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Engross, prejudice, and intimidate
This post from Ian Leslie’s Ruffian newsletter rang a bell for me. He’s talking about the nature of creative influence, and here adds a thought about why great influences can be so blocking: I recently (re-)read U and I, Nicolson Baker’s book about his obsession with John Updike, writer and man. … U and I is essentially […]
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Bookbinding
It’s easy to get a zine printed, bound and trimmed to a very high quality. I wanted to do something interesting with the covers, so I decided to have just the inside pages printed, and supplied to me flat, unbound. I sourced paper separately for the covers and produced the artwork with a laser cutter. […]
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Laser-engraving the covers
I wanted to make a special object. I could have had the whole zine digitally-printed, but it seemed like a missed opportunity, so I decided to have the inside pages printed, and do something more interesting with the covers and binding. I have access to a laser cutter, so my plan was to use coloured […]
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Retro exercise book
File under: ideas for zine format. The bold colour, characteristic typeface, the size and shape, the thick, matte, easily creased paper stock…
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Printing from InDesign
In my early prototyping, I made quite a few mockups in software and in hard copy using Indesign software. I discovered some quirks along the way…
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Printing a photozine
I’ve made a few zines before, mostly for close to zero budget. For this project, I wanted the reproductions to be good, and also wanted to make a lovely object, so I had to spend some money to get it commercially printed. But printing (even digitally) in small quantities is very expensive, so part of […]
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Illusions
The Afghan Girl stares out at you from the cover of the magazine. In the language of portrait criticism, she returns your gaze. We’re so used to seeing pictures of people looking back at us that we don’t notice the illusion – that she’s looking at Steve McCurry’s camera, not at us. We might argue […]
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Richard Misrach on Landscape and Meaning
Buy from Bookshop.org (affiliate link) This is one of Aperture’s ‘Workshop’ series, in which photographers talk about their work as if they were leading a workshop. I don’t have any others in this series, but I do have a couple of other Aperture books, and like those, this is a lovely object: nice paper, great […]
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Editing, sequencing and layout
Once I had a set of images I was pretty happy with, I had to figure out how to put them together to make a coherent flow. I looked at pairings that would work across spreads. I thought about how I could lead on from one image ot the next, but also how I could […]
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An Idea for a Series
I was on holiday with my family in Herefordshire, on the border between England and Wales. July 2022 was hot. Mercifully, the place we were staying had a tiny stream running down the hillside, with steep banks cut into the red soil, and heavy tree cover providing a cool respite from the sun. I was […]