First, don’t be mislead by the post title. Zinio is by no means an unsung great, although it might well be unsung, this post not withstanding. Convolutions aside, what’s Zinio? It’s a way to get magazines online. I stumbled on it while living in Korea. As a way of getting magazines that would have been prohibitively expensive over there - like $25 an issue - Zinio seemed to fill a real need. So I spent the $6 to get a year’s subscription to American Photo. AP is not a particularly distinguished periodical, but it’s entertaining, and a guy can only read so many issues of the Joong Ang Daily. You pay your money, you install a reader, it goes and downloads your content. The content is something like a PDF, I think. Text is clear and readable. Photos are about what you get on the web, although they are a little small for the most part. They even go to the trouble of putting in those subscription cards everyone tears out of the magazine; unfortunately, the reader software doesn’t include a way of tearing them out. Maybe for version 4.

On to unsung greats. This month’s issue of AP features a number of unsung great photographers. It’s an interesting read, and look. I recognized a number of the photos, although I didn’t at first recognize any of the names, until I got to Leslie Krims AKA Les Krims. If you don’t know Krims’ work, do yourself a favor. Stop reading this. Turn on your speakers. Go to Krims’ site: http://www.leskrims.com.

Are you back yet? Good. Leave Krim’s site running in another tab. That music is catchy. While you listen, check out another unsung great, William Gedney. A thread on photo.net a couple of months back got me onto Gedney, and Alec Soth recently mentioned Gedney in a blog post. So perhaps he isn’t that unsung. Great none the less. Check out Duke’s Gedney archives: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/gedney/. Gedney strikes me as easily the equal to Frank, Cartier-Breson and Winogrand.

Know any other unsung greats? Leave a comment.