The Photozine Collective

Back in 2021 the UK analogue film community was shocked to heard of the passing of John Whitmore.

John was a co-host on the Sunny 16 podcast and had his own YouTube channel the dark shed.

When some of John’s 35 film stash was spooled and branded as Black & Whitmore Bananachromatic and sold with one of John's Zines, so I bought a roll.

Sometimes later I saw a post on twitter by Richard Hall talking about making a zine using John's film.

As I had done my own Zines in the past, I thought it would be nice to collaborate with other photographers, so put my name forward.

It was know that John wanted to do a collaborative zine and get photographers to contribute, the working title for this zine was “silent lucidity”.

Eventually 7 people joined in on making the zine and the title was to be Lucid.

Lucid was release in May 2023 and was a great success and a nice way to remember John. The zine sold out and we raised over £200 donated to the Asthma and Lung Foundation.

Buoyed by the success of Lucid in October 2023, we started to look into making a second zine and inviting others to join the venture.

Although I didn't take part in this one, 12 people joined together to create our second zine Ambiguous.

Ambiguous is still available from either Richard Hall or Ian Wallace.

During this time we decided it would be a good idea to set ourselves up as a collective and so was born The Photozine Collective.

At present there is a small core group of us, who deal with the mundane things the collective needs and as we work on new Zines we invite people to join us.

We are currently looking at producing our 3rd zine for the group, this is to be called Opaque.

One of the quirks of making these Zines has been the we all use the same film emulsion, Lucid was all shot on John's film which we believe was Double X, Ambiguous was shot with Agent Shadow from Kosmo Foto and the new zine will be shot using Rollei 400s.

Richard wrote a piece over on Kosmo Foto about the Ambiguous zine, and some of the contributors can be heard on the Sunny 16 podcast.

We hope to continue making zines individually and as a group for quite a while.