Life
The old saw in creative writing, especially short fiction writing, is that there are more writers and aspiring writers than there are people who actually read the stuff (bad news for the increasing numbers of MFAs being pumped out each year). As for poetry, forget about it: I suspect poems are read mostly by other poets who want to see how it’s done. Outside of a certain circle, no one really gives a crap about poetry.
Photography is like poetry and, with the latest shuttering of Life magazine, getting more like it. The headline writers have been having a field day with the news: Life Dies Another Death, Life is Dead, No Life to Live, Death to Life, etc. Cited as reasons for the closure: falling ad sales, declining newspaper readership, dramatic developments in the market, cutbacks at Time Inc. The long and short of it: not enough people were reading the magazine.
Critics are quick to point out the magazine had already long been a relic of what it was back in the day when Alfred Eisenstaedt and W. Eugene Smith were shooting for it. Still, it had been one of the last photo-driven magazines left standing, in whatever incarnation, and its closure is yet another indication that, unless it’s a picture of the latest movie star or something, no one outside of a certain circle really gives a crap about photography.