INQUE

Dan Crowe and Matt Willey launch their new ad-free, hybrid magazine

Mock INQUE cover, photograph by Jack Davison

Port Magazine founders Dan Crowe and Matt Willey – Granta book editor and former art director of The New York Times Magazine respectively – today launch their new magazine, INQUE. The large-format (350mm x 280mm), ad-free title will commission and publish new writing from across the world, alongside extraordinary art, design and photography. Over the coming decade there will be a limited print run of ten issues, each year, and then a hard stop

Mock INQUE spread, photograph by Jack Davison

The launch issue is already set to feature a range of voices, including Tom Waits, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Brian Eno, Ben Lerner, Joyce Carol Oates, Tilda Swinton, Werner Herzog and Ocean Vuong, among others. In addition to original artworks by leading artists and photographers available in special issues – with photographers Jack Davison and Christopher Anderson contributing to the launch – American author Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude; Motherless Brooklyn) will write a new novel over the course of INQUE’s lifespan, one chapter per issue.

Mock INQUE spread, photograph by Christopher Anderson

“It is a ten-year creative document,” notes Crowe, “set to the rhythm of its time, showcasing new talent alongside living icons and commenting on what will be an extraordinary decade. Although magazine sales have dwindled, it’s not because the audience has disappeared: it’s because authentic publications have. Not featuring any advertising is a bold move, but the creative freedom will allow us to make a magazine exactly as we want it, and will be central to our identity.”

INQUE’s editorial board, with the remit to be “creatively groundbreaking”, is comprised of Pulitzer-winning New York Times writer Wesley Morris; acclaimed author Hanif Kureishi; the award-winning publishing director of Hamish Hamilton and Penguin Books, Simon Prosser; and visionary publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove, head of Dialogue Books in the UK.

Mock INQUE spread, Illustration by Mike McQuade

INQUE’s premier issue campaign was launched on Kickstarter earlier this week. 

inquemag.com

To Be Precise

Celebrated landscape and portrait photographer Nadav Kander reflects on his very first camera, a Pentax Spotmatic F

When I was young there was a walk-in cupboard in my house that smelt of the leather cases of equipment stored there… various mechanical things such as movie cameras owned by my grandfather. I would go in, wind the cameras up and listen to them whirl in the dark; I must have been eight years old. To this day the smell of leather still reminds me of machines and quality.

I was 12 when I caught a bus to a store called Dion in Johannesburg. I looked at the cameras and started saving, and a year later returned to buy a Pentax Spotmatic F, the last camera to use a screw-in lens rather than a bayonet. I also bought extension tubes, which are used between the lens and the camera body to get extremely close to things. My first pictures were of dead flies on a windowsill. It was 1974.

I didn’t stay with the Pentax but I see a thread that runs through my work, from those early fly pictures to the present. I’ve always liked to look into things, to show things not easily seen with the eye, or that are not easily noticed – things photographed beautifully that are difficult or hard to look at. I take pictures of vulnerability, terror, love, horror – never of people smiling; I like to look at what is underneath.

This camera is still in perfect condition. I loved it as an object, the clicks it made and the feeling of focusing the lens. I loved its precision, and it’s that that led me into photography – not the need to make pictures, but the need to use an instrument with great precision.

As told to Dan Crowe

Photography Suzie Howell

Find out Port’s favourite digital SLRs here

 
This is an extract from issue 22 of Port. To buy or subscribe, click here.