American Photo

In the Fall of 2011, I had the opportunity to conceive and build my ideal site for looking at beautiful photography for American Photo. A magazine my Dad had received for as long as I can remember, and one that helped turn me on to the world of photography from a very young age. And a magazine, inconceivably, that did not have a standalone web presence at the time. We were able to start completely from scratch. It was a dream.

The mission of the magazine is to expose readers to the superheated cultural stew that is the contemporary photo world. A world where 25 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day, Instagram sells for $1 billion, and you can talk to Alec Soth on Twitter.

The goal of the site, then, was to strip away everything unnecessary from the viewing experience and create a quiet place for photography on the web, presented simply, along with the stories that every image inevitably carries.

You'll notice that we decided to use slideshows, the web's most-often cursed presentation format. But it's not about pageview whoring here: We wanted to eliminate that overwhelming, I-just-ate-too-much type of feeling we've all experienced after a fast scroll to the bottom of a column of dozens of images. These photos are worth the attention you can give to them, one at a time.

The design of this site was a collaboration between myself and the very talented Doug Parker, and it was built in Drupal by Cody Craven and his team. I'm extremely proud of it.