Creative Camera Archive

An ongoing project to scan the contents of all copies of Creative Camera Magazine from the time it adopted that name until it changed into DPICT.


Why is this being done?
All 358 copies of Creative Camera, from its launch as Camera Owner in 1964 to its eventually demise under the DPICT title in 2001, are an invaluable resource encompassing contemporary and historical photography in the latter part of the 20th century.
The magazine produced just one printed index of photographers’ names during its lifetime and that only covered the early years (see below), there is no one index that covers the entire resource.
The aim of this project is to create a searchable repository of the entire publication, with the ability to locate the actual issues which include specific photographers or other references.

In Phase One of the project, only the covers and contents pages from 1970 onwards are being scanned. The scanning and text recognition process is prone to minor errors and omissions, although every attempt has been made to keep these to a minimum. 
It’s not a particularly elegant system, but it works.

To have searchable and retrievable scans of the whole contents is beyond the resources available at the moment, but copies of entire articles are available by special request, at a reasonable charge. This charge helps recoup the personal costs incurred in assembling the collection, which took many years of searching, time & investment to complete.

Details
Copies of articles are charged as follows: 1-4 pages – £6.00; 5-10 pages – £10.00; More than 10 pages – £Please Enquire via Contact Form.

All articles are provided in text-editable PDF format at 300dpi resolution. You will be sent a Paypal invoice. On receipt of payment the article will be sent by email or linked download.

Send requests via the contact form.

(More information on searching, including the use of Google, is at the foot of this page)

As new sets are scanned and indexed they will be added here.

The 1970s Archive

The 1980s Archive

The 1990s Archive

The 2000s Archive


The 10th Anniversary Issue Index (February 1978)
An alphabetical list of published photographers from 1968 to 1977 in PDF format. Opens in your browser or in Adobe Acrobat and may be searched, using Ctrl-F on a PC or Command-F on a Mac.

 

Issue 351 of Creative Camera, April/May 1998

Partial index of Back Issues, April/May 1998.
This was published to enable the purchase of back issues and contains a brief synopsis of content for those issues that were available. Provided here as a searchable PDF file.

 

Try using the search box below with a photographer’s name (e.g. Parr) or other search term (e.g. photojournalism) to explore results across the whole archive of contents.



A Techy Note About the Indexing & Searching

By default, a WordPress search does not index the content of embedded PDF files, so this site uses the plug-in SearchWP to enable the content of the PDFs to be indexed.
In order to display the PDFs as images, a second plug-in called PDF Embedder is used. This has the additional functionality of allowing the entire PDF to be viewed within the browser without downloading the file.

The SearchWP tool uses a ‘token search’. Basically this means that it will not identify phrases as search terms, each word in a phrase is treated individually, as a search ‘token’.
Searching for “Henri Cartier-Bresson” will actually produce results for ‘Henri’, ‘Cartier’ and ‘Bresson’ – not altogether a bad thing in this case as each term is likely to produce a result for the desired name.
But a search for “Eugene Smith” would return any ‘Eugene’ e.g. Smith, or Meatyard, Delacroix, Richards, etc, plus any ‘Smith’! So you can see the limitations. 
Only by searching within the PDF file – by opening it in your browser or in Adobe Acrobat – can you use a phrase search with any success.

On the brighter side, Google does index PDFs and will recognise a phrase search.
All the Creative Camera issues will become accessible via that route over time, although the links may be buried deep within any search results.
To search just this archive with Google you need to limit your search to PDF and the Golden Fleece site. You do this by prefixing your search term with:
site:the-golden-fleece.co.uk filetype:pdf

The Google search below has these parameters built in, just type your search term and hit return – the results pop up in a new window and there are the usual annoying sponsored ads…