New platform offers visual artists a chance to put their stamp on it

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Stampsy is a new digital publishing platform for visual artists to elegantly design and curate content. Photo: Stampsy
Stampsy is a new digital publishing platform for visual artists to elegantly design and curate content. Photo: Stampsy

There are many ways for photographers to display and share work: Build a website, post on Facebook, spread your brand on Instagram or create a repository on Flickr.

But the few mentioned above are not perfect, especially when it comes to displaying photo stories and essays.

Imagine quickly creating an elegant, magazine-style splash with the best features of social media on a simple computer platform. Stampsy wants to help visual storytellers leave an impression with their work.

Each stamp is a kind of story or theme, content that be created, shared or curated among Stampsy members. Photo: Stampsy
Each stamp is a kind of story or theme, content that can be created, shared or curated among Stampsy members. Photo: Stampsy

“To my knowledge, there’s no other platform to create stories like this,” said Romke Hoogwaerts, an editor and photo book publisher who uses Stampsy. “We’re in a transition moment in photography. Things are hard in the analog world. Slowly, we are getting the platforms for photographers. This is a really important step in that trajectory.”

Websites take money or a knowledge of coding. Blogs are simple enough but there are few controls to make visually stunning displays. You can post to Instagram one photo at a time or do a collage-type spread, but given most people view Instagram on a smartphone, it’s hard to drink in a photo’s content and all its subtleties on the small screen.

With Stampsy, digital design need not be an oxymoron. Stampsy members create their own personal microsites in a few minutes with a headline or title, some text and a large display of photos. There is a limit to the number of photos you can display in each stamp but that forces visual artists to tightly edit and display with clarity.

Founder Roman Mazurenko, who launched the site in late February, said Stampsy has 43,000 users and gets about 500 new members registering every day. While appealing to photographers in the beginning to showcase the aesthetic, Mazurenko wants Stampsy to be a place for stylists, graphic artists, designers, DJs, the fashion industry, art schools — any person or organization with visual and creative ambition. Can’t get published? Make your own media company.

“Stampsy helps people provide narrative and structure in a frictionless way that looks like a beautiful magazine,” Mazurenko said. “The curation principle is very important.”

Users create and post units of content called “stamps,” microsites that can be filled with images, text, video and audio to tell a story. The editor function allows users to mold their own designs with drag-and-drop tools to work with text, background colors and image layouts.

The content could be your own or found elsewhere online. The “Collect” feature lets images from other Stampsy users be saved and reposted, merged with content to create stories in a new context. These images carry with them the original creator’s credit and they will be notified that their work has been used in another “stamp.”

For example, Mazurenko has a collection of images from other Stampsy members of people photographed with their backs toward the camera, intrigued by form over face.

“What photographers tell us is they think this is a great tool for validation,” Mazurenko said. “The work is appreciated beyond the like feature.”

Fotografia Magazine uses Stampsy to encourage submissions and show off stories from the publication.

Hoogwaerts and his partner, Grace Leigh, run the independent publishing project Mossless and used Stampsy to give people a preview of their book Issue Three: The United States (2003-2013), a composition of new American photographs.

The Stampsy site for the book helped sell it, Hoogwaerts said. Time magazine named it one of the 10 best photo books of the year.

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