FOTOZINE

Cheap art for all is an idea with the best intentions, but is at odds with the principle of giving up everything for nothing.

Fotozine is a publication dedicated to the inquiry into photography.

Wacky, obsene, gross, tender and funny, fotozine is pocket entertainment.

Fotozine is unpolluted by greed, arrogance and hypocrisy, but is passionate and pathological.

Fotozine employs appropriation and collaboration with a disaffected agenda designed to disturb main stream sensibilities in an attempt to reclaim meaning in a world where images and words are meaningless.

In Fotozine the idea or concept is a very important part of the work but I don’t avoid subjectivity. All communication is a manifestation of interests.

There is no explicit critical viewpoint. I don’t want to impose order on things nor thoughts. I want chance to determine the order of sequences and the connections perceptible between them.

Fotozine began as a response to an image and text brief and has developed into a continually evolving and growing series of artists’ books that employ appropriation, collaboration and plagiarism, as well as original text and photographic imagery.

Fotozine is a vehicle for direct confrontation with art, providing information, ideas and imagery to provoke questions and thinking.

Fotozine can function as allegory.
Allegorical interpretations of work allows them a satisfying complexity with several meanings and values creating a new kind of viewer that can recognize oblique critical allusions without an introductory explanation. In allegory, the speaker trusts the audience to make the metaphorical connection and to sustain it throughout the discourse.

A photographic work driven by a conceptual narrative rather than by formal elements or subject matter found within the frame was essential to the development of photographic post modernism. The critical impact of such works comes from the transgression of photographic norms. The deviations from the standards of fine art photography could be viewed as politicized. The other half of the work’s impact comes in the form of a critical metanarrative. In the criticism of the moment, appropriation and fragmentation were seen as strategies to empty the image and point beyond it. Works can have an ostensible subject matter and an implicit commentary on representation. Pictorial work can function as allegory, linking contemporary photography with the privileged discourses of literature and narrative history painting. Allegorical interpretations of works allow them a satisfying complexity and multivalance, creating a new kind of viewer. The audience of modernist art photography expect to see a self sufficient, autonomous image. The postmodern viewer can recognize oblique critical allusions without an introductory explanation. In allegory, the speaker trusts the audience to make the metaphorical connection and to sustain it throughput the discourse. This critical mode allows artists to maintain links with old-fashioned art values while maintaining critical distance.

When I make my photographs I work intuitively. I have a list of possible themes but remain open to considering anything worthy of my attention. I am quite happy to allow themes to present themselves to me. For example, a hot summer in 2003 wreaked havoc on my garden’s frog population. I exploited their predicament and made some beautiful and some horrible images of dead frogs that I was able to utilize in several different issues of fotozine.




Fotozine is made from a single sheet of A4 double-sided inkjet paper, folded and cut twice, holes poked through the crease of a third fold and sewn together with dental floss. 130g Tetenal is printed on both sides on a hp deskjet 990c m series. They are carefully dried before assembly and distribution in plastic sleeves.

“for anorak photographers the collectible mini-mag full of fascinating historical facts and top tips by amateur photographer Matthews-Morley.” the appropriation and distortion of main stream cultural forms and images has long been an estalished part of zine production.

Fotozine is inspired by zines that appeared in the 1970s created by zinesters, who were politically self-conscious amateurs. Immune from conventional rules, zinesters violate copyright regulations plus libel and obscenity laws. Zinesters are immune from conventional rules because they are anarchists, and it is their choice, so becoming a zinester was a natural path for me to take on my journey as an artist.

fotozine is ephemeral

In 1966 Andy Warhol placed an ad in a newspaper that he would sign anything brought to him, including money. His act perpetuated what, for some it had aparently undermined.