They; whoever they are, say you should always print your work.
The most common ways to do this is, either print images in a darkroom, digitally at home or printed online.
This is all well and good if it's an image to display at home or pass on to a friend.
If you have a body of work you wish to show, this can be a problem. You may be able to get it shown in an exhibition or if a Coffee shop would be willing to display it but this can work out expensive having to frame and hang it.
Another way is to create a zine.
So what is a zine? A zine is a DIY self published, self funded, small circulation publication that can cover any subject from graphic novels to a football team.
Obviously this post is going to concentrate on photography and photography lends itself well to zines.
I have made quite a few over the years but these have mainly been one offs ( just for myself) a physical copy of subjects I had photographed. These included Zombie walks in London, a collection of the Shard images.
My real first zine came about through a post on the Talk photography forums. The idea was you would have 6 months to shoot, design and print the zine. There was no commitment that you had to finish it. In the end I think there was 8 of us and we would then swap the final zines with each other.
I had already been shooting in Nunhead cemetery, an abandoned Victorian cemetery and thought this would make a good subject for a zine.
Overall I shot 4 rolls of black & white film, which gave me plenty of images to work with when finalising the final layout of the zine.
I always had the final design and layout in my head. As it was a Victorian cemetery the design was always going to be gothic and have black paper to portray the feeling of mourning.
The minimum order I needed was 7 copies to swap but when checking prices it actually made more sense to order 20 as the cost difference was minimal and I thought I may be able to sell the extras.
Luckily I sent out some to friends and this gave the zine some traction and I ended up selling the remainder of them.
Since this first zine I have made two more. It's great fun making these and also getting your work into other people's hands.