So I’d been wanting to make a Zine of my photography for a good few years.
I pretty much carry around a 35mm film camera with me at all times (camera of choice right now is an old 90’s Olympus Mju that I picked up on eBay for less than £20) and take photos of things I find funny or obscure as well as the good times with my friends around London and my trips to Europe. I normally drop in a bunch of like 15-20 films for Develop & Scan-to-Disk at my local photo shop every 3 to 6 months. I’ve been doing this for over 4 years. That’s a LOT of photos I’ve been sitting on and doing nothing much with!
I wanted to make a Zine that wasn’t necessarily bound or stapled together. I used to hate having to destroy a magazine or book to take an image out that I liked to hang on my wall. So the idea was have a collection of loose photographs packaged in a way which would mean you’d be free to pick and choose the images you’d like to hang, frame or even give to your friends. It was just how best to package them that was making me scratch my head.
I had seen a video post by my friend Tadej on Instagram ( @585zines ) of a Zine he’d made using a collection of loose 6’x4′ photographs in a VHS cassette box with a photocopied sleeve cover… Genius! But I didn’t want to rip him off, that would not be cool. But it didn’t take too long before I saw a bunch of school kids coming out of a pizza take-away shop with these individual mini pizza boxes and the idea was born.
I made a call to my good friend Stu Smith who owns Lovenskate about the possibility of him being able to screen-print my own design on mini pizza boxes and making a small run of Pizza’ Zines. He’s was super stoked to help me out and we even came up with the idea of a little pizza-pun sticker pack to go with it! I had already come up with the name GET STUFFED! as my nickname is The Girl of Stuff, it was going to be in a pizza box… so it just kinda worked.
Next phone call was to Bryce at Parlour Skate Store. I proposed the idea of having a launch party for the Pizza’ Zine and a photography exhibition of my work. Again, super stoked and wanting to help out, he offered me the gallery space in the back of their Hackney Road store in Shoreditch. We set the date and then I had just over two months to get the Zine and photo show ready. It was a lot of work, but luckily I had great help from knowledgable friends and financial support from my family too.
The 23rd of July soon came around and we were ready to finally open the doors and reveal all….
It was epic! I literally couldn’t believe the amount of people that came down to look at my photography work and to purchase a copy of GET STUFFED! Pizza’ Zine. There was free booze and pizza (of course!), Bryce and Kev provided the music and we ended turning the lights off and the gallery became a dance floor.
Gotta give H-U-G-E shout out’s to Stu for his printing skills, Bryce for letting me take-over the ‘Parlour Presents’ Gallery for a week, Pato for helping me hang my show, Lars for flying over from Germany to be there with me and to everyone who shared the love, came down, supported me and partied hard!!!
I still have a couple of copies of GET STUFFED! left… They’re £12 (and that’s including the P&P charges) via PayPal. Contact me: thegirlofstuff@gmail.com
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