Brownie #2
Brownie is a satisfyingly chunky photography magazine from China which has just arrived at the magCulture Shop. The issue concerns ‘The Photography of Everyday Life’ and features plenty of beautifully presented images. But it’s the one story that uses illustration that caught my attention.
There’s plenty of still life work, a witty amalgamation of hair braiding and bread baking by a Taiwanese woman in the hope of overcoming homesickess, and plenty of investigations of the everyday and mundane. It’s a staccato, pacy selection of images and stories.
But the highlight for me is a piece about Ordinary magazine, the Dutch title that takes an object each issue and asks photographers to interpret it. As well as plenty of that mag’s garishly bright images, there’s a brief interview with the man behind the mag, Max Siedentopf. Produced as a tipped-in leaflet, a series of typewritten questions are answered by Siedentopf in pencil drawings.
The answers are charmingly amusing in their own right, but the contrariness of the sketchily drawn answers in a magazine of photography is a perfect reflection of the attitude of Siedentopf’s publication.
Editor-in-chief and designer: Nelson Ng