BRIEF HISTORY OF A BLACK HOLE

A BRIEF HISTORY OF A BLACK HOLE

When SMBH was established back in 2009 there were only a handful of online photography magazines or blogs dedicated to contemporary photography.

It might be hard to believe now, but the internet was a much smaller space back then. The iPhone was launched just two years prior, MySpace was six years old and dying, Facebook was five years old and unmonetized, YouTube was four years old, Twitter had 58 million users, and Instagram did not exist. The culture of social media was not fully established in the mainstream and reward for vacant imitations was yet to become the norm.

SMBH was born from frustration. As a young artist in Dublin, Ireland, it was near impossible to exhibit photography or see anything new. Photography wasn’t respected as an artform within the contemporary art scene in Ireland. If you did see any photographic images they were usually of green fields, grey skies or Northern Ireland’s traumas. To be blunt, Ireland’s contemporary art world was insular and unexceptional.

Creating SMBH from scratch was one thing. To muster interest in a time of fragmented networks was another. Yet, as suspected, SMBH’s open submission policy catered to a self-evident demand. As Ireland’s first truly international magazine (in print or online), SMBH was a vehicle to introduce new work by Irish artists to the outside world, and introduce new work from the outside to the Irish audience. The open submissions were balanced by invited contributors, many of whom were artists whose work I personally found to be inspiring. It was a real pleasure and complement that they agreed to show their work in the magazine. To ensure it’s existence was recorded, SMBH was registered with the National Library of Ireland with the ISSN 2009-2288.

The magazine’s tagline ‘Time, Space, Light And Gravity Are What Drive SuperMassiveBlackHole’ suggested the constituent elements of both a cosmic black hole and the nature of the work in the magazine. It had featured projects that included documentation of performance and installation, as well as digital and sculptural works. The argument being that the photographic image was instrumental in those artworks either being developed or being received. However, this variety gradually fell to the wayside as the submissions and attention became more centred on photography.

In the subsequent years it became impossible to find the time to continue the huge amount of work needed to source, edit, publish and promote a website and magazine all year every year (never mind manage the growing social media necessity). There was never any financial assistance with SMBH, so it was a burden of cost as well as time and energy.

The arrival of many more online magazines vying for attention and the ensuing social media arms race essentially crowded the space. Coupled with the photobook and photo festival boom, an extremely competitive and parasitic culture emerged in the photography world. The cults and gangs that now ran the show were enough to signal a change as my enthusiasm began to wane. Simultaneously I became less inspired by the work I was seeing as creative exploration gave way to trends and politics. The stars had dimmed and the night was empty. Nothing happened for a long time…

SMBH is now mostly an archive of the work that had been gathered since 2009. Hopefully it will inspire those who discover it because good ideas were represented over the years. The real challenge for any publication these days is to find an authentic voice. It may be that the reason SMBH worked in the first place was it’s outsider quality. It demonstrated alternatives existed while also serving as a spring board for many early contributors who were starting out.

So for now at least SMBH will continue to be active, though it won’t be in the same format as before. It will be slow, and without demand. It will seek out one authentic voice at a time. There may be no light here, but the horizon can still be observed.

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SMBH is owned and published by Barry W Hughes.

With thanks to past contributors including David J Moore, Contributing Online Editor, and authors Katharina Guenther, Dorrell Merritt, Darren Campion and Tessa Bolsover.