About Us
TWENTY FIVE YEARS!
David Colby - Co-Founder Select
Originally published in issue 58
I‘m sitting poolside at Miami Beach, my cellphone is on ‘vibrate‘ because I want to be able to screen my calls (maybe even answer a few of them), and listen to my iPod at the same time. My (wireless) laptop is charged up and ready to go. I‘m ‘multitasking‘.
Now picture this: It’s 1980, I‘m crammed into a red phone box in London, about to be disconnected, desperately trying to sound calm as I scramble for coins in my pocket. I‘m trying to get a photographer to agree to meet with me so I can show him the dummy for the first issue of Select Magazine. I was multitasking then too...but who knew.
Anyway, back to the story. My business partner Wilhelm Moser and I have had this radical idea; to produce a magazine , get the photographers to pay the printing costs in exchange for putting in whatever they want to see published, and then send it to ‘people‘ all over the world. So you see, that was how, all those years ago, Willy and I invented the Internet.
Yes, the up-and-coming young photographer Desmond Burdon has agreed to see us. We jump into a taxi and we‘re off. We arrive at the studio only to find that we‘ve left our (Letrasetted) ‘dummy‘ and all the original artwork - in those days it was prints, slides and layout boards - in the phone box. In a panic, we dash back and arrive to find a kindly English gentleman guarding our future, waiting for a policeman to come by and pick everything up.
Imagine if we were starting Select today, there would have been no ‘originals‘ to show to the clients, probably no kind gentleman and no red phone box. Select (and the Internet) would never have happened.
Trawling through my recollections for this piece, a few seminal moments come to mind. I remember when we bought our first fax machine for $4,500 only to find that we couldn‘t use it because hardly anyone else had one. I remember our first computer, an Apple 2C, to this day, the finest piece of electronic hardware ever made. I remember our German printers showing us a thing out of London called ‘Paint Box‘ which could actually add points of light to images AFTER they were shot! I remember Richard Branson on his houseboat headquarters, telling us that ‘in ten years or so, people would get their music and their images out of a box connected to their telephone lines‘, and us wondering what he was talking about. No wonder that guy is so rich!
Of course we never grasped most of what now seems so obvious. Johno du Plessis was forever trying to drag Willy and myself, kicking and screaming, into the future. He insisted once that I go to a top secret meeting with him in New York to see something that the CIA had built called ‘the World Wide Web‘. I told him in no uncertain terms afterwards to drop it. I thought it was way too complicated and would never catch on.
I‘ve watched as whole swathes of our industry - typesetters, lithographers, retouchers, have been consigned to the rubble of history. Some things have come and gone, remember those fragile Polaroid slides? If you even looked at them too hard they got a scratch and we got a law case for damaging an ‘irreplaceable‘ original.
Nevertheless, photography marches on, facing up to and benefiting from the changes wrought by ‘progress‘. Sometimes one can‘t help but feel that things are spinning out of control, but even through everything seems to be constantly changing and the goal posts are in perpetual motion, the fundamentals remain the same.
You see it wasn‘t technology that built Select into what it is today, it was the imagination and creativity of all our contributors. This is why, over the coming issues, we have decided to showcase work from Select‘s inception right up to the present. We kick off here with the Londoners - often humorous, undeniably unique and always cleverer than the rest of us, there‘s really no better place to start.
Sorry if I‘m rubbing this in, but back here at the pool, the midday sun is about to drive me indoors, where, thanks to the age in which we now live, I can pop this piece into an attachment and shoot it off to head office. The challenge we all face is to exploit the new tools we‘ve been given without losing sight of the fact that, in the end it‘s still about the camera and that button. We must never forget, as someone far more famous than me once said, that ‘photography is about holding your breath‘.
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