PDN - March 2012

MAGAZINE MAVENS

point Self Service was much smaller than it is now and there were only five of us in
the office, so I really got a sense of what it is to publish an independent magazine
and it made it seem possible because it wasn’t a huge operation.”
The two decided they wanted to create a magazine that would combine all the
things they love about different magazines: beautiful images like you’d find in art
magazines and interesting fiction like you’d find in literary journals. They also didn’t
want to be limited by any themes or narrow reader demographics.

“One of the tenets of the magazine is trying to not set any restrictions,” she says.
“So we’ve had some projects where we specifically commissioned people to do a
piece for that project around a theme, but we don’t ever have a theme for the issue.”
They originally thought of producing a simple ‘zine that
would cover art, fashion, culture and literature, but it later
evolved into the bi-annual journal Dossier when Parrott real-
ized they needed a publication that was on par with the unpaid
photography and writing they had commissioned. Parrott says,
“We got back these incredible submissions from these incred-
ible people and we just felt like we needed to produce some-
thing that lived up to their work.”
To help lay out and design the magazine, Parrott asked
Katariina Lamberg, a designer she had worked with at Self
Service, to be the magazine’s first art director. Issue 1 came
in at 150 pages, perfect bound and printed on heavy, glossy
paper stock.

Parrott ended up looking at the mastheads of other magazines to find a distributor and printer, eventually contacting them via e-mail. Though she and Krause had a business plan, much of the money that paid for the first issue ended up coming from themselves, friends and family (they ended up raising close to $50,000, which helped cover the printing costs for the first couple issues). The magazine launched in May 2008, right before the economic downturn, which Parrott says had a huge impact on their advertising model. Until very recently, a majority of the ads came from small, independent clothing,

This page, left: Parrott gave artist Hisham Akira
Bharoocha the opportunity to photograph and collage a
fashion story in Issue 8. This page, below: A Dossier layout
featuring work by Sam Falls. Opposite, left: Two layouts
from 43 that demonstrate Ying’s minimalist esthetic for
the magazine. Opposite, right: Ying included a group of
photos from Brendan Klein’s pool skating series.

accessory, jewelry and art brands, instead of big consumer brands. Parrott says, “It took us a little while to figure out how we were going to continue printing the magazine.” To save money, the magazine doesn’t have an office or a full-time staff. Instead, the now six-person team considers Dossier a side project and no one expects the magazine to pay the bills. But the tradeoff for Parrott is the opportunity to work with other photographers—something she rarely gets to do as a photographer. Dossier has featured portfolios by Stephen Shore, Asako Narahashi and Sam Falls, and count David Armstrong, Nan Goldin (who Parrott worked for as a studio manager in Paris) and Jack Pierson amongst their past contributors. Parrott also contributes to the magazine, but always limits her contribution to one fashion feature, preferring to give other artists the opportunity to do something outside of their milieu, such as featuring a fashion shoot by the artist Hisham Akira Bharoocha in which he created a collage over the images or a portfolio of temporary tattoos curated by the jewelry designer Pamela Love.

Parrott has also gotten into curating and put together a photography exhibit at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2010, which she believes wouldn’t have been possible without her experience working on Dossier.

Her advice to photographers who want to launch their own magazine: Start small. “Our first issue was 150 pages; we printed 7,500 copies,” she explains. “You kind of have to keep going that big and, if I had it to do again, I would probably start a little smaller so that I had a little more space to play with.”