The return of JPG Mag will be warmly received by many serious amateur photographers. I always enjoyed it's philosophy and spirit and know several fellow Melbourne Photographers who had work published in it.
It seems to me that hard copy publications like this and online ones, like altfotonet.org, are a doing a great job in exposing and sharing more and more of the great work being produced 'out there'.
Okay, we are one week late, but we've kicked off photo of the week from the altfotonet Flickr group with this picture by barb. It is within an abandoned soviet army
barracks near Berlin taken during a photo walk with streunerin. Streunerin is Birgit Richter and she has more on the Soviet barracks. The picture appeals to me because it is both a great image and it situates itself within the modernist tradition that repudiates linear perspective and is an image/text. Therefore, it deconstructs the American (Greenbergian) modernist's appeal to visual purity.
This takes us to a space where we can acknowledge the dialectic of image and word and give us a perspective on our culture where can see the protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs. Personally, I am not sure why we have this history of conflict between image and word; a conflict that many see as a struggle for territory and a contest of ideologies.
