The way to make photography pay? Kadir van Lohuizen puts his work behind two paywalls

(please see update at the bottom)

There is a lot of buzz around apps (iPhone and iPad) for photographers.

The ones that that help you share pictures to the web or give your pics a retro look make a lot of sense. They make your photos both accessible and in a lot of cases look better.

Now Noor photographer Kadir van Lohuizen is launching an app for the iPad. Full story  is on BJP but here’s an excerpt

On 16 March Kadir van Lohuizen started his road trip in Puerto Toro, Southern Chile. He’ll be travelling the Pan-American Highway for 40 weeks, looking for people and stories along the way and uploading them to his iPad app, Via PanAm.

Available for $3.99 or 2.99 Euros in the App Store, Via PanAm combines blogs, photo series, video and background research on the countries van Lohuizen visits, updating along the way as the photographer makes the 28,000km journey.

Kadir raised the money for his project through the excellent Empas.is website.  I say excellent because I think the people behind Empash.is have done a terrific job.  You can support photography projects in exchange for behind the scene updates and other benefits.

A closer inspection of Kadir’s donors reveals that over $7000 came from a Dutch magazine, without which the project would not have been funded.  In a very real sense both the magazine and individuals have become sponsors in the project.  This is a good thing. It’s certainly better than the magazine picking the pictures up for next to nothing at the back end of the project.

The truth about the iPad app though is that it is another paywall.  At the moment you can only see much of Kadir’s work by forking out for it.  That means the full project, no matter how good it is,  has a very limited audience outside of the Netherlands. For example almost none of the people featured in Kadir’s reports will be able to see them because they won’t own iPads (there’s nothing new about that). Not only that but many of the people who sponsored the project won’t be able to receive the iPad only updates (see update at the end of the post).

In a sense then we have a situation where mostly photographers are funding another photographer to do a road trip and create a series of reports, many of which you will only see if you own an iPad.  $17000 is a lot of funding to limit the audience in such a way; not to mention the grants from Dutch foundations for the arts and journalism that have funded most of the project’s expenses.

The flip side is that writers often get grants to write, and then will charge for their books. Kadir needs to make a living. I’d still like to think that private and public money can help make arts more open to the public, not placed behind paywalls, but then that’s probably just me being naive.

UPDATE taken from comment on the blog:

Serge Van Cauwenbergh

Despite the fact that I backed his project on Emphas.is, I won’t be able to follow the project because I don’t own an iPad. His Making Of Zone on Emphas.is is hardly up to date. I feel a little disappointed as I really wanted to find out more about his progress and encounters on the road.