The first in a series of zines that started more from the need to preserve my photographs than from having a clear idea of what a publication should be. At the time, I was only beginning to understand what photography could mean to me and how I wanted to use it.

The A4, self-published zine format has always felt strangely familiar to me. In a way, it has been present throughout my entire life — from the magazines and newspapers my parents used to have at home, to BRAVO Sport that I would read as a kid. There has always been something special to me about printed pages, the feeling of holding something that exists physically and can stay with you.

I made this first zine in the middle of the pandemic, when I was sixteen years old and desperately looking for some form of connection with other people. Publishing it became much more than simply putting my photographs on paper. It gave me a reason to share something, to reach people and to create a connection at a time when real-life contact had suddenly become so limited.

Looking back, I realise that releasing this first zine started something much bigger than I could have imagined at sixteen. It became a tradition that I have continued every year since. My hope is that when I am sixty, I will be able to sit down, take these publications off a shelf and slowly look through forty years of my life — not just through the photographs, but through the person I was when I made them.

Instead of treating photographs as individual images, I started thinking about them as fragments of a bigger story. This zine is a record of the beginning — my first experiments, fascinations, and my first attempt at consciously translating photography into a physical form.