access. If the file on the cloud changes, the version we have access to changes in kind.

Suddenly, a song we had heard one way for a few days had changed, disappearing and reappearing with no real sense of why. As a fan of Mr. West at the time, I participated in this strange give and take, along with the millions of others who were intent on capturing a version we liked before it disappeared again. Remixes and remasters existed for decades prior to this, of course, but they existed as discrete versions of a song; evolutions of completed works. With Wolves, it felt as though a fanbase en masse was made audience to an artist enveloped in the creation phase, rather than the marketing phase with which we had grown familiar. This process brought a whole new listenership to the debate around music ownership in the streaming era, which joined concurrent debates that raged around video games, and to a lesser extent films and television shows.

Those mediums, perhaps due to the expense involved with so many moving parts, have not yet in so far as I recall been subject to this sort of public iteration, at least to the same degree; a Starbucks cup being edited out is one thing, but changing a season or series finale after it has launched is another thing entirely. Wolves, and to perhaps a greater extent The Life of Pablo, experienced a series of changes more akin to altering the narrative structure of a film or television series than the aforementioned editing out of a cup, though changes to the mix and master were present as well as the shuffling, addition, deletion, and rearrangement of songs in the running order. Questions around the changing nature of the ownership of creative works wrought by the rise of streaming platforms acknowledged, I now set them aside for the moment to turn to the matter at hand. Might this be a good thing, this public iteration? We accept it as a matter de rigueur in software development. Games, applications large and small – the more anticipated a title, the earlier in the process we wish to be involved, signing up for alpha or perhaps even pre-alpha access. We want to lay hands on something as soon as we can in order to give our feedback to the developers, hoping that what little insight we may bring somehow alters the direction the product takes to more closely mirror our own personal visions.

Should we see those changes, we pledge our undying devotion, extolling far and wide the virtues of the thing which is now, in some infinitesimally small way, our own. Why should other media, other forms of artistic expression, not benefit from this sort of public reckoning? I suspect any reticence felt is due, in part, to the fundamental difference between a product, which is designed, and an artwork, which emanates from elsewhere. I do not want the piece that performed best from a series of focus groups, test screenings, or listening sessions, not really. I want the product of a singular vision; one that takes all of those as inputs, sure, but one that ultimately decides This Is The Thing As It Should Be. It is the job of the artist to decipher the relevant signal from the noise, and to then amplify that signal so that we may hear, so that we may see, as they do.

After all, which was the right version of Wolves? What was the correct tracklist for The Life of Pablo? We could not rely on authorial intent for any definitive answer, even before the artist in question departed from all reason, but there is no one better positioned to create signposts for the audience to follow. Sitting in an Italian restaurant on the night I arrived in Istanbul, Türkiye, I shared a few of my developing thoughts on public iteration in visual arts, specifically as it relates to photography and the photobook. My audience, fellow photographers with whom I shared an interest in book-making, commiserated with my general sense of frustration with the inability to move more quickly within our chosen medium.

Even should you be chosen by the establishment as a darling, an artist who can do no wrong, the realities of producing, selling, and distributing books means that one could release a book once every 12-18 months, as a very rough estimate. This would mean that to release work, to then do the work of promoting, selling, and distributing the work, to collect all sorts of feedback from these disparate sources, distill that into something actionable, return to the well from which your particular creativity springs, and come back again to the table with relevant work is the work of many years. This is not inherently a problem. After all, many artists only ever release one book in their lifetime, a grand tome spanning decades and serving as the definitive point of reference. I happened to want a few more bites at the apple. I do not know how often the first time you do something is your best time, dear reader, but I have never had that good fortune. Any prowess I have acquired in anything has been the result of practice, of repetition, of trying, failing, and trying again. I needed to be able to learn by doing, and I wanted to shorten the iterative loop.

It was from this need that I was reminded of the practice of serialization. Novels were serialized in magazines all the time; Playboy published a number of Ian Fleming’s James Bond short stories, starting with The Hildebrand Rarity in 1960, prior to serializing On Her Majesty’s Secret Service some years later, and of course, this was not the first time a serial appeared in a print magazine. On through today, the practice continues; I am currently subscribed to Inque Magazine, which is publishing a serial of a Jonathan Franzen novel once a year for the next ten years. Here was the key, the language I could use to publicly experiment with form, sequence, and structure, to shorten the iterative loop; to stride more confidently forward towards What Should Be. Now, I just needed a publication willing to allow me, a no-name/no-audience photographer who appears to write much more frequently than he makes photographs, dedicated space for these experiments. That seemed unlikely. However, I’d been a designer for a decade prior. I had the skills to build my own space. So, I did.

Hommage Magazine has undergone a public iteration of its own over the past ~18 months, and thanks to the feedback of friends, photographers, retail partners, and, most importantly, subscribers, it has found its feet. Here, in Issue no. 7, the tool that makes the tool is complete. A new journey unfolds, one in which I begin the serialization of an as yet unnamed project on a few of my favorite things; food, wine, travel, and craft. I hope you enjoy.

Ps. If you are one of those creatives looking for a public space to experiment, my inbox is always open. I would love nothing more than to help you tell your story.

Let’s work.