Thirty years online

Thirty years ago this month, I registered kamenko.com. People asked what for.

A photographer doesn’t need a website, they said. Bring your portfolio to the picture editor. Mail prints. Keep slides in plastic sleeves.

“The internet is a scam,” one of them told me. “It won’t last.”

I bought the domain anyway. I’m not sure I could have explained why at the time. It cost something like seventy dollars and I had no plan for it. The first version of the site was a handful of pages I built badly, with thumbnails that loaded one row at a time over modem connections.

In 2002 I thought it was time to start a photo agency that would deliver pictures online. I went to colleagues — established, respected, the people whose opinion mattered — and I was met with skepticism and refusal. The same colleagues who, at the same dinner tables, were already complaining about how the photojournalism landscape was collapsing under them. The contradiction didn’t seem to register. The agencies they trusted were closing. The fees they remembered were halving. But the answer, somehow, was not the web.

Thirty years later, here we are.

The picture editors I knew have retired. The magazines that ran my work — some of them have folded, some have merged, some are still publishing but in formats that have nothing to do with what they were. The prints I mailed sit in archive boxes that nobody opens. The slide film I shot through the nineties is mostly in boxes in my basement. The Rolodex is gone.

What’s left, still working, after all of that, is the domain.

Three redesigns. Two content management systems. A long stretch on Joomla. Now WordPress, with a new theme built carefully to feel like a magazine. The pictures themselves — Sarajevo, Belgrade, Washington, the slow accumulation of forty-five years of looking at things through a viewfinder — those are still here.

Some decisions you make on instinct turn out to be the right ones.