Every year or so Pau Wau Publications releases a zine packet called Muses. Muses comes with five zines of from five artists who each focus on one person who’ll look good in photographs. The zines are foldy zines, which is immensely practical because they fold out with one big image on the underside, so you get to decide whether you want the booklets to stay booklets or if you want to stretch them out and display them as posters.
Muses Volume 4 came out earlier this year. It matches the aesthetic of previous additions – a little bit punk and a little bit artsy. Lasse Dearman from Denmark took pictures of Frede, passed out on concrete or sitting with bad postured on a couch. There are 8 shots of Frede in this small zine, and Dearman succeeds in making each grimy shot different enough to earn a page.
Charlie Engman photographs his mom who looks like a weathered artist. Agnes Thor takes pictures of Manna as she stumbles through grass or takes a bath. There’re cuts, and skin, and backyards throughout the collections, and it makes for a great sampling to get into some good photographers. Although, if you’re interested in something like this, make sure to price hunt. It costs $50 on Pau Wau’s website, but other zine stores like Art Metropole have it online for $25. It’s still pricy, but Pau Wau assembles their work buy hand and makes sure it’s all made with fancy materials.
Colin Brush is the Fiction Editor at Broken Pencil Magazine.