Print Matters - Black And Blue

What is Black and Blue? Format etc. What's the deal with the name?

Black and Blue is a photography zine, it’s a little bigger than A5 in size and this first issue has 86 pages of my own photographs from the last seven or so years. It’s all black and white; it really has that old zine vibe when you feel the printed pages. The name has no real personal meaning, I was briefly in a band about six years ago called Black and Blue that never escaped the rehearsal room and I just really liked the name. I guess it just stuck with me.

How long have you been cooking this up? Who's in there?

For like ever, I am really self critical, to a weird point where I will just delete everything and start again - this has happened to me on about five different occasions. I start with an idea, I get half of it done and then I leave it, I revisit it and I don’t like it, I scrap it. Black and Blue happened really one night; I had a few beers and just said to myself “If you don’t do this then you’ll never do it”. Now it’s done and printed, I’m happy with it, I don’t know what all the fuss was about. Since I’ve had the opportunity to travel with awesome people, the zine includes many of my friends, people like Dillon Lloyd, Mo Nussbaumer, Devon Smillie, Bruno, AK, Sean Burns, Shane Weston, Ben Hucke, Pat Morse, Dan Coller, Geoff Slattery, Christian Rigal, Fat Head, Jeff Kocsis, and Jared Washington.

What's your favourite story / outtake?

I think the printed emails back and forth from the owner of the Air BnB place in Austin are hilarious. I mean, I was totally in the wrong; I just couldn’t stand the rules and the reason to complain so much over some dirty plates (I guess you have to read it to make sense of it).

Any more plans for Black and Blue?

My job is way too full on for me to be pumping these things out on the reg, but I feel that now I’ve jumped that first hurdle, I will continue to put these out intermittently. I also want to work with friends and just explore what I can do with it; I have some ideas that will just add to the whole print experience.

Print is far from this benumbed slumbering beast everyone talks about, but of course it struggles to compete with the instantaneous feed of the Internet. People need to just learn to look at print differently. I just think that a good photo will never look as good as it looks in print, no matter what stock of paper its printed on or how big or small it is. It takes on a new meaning, it stands out, something happens anyway and it’s worth keeping this shit going for that reason alone.