I've made a Zine!
Or 'what to do when you are out of action for 8 weeks'
Good morning all.
I’m out of action for the first two months of this year with, and now from a hernia operation. The surgery is routine and I’m in recovery now, and acutely aware of how lucky I am, being able to do so in comfort, warmth and light, unlike so many others in the world around us, including our friends and family in Kyiv.
I decided that I would use this time unable to go on location to do something I have thought about for a number of years and make my first ‘zine’.
(Zine - pronounced ‘zeen’. Often, small and self published, the term itself comes from ‘fanzine’ which itself came from a mix of ‘fan’ and ‘magazine’)
A zine is far less costly to produce than a normal photobook which means they should also be far less to buy and most, like mine, sell for around £8 or £9.
Even before the ability to self publish photobooks as I do, zines have always been an amazingly direct connection between a maker and their audience.
My first zine, called ‘One night’ and available to buy now, is centred around the hotel rooms I stayed in between 2015 and 2021 as I travelled to over 30 countries making work. You might well have spotted one or two as I shared some of my working travels with you on social media over the years.
Each night a different hotel or guesthouse.
In these small rooms, I found a reflection of the owners, every one a small oasis for me in which to rest and take stock of what I had seen during the days work before heading out, or just back down the stairs to the hotel restaurant, trying to find something cheap to eat each evening; before the few hours sleep and the inevitable early alarm clock.
These photographs here include rooms from Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania and Ukraine.
The zine costs just £8.50, is available to order now and will be shipping next week, and there is also a ‘print edition’ available that has a signed 10x8 inch print, made on beautiful Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 gsm Giclee archival photographic paper, of my room in Kharkiv in Eastern Ukraine, where I stayed for 3 nights in January 2019, making work on ‘A Wounded Landscape - bearing witness to the Holocaust’.
I hope you enjoy this small peek into the world of others, these rooms they made for weary travellers which in fact, I found, said so much about them also.
My best wishes as ever,
Marc
