A forum sounds like just about the wrongest possible platform to use for something like this. The presentation is all wrong; you need to open a thread before you can see what it's all about, and visuals are sort of the key thing for a site like you're describing.
Something more like a blog or a general-purpose CMS (Drupal and Joomla being examples of the type), something that would allow you to put pictures on the front page and feature content, would be infinitely better-suited. It's easier to categorize and search in a magazine/blog format than in a forum. And yes, perhaps it's more work, but you can get community involvement with that as well (without handing the keys to the kingdom to every Tom, Dick and Harriet). There's a much greater chance of developing an involved community if the site is visually attractive (something no PHP forum software seems to have figured out yet).