Last week, Smashing Magazine announced their selection of 40 Amazing Online Photography Magazines. We were excited to make the cut alongside a slew of our wonderful contemporaries including Flak Photo, lens culture, Deep Sleep, Purpose, Ahorn, 1000 Words and VII, is photo-eye's Online Magazine. This seems like a decent time to recap what we've been up to for those of you who may be newcomers to the site -- after over 25 years of printed text, we launched our online magazine in August 2008 with a salute to the The Americans and two articles on Frank by Jeff Ladd and Karl Baden entitled Report from the May 15th Robert Frank event at Lincoln Center and Covering Robert Frank. Since then we've been honored to feature stories on a slew of wonderful photographers and their books, including Zoe Strauss, Mary Ellen Mark and Hank Willis Thomas-- among others.

This has been all over the photo-blogosphere the last few days, but in case you haven't heard about it yet make sure to take a look. It's a pretty extraordinary event, especially considering that I understand it was organized in an incredibly short period of time. It should surprise no one that the vast majority of people in the contemporary photography world have this particular political leaning:

Art for Obama is an online auction of photographs to benefit the Obama campaign. The whole thing was put together by photographers Ahndraya Parlato, Elizabeth Moy, Gregory Halpern, Whitney Hubbs and Dru Donovan. It's slated to run for 1 week and bidding begins October 1st, so get ready — the list of artists who've donated work is pretty spectacular:

Nubar Alexanian
Uta Barth
Nina Berman
Walead Beshty
Ellen Brooks
Elinor Carucci
Eileen Cowin
Doug Dubois
Jason Evans
Wendy Ewald
Larry Fink
Harrell Fletcher
Tierney Gearon
Jim Goldberg
Frank Golke
Emmet Gowin
Katy Grannan
Sharon Harper
Todd Hido
Jeff Jacobson
Eirik Johnson
Ron Jude
Lisa Kereszi
Michael Light
David Maisel
Susan Meiselas
Richard Misrach
Cathy Opie
Shana & Robert ParkeHarrison
Laura McPhee
Carter Mull
Laurel Nakadate
Mike Slack
Alec Soth
Larry Sultan
Peter Sutherland
Hank Willis Thomas
Catherine Wagner
Jim Welling
Mark Wyse

For more information, images and to begin the difficult process of deciding what to bid on, visit artforobama.net.

Today's launch of our new website marks the third major design for photoeye.com. We have come a long way since first launching the site in 1997 as one of the first e-commerce independent bookstores on the web.

In September of 2003 we changed the design to a lighter easier to navigate style. The goal for today's new design was to produce a site that branded each of the divisions clearly, while maintaining the ease-of-use functionality found in our previous version.

Apart from the great wealth of new features and a fresh new look for each of our divisions, today's launch also includes two exciting new additions to the website: photo-eye Magazine and the U.S.A. Photography Guide.

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