I made something physical. I made a Zine.
How many photos did you take last year?
I got a warning about our family iCloud storage a few weeks ago. I’m not sure what the average person does… incrementally increase their plan?
I refuse to pay more in subscription fees. So I immediately decree a family-wide culling before searching by year and “exporting unmodified originals” to a dated folder on my NAS server.
Start punching in a date in Photos and it offers the calendar year plus an image count.
2,304. To be honest a couple dozen of these are bad potty humour memes I send to the kids.
But in my “real” camera’s non-client database, there’s almost 6,000. And how many did I print? Zero.
I’m working on the script for my next video and it’s about “why”. Why do some of us own… or covet massively specced (61 megapixel! 100 megapixel!) cameras when the most common use of them seems to be to post on a 1.5 megapixel, advertising-based online platform. In defence of owning a paltry 45 megapixel camera, I’m a working photographer that occasionally needs to provide large format prints.
Years ago one of my photos got me like a jump scare when I was parking my car in Toronto.
Giant formats are the exception, and outside of client work, I just simply rarely print my work
Filming a YouTube video about portfolios, It really hit me while I looked through my printed portfolio (from, like, 2012?). I wasn’t expecting how strikingly more special it is to hold a photograph than it is to view it on a screen.
In that portfolio, through the act of editing, (not in the lightroom/photoshop sense) I could suddenly find meaning in the in-between shots. Every photo didn’t need to be a standalone “banger”. Like how a song isn’t all chorus, or how a film has establishing shots, inserts, I started to play with how someone experienced that collection.
And then I didn’t do it again.
Nearing the end of last year I counted 3 prints I made in the past two years. One of my daughter using a film camera, another of a car I took on the same roll of film.
And one of a sasquatch’s family as part of a goofy film project with friends.
So I finally printed something.
Desperation drove a need to print something and I looked back on my year and the clearest collection of images were photos I took during my Camino walk back in March.
I call it my “zine”. But unlike a traditional zine, photography begs for half-decent, non-Staples printing. And I’m pretty happy with it.
The words are achingly beginner as I feel like I’ve only been seriously jotting down words for 2 years (old dog, new trick). But creative desperation overrides that shame… and I’m too old to feel like an imposter.
I printed it here in Canada, and I’m happy with the result. I mean, I’m excited to improve things for the next one… I have ideas. Smaller, more pages, perfect-bound, quarterly, weekly, daily, delivered via missile.
Let’s start with this one. Lettermail. Edition of 100. In rebuilt envelopes because I couldn’t find affordable 9×9 envelopes.
Other than close friends, you’re the first ones to hear about it before I talk about it on my YouTube channel early next week. Patreon benefactors will get it for free.
What’s the point of a digital image garbage heap if we’re not going to do anything with them outside of a mayfly existence on a social media app?
Thanks for reading.
