{"id":90,"date":"2009-06-14T16:33:15","date_gmt":"2009-06-14T20:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?page_id=90"},"modified":"2016-03-30T10:34:42","modified_gmt":"2016-03-30T14:34:42","slug":"about-photocritic-international","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/about-photocritic-intl\/about-photocritic-international\/","title":{"rendered":"Photocritic Int’l: Backstory"},"content":{"rendered":"

Photocritic International<\/em> (formerly\u00a0C: the Speed of Light<\/em>) was conceived as, and remains, a means of keeping people abreast of my professional activities as a critic and historian of photography, and as an observer of and commentator on new digital technologies. However, since its premiere, almost all the assumptions on which I premised it have changed.<\/p>\n

Long contemplated as a project, finally planned during the course of my time in Sweden on a Fulbright in early 1994,\u00a0C: the Speed of Light<\/em> made its first appearance in early 1995, in the form of a printed, two-sided, single-sheet flyer distributed in person, via fax, and by mail. I modeled it after those periodic summaries of their activities that various friends and colleagues of mine send out at year’s end \u2014 a bit impersonal, of course, for a private network, but surely the most efficient way to keep in touch with a far-flung professional network such as mine, since our paths and projects don’t intersect on a regular basis.<\/p>\n

When\u00a0Peter Guagenti<\/a>, then my assistant, proposed establishing an online presence for me on the then-emerging World Wide Web a few months later, the text and organizational structure of that initial broadside version of\u00a0C: the Speed of Light<\/em> became, with some modification, the pattern for the web version of\u00a0C<\/em> when it made its spring 1995 debut online as a small-scale professional home page. This made me the first photography critic (and one of the first art critics) to establish a beachhead on the World Wide Web. However, as I quickly discovered, the web allowed me a more expansive set of options \u2014 greater room for content, and access to a much wider audience.<\/p>\n

At the time of that launch, I had almost no experience with the internet \u2014 not even an email account of my own \u2014 and certainly no idea where it would lead. Within the next six months,\u00a0C<\/em> became the flagship for what subsequently evolved into The Nearby Caf\u00e9<\/a>, and started me off as a committed internet publisher.<\/p>\n

Over the years since, I experimented here with the presentation of various kinds of content for\u00a0C: the Speed of Light<\/em>. For the past decade it’s had a webmaster, John Alley, who has helped me refine it in many ways. This latest incarnation profits additionally from a comprehensive, floor-to-ceiling design and navigation-system renovation of The Nearby Caf\u00e9 as a whole, provided by the splendid team of Marc and Nacia Miller’s Toronto-based web-design firm,\u00a0Crossbeam<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some changes that previous visitors will find in this new version:<\/p>\n

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