Printing projects.
Every so often (very occasionally to being honest) I try and print photos in some form.
I used to post photos online, sometimes with words, on blog sites, which was a more creative and intentional process than uploading pictures to instagram. Looking back, this was an important creative outlet for me, and a very easy way to share pictures and thoughts with an audience - a relatively small one in reality, but with the potential to connect with people anywhere.
But back to printing; I started taking photos on film, when my mum would post the rolls of 35mm film off to be processed and we’d get the negatives and prints back in the mail. We’d get the family pictures back, along with any I’d taken, and that mail day was always exciting. My dad bought me my first digital camera, a 4 megapixel Canon, and I took that for my first travels overseas, though from memory I still only printed photos taken on 35mm film with an SLR I’d also got for Christmas one pre-digital year. After getting back from living abroad very briefly I bought my first digital SLR, a Pentax K7, and was able to practice more creatively.
Earlier printing projects included posting off black and white prints on office paper for inclusion in a couple of exhibitions in the UK by The Photocopy Club (which was a really great project that I think is still running in some capacity), a zine of motorbikes and motorbike scenes from my first trip to Vietnam to sell at a Perth print market, a similar black and white zine of photos from Broome, and an exhibition of prints that a friend and I put on in another friend’s store in Bunbury. Over the years I’ve had printed photos included in a few local exhibitions, and have been a fan of others’s work at more - it’s always interesting seeing good visual art on display in general, but I definitely have a soft spot for photography over painting, sculpture or film as a viewer, not just a shooter.
After a trip to Norway, Poland and Greece in 2017, I printed a travel zine on quality paper through a Perth print shop, rather than opting for the black and white DIY process I’d used previously (I don't really like the term zine but it seems to be pretty well established now for exactly the type of printed things I’ve made). Writing this, I’ve just looked at it properly again for the first time in years; I’m happy that I went to the effort of making it, sending it to family and friends, and it’s reinforced in my mind the value of making something physical, even if shared with small network of people or to look back on yourself in later years.
In 2022 I met my friend Brodie in Nepal to complete a multi-day trek. I hope this is not the last trip of this kind for me, but I’m also aware that it’s the sort of adventure that for some people is a once-in-a-lifetime experience - it was worthy of another print project at the very least. Photos taken on both film and digital cameras made up this zine, along with a written intro, and I sent copies to friends as well as selling them through local photo labs and a hiking store.
My latest printed project took almost a year to get together after taking the photos - not because it was ambitious, I suppose I just had a lot of distractions getting in the way. My son’s mum and I coordinated a tag-team trip to Japan for our son Ari for his birthday in 2025, after telling him we’d take him the previous year but not quite getting organised in time. I’m still hoping to do more with the pictures I took from the trip overall, but for my travel zine decided to include only photos of Ari. It was fitting for a trip that was his birthday present, and it gives me a visual diary to accompany a lot of what I was reflecting on as a parent of a child at that age in 2025, and him specifically.
I’m not sure what my next personal print projects are going to be yet, but writing this is one step, hopefully, in motivating myself to get more together soon.