In the last two years, Tiny Atlas Quarterly has gone from a seed in the mind of Oakland photographer Emily Nathan to a leading travel and lifestyle magazine. As of this writing, the Instagram hashtag #mytinyatlas has more than 1.7 million submissions, with photographers all over the world vying for a coveted spot on the @tinyatlasquarterly feed.
Because Tiny Atlas Quarterly is at its core a publication for photographers by photographers, Nathan wasn’t content with the idea of stopping at a successful publication. She wanted to interact with the community she’d built to find new and easier ways to make beautiful pictures.
Tiny Atlas is all about photographers who don’t stop in their studios, those who are driven to explore unseen places and take in extraordinary sights. To date, the team at Tiny Atlas has launched photo exhibitions with images sourced directly from the community and even planned trips and adventures designed for photographers.
Now, they’ve created a camera bag, using the feedback of countless photographers. The SOLAS bag was made in collaboration with Alite Designs, and it went through many incarnations and beta-tested versions before the perfect bag came into being.
Travel photographers in particular have had a ongoing struggle with finding a suitable bag; the ones that offer enough protection are often bulky, hard to carry, and well, ugly. The SOLAS bag is different; it’s designed the same elegance and sophistication for which Tiny Atlas is so well known, and it offers safe compartments for laptops, lenses, phones, sunglasses, and more. It can be worn as a tote bag or converted into a backpack or shoulder bag.
With more than 120 backers already on Kickstarter, the SOLAS is the camera bag photographers have been asking for.
To mark the release of these stylish, lightweight bags, Tiny Atlas Quarterly is holding a beautifully curated exhibition of photographs in Greenpoint, Brooklyn as part of the Independent Art Book Fair, a new event for outstanding indie publishers, galleries, and bookmakers. The show was curated by Nathan and picture editor Cory Jacobs from Instagram images submitted using the tag #mytinyatlasSOLAS, with the theme being travel and light (“solas” means “light” in Irish Gaelic).
Next Thursday, September 15th, Tiny Atlas will open up a free preview for the public from 6:00-8:00 PM. The show will run from September 15th to the 18th. To learn more about the SOLAS bag, check out the Kickstarter campaign.