The aim of this assignment was to create a handmade zine in which I would be documenting the Bristol skate scene. Within this zine I aimed to cover a broad spectrum of photographic styles, so that I could convey the many different levels and aspects of the scene. Not only looking at a singular aspect (e.g. tricks in skate parks) but also exploring the lives of the skaters and the environments in which you find them.
I had began shooting on 35mm black and white film while I was in my idea development stage, I traveled around the city shooting various ideas that I had and seeing which ones worked best. When I started photographing the skate scene I knew that this was the idea to run with and that 35mm was the best medium to document it with. I did shoot a portion of this assignment digitally but this was only due to the fact that I didn't have a film camera available to me at the time. I then edited these images so that they matched the aesthetic of the film images, this may be seen as cheating in some people's eyes but I wanted to use the images and didn't want to disrupt the continuity of the zine.
When I was researching artist I took a lot of inspiration from Californian lifestyle and skate photographers such as the knighted collective and Sagan lockhart and also Michel Burnett. I have always loved their of the moment shooting styles and really wanted to emulate their ability to capture the realism of the subcultures they photograph.
As I was new to the city trying to infiltrate a scene such as the skate scene was quite a hard task. Once I had decide that's what I wanted to shoot, I had to then find where to go to shoot it, at what time, which days etc. With more time and the insight I have now I think I could have brought together a more varied array of images but over all I think I managed my time well and produced a successful body of work in the time I had.
Once all of my images were taken I then began the book making process. I had already decided on the book size and shape but I still had the layout to decide on. I began looking through different zine's on the velvet cell and other web sites which were producing high quality photographic zines. As much as I liked what they were doing, these zines were more like photobooks and this wasn't the look I was going for. I had looked at the zines knighted were producing and knew this was much more of the sort of thing I was trying to achieve. I knew that I didn't want the zine to included text so I needed the images to speak for themselves. I wanted to included large double page spreads, reminiscent of the powerful images seen in skate magazines such as thrasher but i also wanted to include the more intimate style that I had seen in the knighted zine's where they had pushed two landscape images onto a single portrait page.
I also experimented with overlapping images to keep things fresh and interesting, I haven't really seen this done in photobooks before and thought it would be interesting to see how it would be received.
I have really enjoyed producing this assignment and the feedback I have received from peers has been very positive. I believe I have stuck to my initial proposal and have developed a well rounded zine.
I will hopefully continue to develop the zine and produce further issues in the future.
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