This image by artist Mike Bailey-Gates, was the first ever post on If You Leave, 10 years ago today (Dec 10th 2009).
Set up by photographer Laurence Von Thomas, If you Leave featured what he found to be an impressive “new wave” of talented and underrepresented young photographers emerging onto the scene.
In a style that was not exactly fine-art, portrait, documentary, commercial or street photography, it felt more closely related to the works of 19th and 20th century painters such as Monet, Friedrich and Hopper or cinematography by the likes of Tarkovski, Bertolucci or Wong Kar Wei.
The concept was simple, feature one photo a day by a new artist, preferably up-and-coming.
The sharing platform was Tumblr, but most content came from Flickr. In a pre-instagram age, personal blogs where peaking and an online world without borders was attracting young talent from far and wide.
Today, ten years later, If You Leave has featured more than 3000 photographers across 63 countries, resulting in over original 5000 posts, 4 books, two magazine issues, 2.7M instagram tags and 4 international showcases.
2020 will celebrate #IYL10 with several revisiting features and a re-publishing of the 4 IYL volumes in a limited hardback edition, as well as a new 5th volume and a special event in December 2020 to top it off.
A warm and grateful gratitude goes out to everyone who has been involved over these past 10 years, from the more than 50 people behind the scenes, to the generous co-curators, bookstores, venues, and of course you our loyal followers.
And finally, to the photographers… thank you for all these years of inspiration!