Issue One: What Freedom.
hi. so, we released a magazine.
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“I’m seventeen years old and I’ve yet to experience the world for what it really is. There are so many things I haven’t done or figured out, so many places I haven’t seen and feelings I can’t describe and people I haven’t kissed. I feel like in high school, we’re always looking for the best and most likeable versions of ourselves, like the perfect “me” might be lurking around the next corner. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
I wish I could escape. Cut off all my hair, dye it pink, pierce my ears twice, and climb out my bedroom window into the night, where quite literally thousands of worlds and stories are playing out while I’m sitting here in my bedroom typing all of this out in the dark. Maybe it’s just the teenage adolescence talking, but if that’s the case, then I never want to turn twenty. That would take the luster away.”
My best friend wrote that. Her name is Kyla, and she & I are the co-founders of Pure Nowhere, an online (and now print!) magazine. We're two teenagers on opposite sides of the world, sharing an obsessive passion to express inexpressible thoughts and feelings.
Youth is weird, and Pure Nowhere is devoted to it. We want to create media that's raw. Think film, scanned journals, rough poetry, hand-writing, sketches - all accompanied by the most beautiful, heart-aching pieces of writing and photography. That's the vision for our first issue - What Freedom.
Print media is evolving, not dying. This magazine is not a magazine in the traditional sense - it's modelled off of coffee table books, contains no time-sensitive content, and is designed to be something you can keep and treasure. A diary of youth.
This mag was a year-long labour of love. Every contributor was sourced through instagram, and I received hundreds upon hundreds of photos, stacks of poems and tens of articles. Everything included in the final product is heart-aching in its honesty & beauty.
The theme is freedom. To me, freedom is the absolute and pure expression of the self. It’s vulnerability, and sharing the pieces of you that you don’t even understand yet. It’s that constant longing, that disconnect in your soul, a frustrated desperation to break free, even if you’re not sure from what. This issues focuses on growing up, on desperately needing freedom and never feeling like you have enough. On having too much freedom and nowhere to go and nothing to do. Cement pavements, house-lined streets and bedrooms crammed with life. Chasing rooftops and highways and always looking for something more than what we have.
Overall, what I want you to take from this issue is the knowledge that freedom still exists, even when it feels like you’re trapped. And maybe you’ll find it in the mosh pit, out the back of your favourite surf beach, in the last few pages of your journal, the wheels of your skateboard or your best friends laughter at 4am. But I promise, you’ll find it.
The magazine is messy and unscripted and unplanned. It feels like natural light falling through windows, flickering red fluorescent lamps, skin creases and pimples, scabbed knees, wet hair, underwear, crooked teeth, glasses, odd angles and hysterical laughter. It contains photo essays, journal entries, screenshots, short stories, articles, iphone notes, scans, and assortments of fragmented moments. (see a visual preview here!)
click a photo to explore
all the details u need to know:
It ended up at 100-something pages, just under A4 sized, with THICK paper that feels amazing in your hands. It's completely free of advertisements, softcover and perfect-bound, and printed with love on 100% recycled paper in Melbourne, Australia.
She’s been in the works since January of 2018, and currently, we're just days away from finalising the layout, our printer is lined up and ready to go, and we're waiting on the final number to be printed (reliant on pre orders - we’ll get to that in a sec). We’ll have the magazines in our hands by early April, and then I’ll be packing and shipping every order myself, which should take another week. Every order should be shipped out in late April/early May!
how to get ur hands on it:
pre orders are OPEN! click here! pre orders are so important because it gives us a concrete idea on the final number we’ll be printing, and helps us offset the thousands of dollars of upfront printing costs.
I know it’s a bit of an investment - especially for u international babies, shipping kills us - but there’s a thousand things we throw $25 at without blinking an eye. So maybe skip a few iced coffees & instead support independent print, ad-free print, and youth print.
i’m a terrible sales person lol, but I can promise you’ll feel every bit of emotion that went into this project the moment you hold it in your hands.
P.S.
I cannot express how thankful I am, just that you've read all the way through this. This magazine, the evolution of print media, and teenage/youth expression mean absolutely everything to me, and every order gets me a step closer to realising my dream and getting my magazine into the world.
buy it now!
(see a visual preview here)