Zining the past

I have several shoeboxes full of photos, letters, cards and the like that I've kept for nearly my entire life.

The letters and cards all were given to me, including birthday cards beginning at age six (I was given five of the same card, clearly the only option at Woolies), melodramatic break-up letters from my mid-20s, and the many letters my mum has written me since I moved states more than 20 years ago.

The photos, on the other hand, were taken with my camera, mostly by me, up until I bought my first digital camera in the early 2000s (after that point I have made virtually no prints). There are packets upon packats of one-hour photos complete with the strips of negatives.

Many of these I took with my beloved Olympus Mju-II, the sleek little automatic point-and-click film camera that apparently these days is quite collectible. I gave mine away only a few years ago to FilmNeverDie because the seals were dead. I hope they were able to fix it.

All of the better photos made it into albums years ago (I still have those too). The rest are blurry, double-exposed and otherwise objectively terrible photos. Most of these were taken during the late 1990s which for me and my friends was a time low on sobriety and high on boredom.

I don't know why I was keeping them, other than the fact I couldn't throw them out. Not that long ago I started sorting them so that I could throw at least some out. All I did was put them all back in their packets and scribble labels on the front.

But recently I was inspired by Nash's Thin Slice micro zine which uses small, close-cropped photos captioned with poetry (Nash's itch.io page has lots of other good zine things, have a look!). I loved the idea of cropping details from photos and collaging them into something or other. It made me want to go back to the shoebox.

This is how I ended up making my 1990s, a little zine printed on A4, cut and glued so it concertinas out into 24 captioned images.

The images are memories and nonsense, in no particular order, from sharehouses and outings. I felt no mental barrier to chopping up some of my favourites, and it feels good to have made the zine, almost like a light form of therapy.

I decided to go full colour which works out to $3 printing cost per zine, plus the money I wasted getting confused about double-sided photocopying at the library. If I was more spatially on the ball I could just print the image side in colour, leaving the front and back pages in black and white, but who knows how many more expensive stuff-ups I'd make along the way?

The result is that I've only made three copies for the moment. One I have promised to a friend in a zine swap, one I'll keep and the other I don't know yet. I need more, not least so I can drop some off at Sticky Institute.

This project gives me hope for my other boxes of personal history. Those five For a Girl Who's 6 birthday cards are in trouble.