Printed Matters: Point.51

By Sara Bellini 

The 51st parallel north is the point where continental Europe and the UK meet, halfway between Dover and Calais in the English Channel. This meeting point also inspired the name of Point.51, a London-based magazine of slow journalism and documentary photography.

The look is simple and effective: a red matte cover, a full-page portrait, one word that identifies the theme of the issue and a phrase to invite you in. The content requires time, a comfortable armchair and a cup of tea: Don’t flip through the pages, linger, take everything in. This is what I immediately loved about this new publication, the slow and in-depth approach to stories, narrated equally through words and images. 

We all consume the news, or more often than not, news headlines, and their abundance and speed detach us from the content and from the people the headlines are about. Point.51 gives you the opportunity to explore significant news topics through personal stories, focusing on ordinary people and how they relate to the bigger narratives of our multi-layered present. It gives you time to empathise, reflect and form an informed opinion, which is crucial in shaping contemporary conversations.

Issue 4 will hit the shelves in May, and meanwhile we caught up with editor Rob Pinney:

What was the inspiration behind Point.51 and what drives you?

We wanted to do something that gave us the space and time to really dig into complex stories – both in the writing and in the photography – without having to strip them down. We want to work on stories that challenge us, and challenge our readers, and I think that curiosity is really what drives Point.51 forward. 

Why did you choose the print magazine as a format?

I think we knew that Point.51 was going to be a print magazine from the outset. In fact, I don't think I can remember us having a conversation about the possibility of doing it any other way. But as we've grown, I think it's now clearer than ever that print is the right format for us.

I like to think about it by flipping the question on its head: how would we want to read these stories? For me, it is undoubtedly in print. I want to sit with them and read them through, following the story as it unfolds, without distractions.

Point.51 comes out twice a year, and so the stories we work on for the magazine are usually put together over fairly long periods of time. They're designed to last – we want them to feel just as relevant in five years time as they do today – and there's a permanence to pulling them together in a printed magazine that reflects that.

Then it's also important for the photography. My background is as a photographer, and we pride ourselves on commissioning and publishing really great documentary photography that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with our journalism. There are 102 images in our latest issue, and without wanting to sound too old fashioned, I think that work really is at its best when seen in print.

At the core of your magazine are a strong sense of place and a genuine interest in people, what’s the relationship between these two elements?

Definitely. Both people and place are essential to the stories we work on. But they come up in different ways, and I think the relationship between them changes from story to story.

People are at the forefront of all of our stories – that has been a constant throughout. But place comes up in different ways. To give a couple of examples: there is a story in our first issue about Cuban asylum seekers arriving in Serbia to make use of visa-free entry for Cuban passport holders, which exists as a legacy of the Cold War. In that case, place plays a very specific and explicit role in the story. Then there's a story in our second issue about Port Talbot, an industrial town in north Wales known for steel production. When the steelworks opened there in the 1950s, it employed 18,000 people – literally half the town – but today that number has fallen to just 4,000. At the centre of the story are multiple generations of a family with a long-standing connection to the steelworks, and you get to see how those different generations – with different experiences – relate to their town. Bringing those different perspectives into our stories is really important.

So I don't think you can say that there's a fixed or static relationship between people and place in the magazine, but the stories are definitely concerned with the way the two inform and shape each other.

How has Point.51 changed since Issue 1 and what are your plans for Issue 4?

When we started out, lots of friends and colleagues thought we were crazy trying to start a print magazine for long-form journalism and documentary photography when other publications were disappearing left, right, and centre. They were probably right – it's certainly not easy. But we've seen the magazine go from being just an idea to an established title with a solid and growing reputation.

Issue 4 is well underway, and should hit the shelves in May. The theme for the next issue is Nations and Nationalism, but as with all of our issues, we're coming at it from a variety of angles – from the story of a "micronation" in Italy to the relationship between people living in Gibraltar and La Linea de Concepción, the towns on either side of the border.

The team of people working on Point.51 has also grown – Nick, Sara, and Meg have joined us, and their knowledge and hard work is already showing. So yes, there have been lots of changes.

But I also think that, in a fairly fundamental way, it hasn't changed at all. We had a very clear idea of what we wanted Point.51 to be when we started it: a straightforward magazine for considered long-form journalism and original photography. I think we've stuck to that pretty doggedly, and I think it's what a lot of our readers really like about it.

Can you tell us a bit more about the concept of little story/big story behind Point.51?

Yes certainly! "Big story/little story" is an approach we use when working on stories for Point.51. We can't claim it as an original concept – it has been put to use (and written about) widely – but it's something we try to put into practice wherever possible.

Essentially it comes down to the choice between doing something that is wide but shallow or narrow but deep, and deciding where you think the real value is. The stories we like to work on for Point.51 are usually concerned with pretty big topics: we've reported stories about migration and asylum, the climate crisis, mental health, Brexit, and the Irish border, to name a few. But in each case we're zooming right in to tell a smaller story within that, concentrating on just a few individuals, or a single place, or maybe both.

The small stories are the ones we can really relate to, and that stay with us. And I think that if you tell the small story really well – bringing in all the detail and complexity that exists in real life, and which often gets cut out – then you're also providing a much richer perspective on the big story too.

We're not trying to tell readers what to think or to persuade them to see something in a particular way. We want to bring people great stories that are told thoroughly and faithfully, but ultimately it's for them to engage with them on their own terms.

As usual, Berliners can find Point.51 at do you read me?!? and Rosa Wolf. Check out the website for online shopping and a free newsletter with more articles and photography.

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Parenthesis in Time: Journal entry from a road trip in northern Chile

By James Kelly:

Down in the valley, among the verdure, the landscape seems still, immobilised in time. Giant slopes of sterile rock bear down from above, arid, expectant in an epochal wait for rain. Yet carved between the high walls, the valley floor, with its regular crops of alfalfa and corn, is of a different time. The boulders and pebbles that lie scattered across the riverbed stand at rest, a temporary pause on their journey down from the Andean highlands to the sea. These petrified fragments of an immense telluric memory are testament to the youthful vigour of the mountains that bore them, the wave of rock that surged up from the Pacific Ocean to form the Andes.

Some of the stones, no doubt, have siblings way up there, up where the air is thin and fresh, where the snow-capped volcanoes of Isluga and Guallatiri attract giant storm clouds with their magnetic pull. Some of the rocks would have been present in the immense columns of burning ash and debris thrust skywards from the bowels of the Earth to hang suspended in the air by great updrafts of igneous gas, before collapsing in devastating waves that ripped down the mountain slopes with force enough to bury a small country under the volcanic rubble. 

And it’s there, up in that other world, in the heart of Cerro Anocarire, that the river begins, the same river whose flows have sculpted the valley and its hillsides. It’s there that the source of the water can be found, the water that washes gently over the pebbles, polishing and massaging them, conveying their sediments on towards the ocean, the same water whose minerals now nourish the transience of these sun-kissed plantations, day after day, year after year.

15:25, 9 January 2018. Camarones Valley, Arica and Parinacota Region, Northern Chile.

***

James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. His work explores interactions between different timescales, from the human to the geological, and what we can learn from the cosmovisions of other peoples in our relationships with the land. More of his work can be found at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Five Questions for... Vanessa Berry

Interview by Sara Bellini:

We love zines, maps, psychogeography and archives, which is why we really wanted to speak to Vanessa Berry. She started making zines in the 1990s and is the creator of the long-running Disposable Camera, the last issue of which was published a few days ago. Besides making zines Vanessa writes a psychogeography blog Mirror Sydney, exploring “the marginal places and details of the city of Sydney” and in 2017 she also published a collection of essays and hand-drawn maps with the omonimous title.

Vanessa’s work is equally autobiographical and historical, exploring her personal relationship with place and memory as well as the stories that belong to a specific place. In the case of Australia where the pre-colonial memory of the island has been highly disregarded, Vanessa always writes “with acknowledgement of the Aboriginal lands”, reminding us that we should always be respectful of spaces that we share with others and that many others before us have respectfully preserved.

Vanessa’s newest project is a book of essays on place, memory and relationships with animals and the 20th anniversary issue of her other zine I am a Camera.

What does home mean to you?

My connection to the physical environment is strong and deeply-felt and always has been. I attribute this to being a quiet and introspective person, an observer who has always felt a kinship with the environment around me - its objects, creatures, details, changes, daily rhythms - as much as with other people. I do a lot of work at home, in a small and cluttered room amid piles of books and papers, and this is probably where I feel most at home. Although writing is also a kind of home for me, if you see me with a notebook open and I'm writing in it, know that this is when I feel most connected with the world. Perhaps that's what home means to me: feeling connected to where I am, wherever that be.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

My mental map of Sydney is made up of many such places I feel a special connection to. Generally they fall under the categories of anomalies, places of respite and places of solace. In the latter category there's a particular headland overlooking the Pacific Ocean that I go to at times of significance or difficulty. The city's eastern edge is a long stretch of coastline, scalloped into bays and beaches between sandstone cliffs. The approach to this particular headland is a stretch of parkland which rises up to a rocky outcrop. I sit on the grass and watch the magpies which patrol it. A group of them live here, and whenever I am there I see them moving across the lawn, heads cocked, listening for insects under the soil. One time, when I was sitting on the rocks, they assembled in front of me and all started singing, which felt like a gift from them and from this place, which never fails to make my spirit feel lighter.

What is beyond your front door?

Having lived in the same house for almost a decade, this scene is now permanently established in my mind's eye and I could describe it to the utmost detail, however I will keep it brief: a low brick fence with a crooked front gate made of wrought iron shaped into hearts and curls. Beyond this, lining the street, is a row of native fig trees. Directly across from the house is an olive-green metal box a few metres long which I like to imagine holds the street's secrets, but is actually an electricity substation. At the corner of the yard is a hibiscus tree which is often in flower. People like to pick them as they walk past and I don't have the heart to tell them that once you do, the flowers close up very quickly.

What are you reading / watching / listening to / looking at right now?

I am writing this answer on a plane which is flying over a scene below where the land meets the sea in an outline of bays and rivers, and the sun has dispersed to an orange glow on the horizon. I'm listening to the new Gwenno album, Le Kov. Tucked into the seat pocket in front of me is How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee and an issue of Elementum. My watching, for now, is all out the oval frame of the plane window, thinking about the ocean below, the atmosphere above, and how it feels to be suspended in between.

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In Profile: Edgework – Journal & Store

TJENTISTE – Andy Day

Here at Elsewhere we have long been proud of our collaboration with Edgework, an artist-led, cross-disciplinary journal and online store with a focus on place founded by the artist (and Elsewhere contributor) Layla Curtis. The journal gives space for artists and professionals from a range of disciplines and allows them to give readers an insight into their extended research, fieldwork and working methods. The online store then promotes their work, specialising in editional artworks on paper, publications, posters, postcards and also the work of independent publishers who share their ethos and emphasis on place… including us!

WORLD POLITICAL (Detail) – Layla Curtis

‘Edgework contributors take risks; conduct deep explorations of our cities' overlooked, forgotten and forbidden spaces; misuse, reclaim or appropriate architecture; test the boundaries of access; subvert surveillance technologies and pick apart cartography. They explore the margins of our urban spaces examining how we inhabit them, move through them and establish a sense of place. They are overland wanderers or remote viewers who reflect upon our relationship with nature and landscape.’ – Layla Curtis, founder of Edgework

Artists whose editioned work can be found in the Edgework online shop include Susan Collins, Layla Curtis, Andy Day, Alec Finlay, Joy Gerrard, Lucinda Grange, Graham Gussin, Nicky Hirst, Lee Maelzer, Simon Woolham and George Shaw, and over the coming months we will be profiling them here on the Elsewhere blog. At the same time, we would encourage our readers to explore the different posts, essays and articles on the Edgework journal pages. Recent articles we have enjoyed include ‘The Walking Library for a Wild City’ by Dee Heddon & Misha Myers, and ‘Mapping the Wild City, Fiadh-Bhaile, Orasul Salbatic’ by Alec Finlay.

PROTEST CROWD (NO BREXIT PEOPLE’S VOTE MARCH PARLIAMENT SQUARE, LONDON, 2018) – Joy Gerrard

Another aspect of the project that we have especially enjoyed over recent months is the series of Instagram Takeovers on the Edgework feed. Here, they have invited artists to post images onto the Edgework account over a period of time, highlighting a specific project or body of work and it is well worth checking out. We are really looking forward to showcasing the talents of the artists involved in the Edgework project, and we especially like the opportunity that Edgework offers to connect directly with artists, purchase their work and support what they do.

Edgework artists whose work appears in this post:
Andy Day
Layla Curtis
Joy Gerrard