Fotophile.com is a website dedicated to the love of photography. It’s right in the name! “Foto” from a common spelling internationally (and how it’s pronounced), and “phile” from the ancient Greek word meaning “one who loves, likes, or is attracted to.”
From my apartment in Grand Forks, North Dakota, I started the website in 1993, what seemed like the early days of the internet, as a list of photography sites I’d found on the world wide web. Back then, I would buy and sell photo equipment on Usenet, an early, text-based community that predated sites such as eBay, and it was infused with a community spirit in which photo enthusiasts would share knowledge, ask questions and trade camera gear out a love of their hobby. Via a 14.4k-baud modem and an AOL dial-up connection, many of these websites took an inordinate amount of time to load, but I was fascinated by the connections people like me were making all over the world and the possibilities for sharing their work and knowledge.
I hand-coded simple HTML lists of cool photography websites I came across and shared the list freely, later dividing them by categories and geography as the number of listings grew. Eventually, I added photo galleries to highlight the work of talented photographers I had come to know. The website once earned enough money from advertising that I decided to open a physical, bricks-and-mortar gallery off Canyon Road in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Excited for the future, I gave three weeks’ notice at my job on a Tuesday. My last day of work was 11 September 2001, a day that would change the trajectory of history.
Although the gallery never opened, I maintained Fotophile.com as I moved around the country as a newspaper reporter before I returned home to New York. Now, I thought I would give it some of the attention it deserves.
— Bruno