A zine is a photo book that is mostly produced on a small scale and by hand. Most of the time they are self published and will be distributed by the artist or by small scale businesses.

There are different kinds of zine, the differences can be based on the content and the way that they are created and presented. The genera that I will be studying is the photo zine; in which a photographer will present their photographs in a way that can tell a story or impact on a reader.

An example of a zine is from the Italian photographer Lorenzo vitturi called ‘Dalston Anatomy’, he lived in the Dalston area of Hackney in London. This is the area sometimes known as the African Quarter. He would photograph the people who he saw in the market and then with the leftover food at the end of a days sale. Then he would arrange the food into elaborate sculptures and would use some of the produce to make the portraits more interesting and colourful.

The way that he presented the book was a simple hardcover but the photos within were not set out normally they are different sizes with different sized borders, there are also set-up with matching or complimentary colours in a double page spread.

The second Zine I will be studying is called ‘Red String’ by Yoshikatsu Fujii it is based around the splitting apart of his family due to their parents divorce. The name ‘Red String’ was based on the old Japanese that says that two people destined to fall in love have an invisible red string tied around their little finger and it grows smaller and smaller until they are together. Fujii says that the string between his parents has been cut. The zine incorperats the theme of red string because the pages and cover are all bound with a red string.

The layout of the book is done so that it can be opened up to show two different smaller zines and they can be read through in different way to show the full history and story of the family and the parents relationship.

“The split binding allows the reader to page through one side and then the other, but the powerfulness comes from pairing both halves together. In this delicate and personal family album, Yoshikatsu Fujii ties the memory of his family back together with the cultural metaphor of red string.”

Larissa Leclair, Founder of the Indie Photobook Library