Not Today is a short 20 page zine made in response to a few days worth of frustrating and incredibly disappointing events that occurred concurrently in February 2020. They also brought up some terrible disappointments from 2019, which took an emotional and financial toll (from which I recovered, mind you).
I have started to journal more regularly as a way of keeping track of my photographic work in a physical record. It is easy to produce photographic work but often it never leaves the screen and I feel that images find their life in paper. It’s part of the reason the Australian Institute of Professional Photography hold a print awards for their professional certifications.
To create Not Today, I selected at random a number of favourite film photographs I’ve shot then printed them with my lovely Epson P800 Inkjet printer. I realised a few pages in that I didn’t want everything to be black and white, so I also experimented printing on alternative media—old pink and red creative paper stock for collage that I had lying around. The colour was gorgeous and it provided a different texture to the high-quality archival paper I’d used for the other images.
I cut, tore, shredded and splattered them with my signature letterforms—the expressive brushstrokes help relieve tension, the inked line releasing pent-up energy. The thoughts were free-flowing and I was unconcerned with how they’d be interpreted. The pages themselves were created on A3 sheets of cartridge paper folded into quarters, providing a loose guide for the A5 pages I wanted. When the ink dried, I cut these A3 sheets down to A4 and scanned them. Some of the spreads are these whole A4 sheets, others are the A4 pages reduced to A5 and laid side-by-side.
The final layout of the book reinterprets the original meaning behind each pages physical creation, bonded with a narrative of overlaid type.
Some of the original photographs contributing to the zine are posted below, in addition to more spreads from the book.
Not Today zine is available in my store for $10 + postage within Australia.
Not Today zine is limited to 25 signed editions with a randomly inserted photograph printed on cotton rag.
