David Alan Harvey: It sprung from this blog called Road Trips that I was doing for a couple of years. People [following] that would come out of the woodwork wherever I went. I realized I had this audience, and that I had a real responsibility. I started mentoring people online, and came up with this idea [to launch Burn].
I got non-profit status through the Magnum Cultural Foundation. With that I was able to raise enough money for the Emerging Photographer Grant.
PDN: How did you come up with the name for the magazine?
DAH: I was up in my loft in Williamsburg with my buddies, drinking beer. We had all these photo names—Lens and Diffuse, and that sort of thing. Nothing sounded good. Then a friend of mine said, "Here's three names." And Burn was one of them. And I said, "That's it." It's edgy, it's short, and has different connotations: burning passion, burn the house down, it's fire, it's light, burn and dodge. . .it's cool, and everybody likes it.
PDN: How is the photography you're showing different from what other publications show?
DAH: It reflects my background and passion and loves, which are equally distributed between art photography and photojournalism. I tell young photographers, "You've got to have something to say. It could be conceptual, or you can try to save the world as a photojournalist. But you can't just be a technician. Everybody's a technician. You've got to have an idea."
PDN: Are boundaries between conceptual photography and photojournalism breaking down?
DAH: I think so. You can have eclectic tastes and embrace one [type of photography] without selling out any of the others.
PDN: How have you been supporting Burn magazine?
DAH: I haven't. I'm losing money. I'm so broke. I was financing myself on my American Family [personal] project, and I had to slow it down a little bit.
PDN: So how do you plan to keep Burn viable in the long run?
DAH: I think corporate sponsorship will keep it going. All I have to do is [complete one sponsored project] and the servers will melt down, and [other potential sponsors] will look at the numbers. I've already got a pretty good audience, and a 7-1/2 or 8 minute hang time [i.e., the time visitors spend on average at the Burn Web site].
PDN: How would the sponsored projects work?
DAH: The basic idea is to raise money, and give assignments to emerging photographers alongside iconic photographers like Martin Parr or James Nachtwey. And then we'd [promote it], telling everyone that at a particular time you would see original work on Burn by those photographers.
PDN: Would the emerging photographers get paid, too?
DAH: Absolutely. They would all be getting paid. I can't pay advertising rates, but my goal is to pay better than editorial rates. My idea was to pay Nachtwey $1,000 a day for short assignments, just to see how it works.
PDN: What types of assignments do you anticipate?
DAH: We talked about Nachtwey choosing something near and dear to his heart, that he has never been able to do—something relatively easy to do because it's a short assignment. But he would have control over what gets published, how it looks published and what the text is.
PDN: Would the emerging photographers get to choose their assignment subject?
DAH: Yeah.
PDN: How will you choose which emerging photographers get assignments?
DAH: There are various ways to do that. I could do it as an arbiter—like an editor. Or I could have a committee select photographers. Or we could maybe present three [choices] to a sponsor and they might say, "We really want to sponsor so and so."
PDN: Who are the sponsors you're talking to?
DAH: I can't say [yet]. We're looking for one large corporate sponsor and three or four smaller ones.
PDN: What's in it for the sponsors?
DAH: Eyeballs, and the educational imperative of the whole thing. We're hoping to appeal to the photography crowd, and [consumers] too. The sponsor's brand would be on a story as it travels around the world for the next year. Also Burn is going to be a channel on the Magnum site.
PDN: When are you hoping to kick this off with sponsored assignments?
DAH: Soon. We were talking to sponsors today. I have cashed no checks, but I have Nachtwey on deck.
PDN: So what amount of money are you trying to get from a sponsor for a project to pay the photographers?
DAH: $50,000 would be really good for a ten-day assignment. The photographers would get a portion of that, depending upon the budget, and expenses and everything.
PDN: How many of these sponsored projects are you expecting to do per year?
DAH: I would say we could handle one iconic photographer and three emerging photographers every month, and that would be in addition to our regular programming for all the wannabe people submitting their work. It's a long process from getting film on the table to getting stories into print. This is going to be absolutely first-class reporting and photography.
PDN: You'll continue to post contributed work as you do now?
DAH: Oh yeah. Burn magazine will go on just like it is. But once a month we'll build up [a forthcoming project] with an iconic photographer and three emerging photographers, maybe working on the same theme in different parts of the world. That's one possibility. The sky's the limit.
