50. Disposables.
Comrades, greetings from Brighton where life is good by the sea! I’m back after a few weeks on a summer break during which I did all sorts of things except taking a break. First and most importantly, let’s give a warm welcome to all my new subscribers, I’m pleased you’re here!
I’m struggling to write today’s newsletter I have to admit, I’m blaming it on being away from the keyboard; unlike photography where I have a bag of tricks to problem-solve a wide variety of situations, laying down thoughts and ideas or building sentences requires a different set of skills. Anyway, I love doing both so I’m not giving up.
Last week I attended a photo walk with the wonderful people from the Photosocial group. I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m a member of this group that I knew about by meeting the founder at the Photographers Gallery in Soho. This time we decided to walk around the Whitechapel area replacing our fancy digital cameras with disposable film ones instead.
Photographing in packs can be a bit challenging, especially for someone like me who loves the solitude that goes with the process of making photos: the meditative state one can get into, the inner conversations, the problem-solving, the observations of the mundane and occasionally the interactions and relationships that emerge from walking alone with a camera. All these get disrupted when you’re around other snappers BUT… there is one reason why I love these group photo walks, they are fun! Fun means to be in a relaxed, unpretentious, collaborative, and non-competitive environment where everyone is highly sociable.
Funny enough,
wrote recently about the mindset of photo-walking in groups which I agree with and can’t describe better than him: WORDS IN THE CITY.
The pictures you’re seeing in this newsletter are some of my favourites from the day, I enjoyed the experience so much that I made a zine building a visual narrative from all the random shots of the day. I wasn’t planning on doing anything in particular with the photos; they’re not the best quality, nor portfolio worthy either, they are snapshots from the day but still, I felt like I could construct something out of nothing so I laid them down following the same process you saw on EDITING part 1 and part 2 to build a visual narrative and since I liked the result, I made a zine:
I’m not going to bore you with a step by step on how I made the zine from editing to binding the pages, there’s plenty on the subject already on YouTube but please do let me know in the comments if you’d like to see my way of building a zine.
What I can tell you is that I had this thought of fun present throughout the whole process, from the editing of the photos to the layout, building the visual narrative, and through to the choice of paper, format, and design of the zine. I even went a step further and had some more fun cropping with a scalpel most of the images to fit the vision that I had in mind for this zine, and of course, for narrative.
If there’s something valuable with you to day is that narrative is everything!
I encourage you all to create your zines, booklets, and albums from anything you photograph, it is such a rewarding process and you’ll learn so much about yourself and your work through it. Have a look at the work of
or for inspiration.
Some final thoughts on this experience: Will I continue photographing on disposable cameras? I doubt it, they’re not a very eco-friendly thing to do. Shoot more on film? most likely not. Film is not my thing, I love the process I have with digital! Plus, I already have an expensive pastime with my current obsession of book and zine making, I don’t need another one or I’d have to start hiding posts like this one behind paywalls, definitely not my kind of thing.
It was fun while it lasted but film doesn’t tickle my creative pickle.
Saying that, next week I’m sharing my very first editorial commission which was shot entirely on an expired roll of film. Until then.
Wonderful series of photos and amazing zine from your group photo walk - which is in my manor and I see there’s a photo of the best bagel shop in town as well! Some familiar scenes for me there. Would love to join a similar walk in Whitechapel if it happens again. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for the shoutout, I appreciate it! 🤍