The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo

LIBRARY · STYLES

Styles of photography

What each kind of photography is for, what it asks of the photographer, and a master to start with where the public domain has one.

LOOK AT · DOROTHEA LANGE, 1936PEOPLE AND EVENTS AS THEY AREDocumentary

LOOK AT · ANSEL ADAMS, 1942PLACE, LIGHT AND SCALELandscape

LOOK AT · BOULEVARD DU TEMPLE, 1838PUBLIC LIFE, UNPOSEDStreet

LOOK AT · EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE, 1878WHAT THE EYE IS TOO SLOW TO SEEMotion study

Portrait

A person, and something true about them. Light and distance matter more than the lens.

Fashion

Clothes, styling and a mood, made with a team.

Sport

Peak moments; long lenses and fast shutters.

Wildlife

Patience, distance and a long lens.

Architecture

Straight lines and the right hour of light.

Macro

Very close; the sharp zone is millimetres deep.

Astro

The night sky, long exposures and a dark site.

Product

An object lit to sell it, often on a plain sweep.

Wedding

A whole day, no second takes.

Fine art

The idea leads; the picture is the medium.

One letter a week, starting soon.

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