THE ZINE LAB
NOVEMBER, 2025
Photography after the street. Identity, desire, confrontation. Now print it. Share it.
Transform your vision into a tangible object.
The Zine Lab is a 4-week immersive mentorship online or in person where photography meets authorship. This is not about decoration—it’s about building a statement. Together, we’ll shoot, edit, sequence, and design a zine that reflects your voice and carries it into the world as a physical object.
What You’ll Get
Guided Shooting Sessions: push your photography beyond the “street” into something urgent, personal, and iconic.
Editing & Sequencing Mastery: learn how to shape images into narrative, not just collections.
Book & Zine Design Basics: typography, layout, materiality, and production.
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 History of Print
Get into the subversive and impactful history of print.
The Format
4 Weeks | November 2025 Start
Weekly 1-on-1 mentorship sessions (online or in-person by arrangement).
Personalized critiques + assignment-driven progression.
Studio hours for editing + design guidance.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story can make all the difference.
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. The Zine Lab is not just about making a booklet—it’s about authorship, urgency, and creating work that lives beyond the screen.
Bil Brown
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 Often using his work as a platform for advanced ideas, social-change, and excising historical reference addressing current events, Brown pushes the boundaries of his visual storytelling as a “concrete-poetry” infused with empathy for our current cultural milieu.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!