This side of 15 minutes and Harper’s Magazine

Two weeks ago I was contacted by the Art Director of Harper’s Magazine. She had come across one of my Salton Sea photos online and was interested in seeing more of my work from there, as the magazine was looking for artwork to accompany a piece they’re putting together for an upcoming issue (presumably about Salton Sea though I’m not sure).

Not having any of my black and white work in a digital format (what I previously had put up online were actually scans from prints), I spent two solid days scanning over 80 medium format (6 x 4.5cm) and 35mm images on my modest Epson flatbed scanner (wholly inadequate for the undertaking but in the end performing like a champ). To scan one negative, and then to adjust contrast and remove dust introduced in the scanning process, took anywhere between 15 and 20 minutes, so you can add up the work I went through to get these to the point where Harper’s could take a look at them.

In the end, it was for naught. The deadline for the project was yesterday, September 12th, and given that I would have had to have had dupes made and FedEx’ed to New York before then, I knew the jig was up even before I received the “rejection slip” via email yesterday morning:

Dear Kurt:

As I am sure you have already imagined, we have run out of time to for this piece. I still don’t have the final editorial cuts yet and have not been able to make any art selections. So unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it is going to work out this time for us because of time. I sincerely appreciate your posting the black and white images on the website so that we could see them.

I wish you the best of luck with your current and future projects.

Now I have no idea whether they really ran out of time or if the between the lines meaning is that they found other artwork they’d rather run with, and I’m not going to waste time fretting over it. I was flattered just to have been contacted. That’s not to say I’m not disappointed, but the rue is more of the sanguine “it was fun while it lasted” variety.

The title of this post is facetious; I’m under no illusion that having my photos published in the 150 year old, “oldest continually circulating magazine in America” (so says their site) would have brought me fame or even 1 second of 15 minutes of it. But I did find myself pondering over the possibility of being published in a magazine probably best known now for its monthly Harper’s Index, but which has published (and continues to publish) work by some of the most renown authors in the field of arts and letters, writers like Mark Twain, Umberto Eco, James Baldwin, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Joyce Carol Oates, Leon Trotsky, William Faulkner, David Mamet, Alice Walker, and so on and so on (a very incomplete sampling of authors published in the magazine can be found here). So yeah, it was kind of a big deal for me and predictably I got my hopes up though not fantastically so.

My use of the phrase “rejection slip” above is also facetious, and ironic as well. Back in the days when I fantasized about being a writer and would thumb through the well-worn pages of my Writer’s Market that my mother had given me, I often wondered how many manuscripts and I would have to send out before one of them was finally accepted for publication (and that at the sort of journals that paid you in copies of their magazine), and how many rejection slips I would amass in the process. So here it is in 2002, my dream of being a writer long displaced by other dreams and even more plebeian realities, and through absolutely no effort of my own, one of the most prestigious magazines in America contacts me about possibly publishing my photography in their publication. And I didn’t even have to include a self-addressed stamped envelope to get my pictures back! Of course it is a testament to the power of the internet, and to the self-publication model that characterizes weblogs and all manner of personal web sites. It also makes me wonder what would happen if I got off my ass and put myself and my work out there more.

I’ve left the page I created for Harper’s unchaged, and you’re welcome to take a look at it if you like.