It's Photo Zine time at Hastings High School!
Yesterday, Photo Club members met to begin organizing, curating, and preparing the biannual printed magazine built on photos and captions.
The Zine, which comes from the word “magazine", follows the style of magazines with photographs put on a grid. Completely student-made, the zine is a visual storytelling tool that tells Hastings’ stories from the student perspective, with the details of just a single frame carrying personal and universal meaning.
Photo Club Advisor and High School Photography Teacher Cory Merchant created the Photo Zine project a few years ago and ever since, has been amazed at the dedication and passion of the students involved.
“The kids really took it over,” Merchant said. “The project is completely student-led and facilitated.”
The process for creating the Zine includes brainstorming themes and topics, voting on the top three, capturing photographs that relate to those themes, and working with the thumbnails of the images to lay them into a digital format. Once finalized, the digital copy is sent to print in-house and copies are distributed to students and staff throughout the high school.
“This year we opened the suggestion box for themes to all classes,” said Merchant. “There were 40 themes and from that 40, students landed on the three that they would focus the Zine on.”
The selected themes were:
- PEOPLE
- DREAMS & NIGHTMARES
- REFLECTIONS
Each theme can be interpreted in a different way. That's where students are free to explore their imaginations and be creative.
The Photo Zine is just one project that students in Photo Club work on each year. In the past, they've done charity work through Help Portrait and gone on field trips to the annual Photo Expo and the New York Botanical Gardens. They even host fundraisers at school events such as Homecoming and the Relay for Life.
Look for their booths at local town and school events and stay tuned for the Photo Zine which will be available to all students and staff in the coming weeks.
