NOVEMBER 15-16, 2025 ONLINE SEMINAR
© 2025, Bil Brown/Brown Artistic Trust
Transform your vision into a tangible object.
HOW TO SHOOT ZINE isn’t nostalgia — it’s a method.
Led by Bil Brown, founder and editor of Black & Grey, this immersive workshop returns to the tactile roots of image-making and independent publishing. Participants explore how underground zines once carried voices, bodies, and ideas that couldn’t exist anywhere else — and how that spirit translates into today’s hybrid art world.
Through close study of Black & Grey’s legacy issues, zine creation, production and adding your archive your “old images” to the mix, you’ll dissect layout, sequence, typography, and tone — then build your own limited-edition zine, from concept to print.
Inside the Lab
Analyze & Deconstruct
Study the Black & Grey archive and the visual codes of 2000s subculture.Design & Collate
Create your own zine layout using both analog and digital techniques.Print & Assemble
Experience the rhythm of DIY production — cut, bind, staple, and finish.Discuss & Archive
Learn strategies for self-distribution, collection placement, and digital preservation.Final Printed Zine: your work, edited and designed, produced in a limited edition run.Career & Distribution Coaching: how to position your zine to galleries, collectors, and publishers.
ADD ON: 1-on-1 Mentorship with Bil Brown
The Source Material — Black & Grey Legacy Issues, modern Zine Layout 2025, and 1990s zine culture
Every HOW TO SHOOT ZINE participant receives digital access to Black & Grey’s Legacy Issues, a three-part archival set chronicling underground aesthetics from the 2000s–2010s. We will look at the original zines from the 1990s brought to life by Bil and his contemporaries and also look at modern zine production in 2025 and beyond by someone who is doing it now!
Print editions are available as a Zine Lab Activation Bundle — a limited set connecting the past to your practice.
Why This Matters
From Warhol’s factory books to Daido Moriyama’s RECORD, zines, fake diaries, and even posters, independent print has always been the avant-garde’s weapon. HOW TO SHOOT ZINE is not just about making a booklet—it’s about authorship, urgency, and creating work that lives beyond the screen.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story can make all the difference.
Live online
Two consecutive days — 3 hours per session
Includes access to PDFs of Black & Grey Legacy Issues, historical zines from
In-Person Add On Available.
A private mentorship experience for artists, photographers, and independent publishers developing their own editorial or zine-based projects.
In this 1:1 format, Bil Brown works directly with you to refine concept, sequence, and authorship — drawing from the Black & Grey legacy and decades of independent publishing practice.
Together, you’ll identify your project’s visual language, editorial intent, and final form — whether it’s a zine, book, or exhibition.
Structure:
Three 90-minute sessions (online) over 4–6 weeks
Personalized feedback on your concept, edit, and design flow
Access to full digital Black & Grey archive for reference
Optional follow-up review of final project (within 30 days of last session)
Bil Brown
The History of Print
Get into the subversive and impactful history of print.
YOUR INSTRUCTOR
“TEACHING MUST BE AN EXPERIENCE TAUGHT BY THOSE WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY.” – BIL BROWN
Whether working in portraiture, fashion, experimental work or diaristic photo essays, Bil Brown’s visionary imagery captures highly energetic moments and extremities of the conscious world, or the foreboding of prescience — of what is to come. Often using his work as a platform for advanced ideas, social-change, and excising historical reference addressing current events, Brown pushes the boundaries of his visual storytelling as a “concrete-poetry” infused with empathy for our current cultural milieu. Bil’s work excels in long-form essays, exhibitions, books and prints exploring a single subject or theme. Maintaining a recognizable voice across all media. Oft an editorial contributor to magazines and periodicals such as FLAUNT, PURPLE FASHION MAGAZINE, AUTRE, INTERVIEW, SCHON DETAILS, PAPER, The Sunday Times (UK), Le Monde (FR), Mala Fronta DNES (CZ), and founding editor and publisher of Black & Grey magazine. Bil also is the founder and president of the creative agency NINESIXTYNINE, and is often a presenter for LEICA AKADAMIE worldwide.
Bil’s still photography has been exhibited in numerous group and solo shows. His 2018 show at the Leica Gallery LA, in conjunction with the estate of the late Jim Marshall, PROTEST, vehemently documented the 2016-2017 protests following the election of an American President. In 2020, during the global pandemic, Bil started a teaching series with Leica Akademie entitled Fragments Toward the History of Photography. In 2021, Bil’s series MYLAR was made into NFTs and held gallery shows at two galleries in Vienna, Austria and now for the first time is at Tamarkin Camera in Chicago July-September, 2025!