Lens Culture started out 8 years ago as a magazine published 3 times a year in my spare time. It's grown quite a bit since then!

Last year we organized screenings of great new contemporary photography on two continents, hosted our 3rd annual international portfolio reviews in Paris, awarded 9 prizes and 27 honorable mentions for the International Exposure Awards, and the UK Guardian called us “one of the most authoritative and wide-ranging sites” on contemporary photography.

In the past 8 years we’ve published 35 issues of Lens Culture, including more than 40 original in-depth video and audio interviews with photographers, lots and lots of photobook reviews, and shared our discoveries of photographers from more than 50 countries worldwide. We've stayed up all night working on high-resolution slideshows, editing captions, revising translations, linking out to other sites that we find interesting. We’ve lost some friends and family, welcomed newborn babies, published 750,000+ photos (last count), written 2,500 photography-related tweets, and helped to launch dozens of new careers.

We love what we do, and apparently a lot of you do too. We appreciate your support, and we rely on your generous donations to continue our work. We’ve never cluttered our site with commercial advertising, and we think you appreciate that as much as we do.

So today we're asking you to donate just $10 (or more if you can afford it) to keep us running.

It takes 200 hours per week to do everything we do. Many of us volunteer a lot of of our time, but we have real costs that include high-speed web servers, a dedicated part-time editorial staff, software, computer upgrades and video production.

If everyone who reads this donated $25, we could keep running for two more years.

Please act now, and donate something today. Keep Lens Culture vibrant and inspiring. And come back soon!

Thanks very much,

Jim Casper, founder and editor
Lens Culture