Why a magazine, and why we're saying who publishes it

Quarter Panel started as a folder. Over a few years of shooting cars for owners, clubs and a small shop, the folder grew to more than a hundred sessions — roughly eighty finished frames each. A calendar takes twelve of those a year. A product page takes one. The rest sat there.

A magazine is the only format I know that gives a photograph room: a full page, a facing page for the owner's words, a spread when the car earns it. It is also the only format that lets other people in. The owners. The shops that keep these cars on the road. The photographers who are better than me at the thing I'm trying to do. So the folder became an issue, and the issue needed a name that wasn't already the shop's.

Who publishes this

Quarter Panel is published by Carshowcasing Media, which also runs the Carshowcasing shop and photography. You'll see the shop's calendar and prints advertised in these pages. Every one of those pages is labelled as an advertisement, the same way a partner's page is. The magazine features Carshowcasing in the first issue because that's where the archive is — and it says so on the cover line rather than pretending an independent editor discovered it.

That's the deal, in one sentence: we'll tell you what's ours, we'll label what's paid, and we'll mark what's generated.

The awards

The awards open with this issue and cost nothing to enter. The panel has five people and a majority of them are not the publisher. Anything owned by the publisher, a judge or an advertising partner is ineligible — Carshowcasing can be featured; it can't win. The categories are the ones owners actually care about: the build, the daily, the survivor, the shop, the photograph, the meet, the first project.

One more thing about the photographer on page 47

There is a feature in this issue by a photographer who doesn't exist. It's labelled in the contents and it tells you so on its last page. It's there because the line between a photograph and a rendering is getting hard to see, and a magazine about photographs should show you where that line is instead of hoping you won't ask. Thanks for reading the first one.