Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/02/15

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Subject: Re: [Leica] The death of Leica Fotografie "International" in French
From: Martin Howard <howard.390@osu.edu>
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2001 07:15:39 -0500

Lucien wrote, in part:

> It use to be like that in the past. I'm not so sure you can
> still assert that today.

Well, I subscribed to it from Jan 2000 to Dec 2000 and it certainly was the
case then.  Have they changed that radically in the first issue of 2001?  I
doubt it.  It was glossy fluff, as far as I was concerned.  Nothing more
substantial than Leica's own sales literature.  The *only* reason for buying
the magazine would be the portfolios, but they seemed heavily biased towards
colour photography.

The final straw was when I paid $15 to get their special, 50th anniversary
issue.  I thought they were going to include some interesting, landmark
articles from their past issues, but instead a good 50% was the entries from
some photocontest, and the other 50% was just filler material.  Hell, they
even had an article in there showing you how they'd made the some of the
pages in the magazine you were reading.  50 years publishing history, and
*that's* the best they could do?  I was absolutely disgusted.  It took ten
minutes to read the marginally intersting parts of the magazine from cover
to cover.  If ten minutes entertainment is going to cost me $15, I'm sure I
could find more exhilarating ways of spending the money.

The LHSA Viewfinder is orders of magnitude better by comparison.  It may not
be the sexiest magazine out there, but I learn something new in every issue
and the people who write for it write things which are worth reading.

M.

- -- 
Martin Howard              | There's a culture here which dictates that
Visiting Scholar, CSEL, OSU| anyone who walks more than a few paces must
email: howard.390@osu.edu  | either be too poor to own [a car], clinically
www: http://mvhoward.i.am/ | insane, or British.    -- David Willis, BBCWS
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Replies: Reply from Lucien <director@ubi.edu> (Re: [Leica] The death of Leica Fotografie "International" inFrench)