Why do photographers make zines? Why do they call them zines? What is a zine? For that matter what is a book? I think most of us could answer that final question but how many of us could define the difference between a book and a zine?
The use of the word ‘zine’ comes from the word magazine. A word that in itself has an interesting history as the description of a home for a collection of objects. A zine was the underground press’s answer to the glossy mainstream. Cheaply printed on cheap paper, rejecting conventional design for a home made amateur aesthetic. Zines were distributed through record shops, skateboard shops and independent clothes shops. They were the publishing platform for the counter culture. In all these senses there seems to be little connection between the spirit of these original publications and the work I currently see described as zines by photographers making them today.
Of course our use of language evolves and there is no need for a 1977 zine to look like a 2024 zine. However, every time I see a photographer describe a printed artefact of their images in this way I do tend to bristle a little. I can’t help it.
This is because I find myself asking why these photographers are using the word zine and not book. As that is what they are producing. A book. A well printed, design considered publication with no connection to magazines at all. This has happened so often that I find myself reflecting on the reasons for this, hence this article. Despite my reflection I can only come up with two potential reasons. The first is that by using the word book a perceived pressure is applied to its quality and importance that the photographer is unwilling to shoulder. Perhaps the word zine avoids such critical inspection. Perhaps a zine is more throwaway less serious. If this is the case I’d suggest that the photographer is unintentionally demeaning their own work. I don’t think this is the case. Proof of my belief can be found in the work sold by people such as Village https://villagebooks.co/collections/zines.
The second is that through continued use it has become a replacement description for a photo book. Perhaps it is a photo book without words. The opposite to what once defined what constituted a zine.
Another Place Press has a selection on their website devoted to zines where their Folio series resides https://anotherplacepress.bigcartel.com/category/zines. These are low price, well printed and designed, artefacts that complement the longer form projects Another Place publish as books. I recommend them. Perhaps this approach makes sense. The idea of the zine as a form of photographic sketch book. A printed artefact of a project in progress or one that has not yet reached the point at which a book could be considered or is appropriate.
Either way it does seem as if the word zine has been adopted by the photographic community as a way of labelling a collection of printed images that it does not consider to be a book. The reasons for its use still don’t work for me but that’s not important. What is important is that you understand why you are using it if you are.
Dr.Grant Scott
After fifteen years art directing photography books and magazines such as Elle and Tatler, Scott began to work as a photographer for a number of advertising and editorial clients in 2000. Alongside his photographic career Scott has art directed numerous advertising campaigns, worked as a creative director at Sotheby’s, art directed foto8magazine, founded his own photographic gallery, edited Professional Photographer magazine and launched his own title for photographers and filmmakers Hungry Eye. He founded the United Nations of Photography in 2012, and is now a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, and a BBC Radio contributor. Scott is the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019), and What Does Photography Mean To You? (Bluecoat Press 2020). His photography has been published in At Home With The Makers of Style (Thames & Hudson 2006) and Crash Happy: A Night at The Bangers (Cafe Royal Books 2012). His film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay was premiered in 2018.
Scott’s next book Inside Vogue House: One building, seven magazines, sixty years of stories, Orphans Publishing, is now on pre-sale.
© Grant Scott 2024
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