David Rathbone
@david_rathbone_photo14 Jul
Thoughts and reflections on creating a zine
Creating my zine, We Live in Colour has been a really rewarding photographic experience I loved taking the photographs and, over seven years, building a body of work. The most challenging part wasn’t making the pictures, it was selecting them and finding the right sequence. Deciding what to leave out was often harder than deciding what to include. Although I found the editing process difficult, it’s taught me a great deal. It’s made me look at my own photographs more critically and objectively, and I’ve enjoyed discovering the visual connections between images that help create a narrative rather than just a collection of individual pictures. The part I’ve enjoyed least has been selling and marketing the zine. It’s felt more like a chore than a pleasure, which is slightly ironic given that I spent most of my working life in direct sales. Promoting your own creative work is a very different challenge to selling someone else’s products What I love most is seeing the photographs in print. There’s something special about holding the finished zine in your hands. After spending years viewing the images on a screen, seeing them printed feels like the completion of the whole process. It’s as though the photographs have finally escaped the screen and become a real permanent thing Would I do it again? Absolutely. Not because it’s easy, but because I’ve learnt so much from the experience. Creating this zine has made me a better editor, a more thoughtful photographer, and has shown me that making the photographs is only the beginning. Turning them into a coherent body of work is where the real challenge is I would love to hear of other photographers experiences in making a zine, or if you are thinking of making a zine where have you got to in your process
Thank you for sharing this, a very thoughtful insight. I'm actually toying with the idea of creating my first zine right now, and even the sequencing feels like a daunting task. I would love to hear more on how you approached that when working on your zine. Did you print them beforehand to look at them side by side? Or done it all digitally?
Thank you! It’s definitely one of the hardest parts of the whole process.
I ended up doing a bit of both. I printed some images out early on so I could move them around physically, but most of the sequencing was done digitally in Lightroom. I set up image pairs and spent a lot of time scrolling through different sequences, making drafts and tweaking little details.
One thing I found really valuable was sharing those drafts with trusted friends for feedback. The biggest lesson, though, was to ask someone who isn’t emotionally connected to the project. When you’ve been looking at the same images for a long time, it’s very easy to get stuck in a bit of a tunnel with the sequencing. A fresh pair of eyes will often spot things you’ve completely missed, or question a sequence you’ve taken for granted.
It’s a slow process, but I found it was worth living with each draft for a while before making the next round of changes, I made three drafts for my zine, Good luck with your first zine it’s a rewarding journey.
Thank you. 🙂
I'm not sure how to use Lightroom for this just yet - might actually do it in Canva in the end.
But that whole "red team" approach of people reviewing it, I'll definitely bring on board - just have to think how best to gather the feedback from them 🙂
I’ve heard other photographers are using Canva or Affinity which I believe are made by the same developers and are free to use
Thank for highlighting this topic, David. I could not agree more: Curating a finite body of your own work for a publication is undeniably the most potentially rewarding self-informative activities, both retrospectively and prospectively, any photographer can undertake. The comparisons and decisions required to assemble a book / zine or exhibition can be jarring. Personally, I love these projects and try to do one each year or two. My goal is not to sell the books (I offer them all freely for anyone to browse online (https://www.kentanaka.com/books). My goal is to learn by attempting to use a body of my photographs to present an experience to viewers.
Thank you for responding Ken, I checked out your web page and your books look great, I will make another zine, as I’ve enjoyed the process, but I need a bit of time now to work on ideas for a new zine and build on the lessons learnt
💯 thanks for sharing. It’s a very self reflective process. Very humbling and rewarding at the same time. I carry a few projects in postcard sized prints that I often share with fellow photographers. It’s a good way to get feedback. Other than that I’ve reached out to some heavy hitters and gotten some very honest critique. Not for the faint of heart 😂 but very humbling.
I like the postcards idea, and showing to other photographers for feedback. I am trying to build up the courage to get some proper independent critique on my work, critique can be tough but I feel it’s a great way to understand where you are with your photography the good the bad and areas for improvement