This approachable online zine-making workshop series took place in April and May 2021 as part of the inaugural Tasweer Photo Festival Qatar.
The workshop’s creator – artist and educator Andreas Laszlo Konrath – touched upon important historical and current concepts of zine-making and zine-culture and introduced the international group of participants to the power of telling our stories through zines. The online workshop sessions considered the creative elements of zine-making – how to create visual flow; how images can complement or detract from one another; and experimentation in layout and sequencing content in varying size, number; and spatial layouts. The workshop series utilized the Progressive Web App ‘shrimpzine’, co-developed by Andreas, as a tool to learn the basics in creating self-published works.
This first workshop session started with a conversation about where we can begin our relationship with zines and discovering the language of zines. Workshop participants were introduced to the Progressive Web App ‘shrimpzine’, and discussed its use as an access point to zine-making. This workshop session also focused on editing, encouraging users to think strategically about their images.
We explored the structure and experimentation of the zine form, and how to find our own voices and identities through a zine practice. While continuing to develop your ideas and find your own language in the zine form, this session also focused on sequencing, encouraging participants to think strategically about visual narratives.
We looked at ways to play with the orientation of zines and introduced possibilities of interventions into the pages and structure of zines when printing and assembling. We considered the physical attributes and discussed grain direction, weight, the texture of paper.
We discussed different styles of cover-making strategies – dust jackets, interactive layers, interventions, gatefolds, 2-fold cover, belly bands, colophon page – and the ways in which the zine interior is supported and amplified.
Andreas Laszlo Konrath grew up in the U.K. with a keen interest in skateboarding and music. In 2004 he moved to New York, assisting numerous portrait and fashion photographers while running a small darkroom on Canal Street. From 2008–2018 he collaborated on the independent zine and book press PWP with designer Brian Paul Lamotte. PWP became their foundation to not only help and actively encourage young image-makers to pursue their own ideas, but also to inspire each other in the process. Since the imprint’s inception, 53 unique publications were created. Andreas is a regular visiting artist, class instructor and portfolio critic at inspiring institutions and platforms including the Fashion Institute of Technology, International Center of Photography, Parsons School of Design at The New School, Pratt Institute, Red Hook Labs and the School of Visual Arts, in New York. Andreas is currently the Artist Educator at the museum Dia:Beacon for the Dia Teens program. He is also the co-founder of the zine-making Progressive Web App ‘shrimpzine’.
‘shrimpzine’ is a Progressive Web App developed to help young digital natives to make zines for free on their smartphones. This is intended to be a communal creative tool that takes images that live in the digital sphere and help those using the app to merge them into an object that can be printed out, shared, and exchanged. Intended to promote the art of zine-making and exploring the possibilities of the digital and the physical coming into contact with one another, as well as engaging in public discourse and world-building using the vessel of the zine and printed material as a catalyst to do this work. In a moment where so many are isolated from one another as a product of this ongoing pandemic, shrimpzine exists to consider how to build bridges between people and to break down walls to allow for new and exciting forms of tangibility.