Here's a Copy of Jiazazhi, the "Fake Magazine" That's All About Independent Photo Publishing | 100 People With Ideas

In February 2017, Jiazazhi opened a real, physical bookstore in Ningbo's Jiangbei District.

Yan You had just come back to Ningbo from Young Art Taipei. All 50 of the Jiazazhi photobooks he took to the fair sold out. But what he really brought home was the work of several young Taiwanese photographers — among them Wang Zun, who used a large-format camera to shoot a series on shuttered Taiwanese sugar refineries. Those mills, a pillar industry since the Japanese colonial period, are mostly ruins now. "It broke my impression that Taiwanese photography had no one coming up behind," he said.

Two years earlier, at the Hong Kong photobook fair, Yan You had "set up a stall" at an international art book fair for the first time. In the booth next door sat Yasunori Hoki, founder of the Japanese independent publisher Super Labo. Tired of Tokyo's pace, Hoki had moved his home and his work to Kamakura; once a week he took the hour-long Shinkansen into Tokyo, met artists and designers at Starbucks to hash out the details of a book in progress, then rode an hour back.

"He handles everything himself, from editing to design, and only gets his wife to help when he's swamped," Yan You wrote of that meeting in the magazine China Photography (《中国摄影》). Jiazazhi, itself a team of five, had likewise "fled" Beijing for its hometown of Ningbo. Independent publishers like these gather at art book fairs large and small around the world, work their booths, sell books, meet buyers they have never met, and turn up new young artists — any one of whom might make the next book for the next person who walks up to the table.

Counting from June 2011, when it made Obsessed with photographer Sun Yanchu, Jiazazhi is now in its seventh year. It designs and produces limited-edition photobooks to order for photographers. On April 8, the 19th title in the Jiazazhi Publishing Program, Time From Different Sources: Images from Ciman Village (《来源不同的时间：来自茨满村的图像》), got a preview event at the Jiazazhi Photography Library in Ningbo. By the standards of design and binding, the sample copy is hard to call a book at all — held together by a spiral coil, it reads more like a field notebook of anthropological jottings. Open it and you find long foldouts, small booklets, maps, collaged documents… This wildly imaginative paper object keeps interrupting the reader, forcing pauses, making you wonder what exactly is going on here.

This was not Jiazazhi's first try at such an odd-shaped kind of publishing. In 2015, Double Happiness (《双喜》) — made with French photographer Thomas Sauvin, and No. 12 in the Jiazazhi Publishing Program — came packed inside real Double Happiness cigarette boxes.

Sauvin, who had lived in Beijing for more than a decade, collected some 850,000 discarded negatives from a dump on the Fifth Ring Road, at 28 yuan a kilogram. Like X-ray film and discs, the negatives sat at one end of the recycling trade: waste containing silver nitrate, which after chemical processing yields silver that is sold to laboratories. In this huge "silver mine," Sauvin found more than twenty years — 1985 to 2005 — of daily life in ordinary Beijing households.

Double Happiness is Sauvin's rework of the "Beijing Silvermine" series, narrowed to one particular scene: the wedding. Cigarettes play a distinctive part at Chinese weddings. The bride is usually expected to offer them to guests, and the couple is teased and put through crude but "wildly imaginative" cigarette games the guests invent. In one photo, a plastic bottle stuck full of lit cigarettes is a prop someone improvised at the banquet.

Jiazazhi settled on a size of 81 millimeters by 53, packed inside real Double Happiness boxes. Yan You had first planned to have the boxes custom-made, but no printing plant would take the job — they suspected he was counterfeiting cigarettes. In the end Jiazazhi ran a crowdfunding campaign online, "cigarettes for a book," asking backers to send in 150 full cartons of hard-pack Double Happiness; each backer got one "pack" of Double Happiness, bound and complete.

Open the box and the title page reads, in red, "Until Death Do Us Part"; the pages inside freeze strangers in mid-laugh. "We thought about using Zhonghua or something, but that's too expensive — we couldn't afford it," Yan You said, laughing. Collecting Zhonghua boxes would have been a real test of the production budget, and Double Happiness fit the project better anyway: it is the cheap brand ordinary people actually smoke.

Rewind more than a decade, to 2006, when Yan You was working at a Beijing magazine called Fresh Oxygen (《鲜氧》). He later started a blog on art and design called On the Construction, which planted the idea of making a magazine and became the forerunner of the Jiazazhi blog.

At the 2012 Caochangdi photo festival, Yan You put on the "Jiazazhi and Chinese Independent Photobook Exhibition." That same year, City Pictorial (《城市画报》) ran a feature titled "Private Reading Power: China's Booklets," on the wave of independent publishers that Jiazazhi, Lianbang Zouma, Po Xiansheng and Amiba represented, describing them as "using the internet as a medium, licking at the cracks that dryness has split open in the domestic publishing market." Five years on, the Jiazazhi Publishing Program has reached its 19th book, and along with Lianbang Zouma, Po Xiansheng and Xiangjiaoyu it has become one of the established labels in Chinese independent publishing. Amiba, which had planned to shoot a documentary called China's Booklets, ran aground in 2013.

In 2014, Yan You's child was born and Jiazazhi left Beijing for Ningbo. Asked about the move at the time, Yan You said the plan was to keep the main base in Beijing for bookmaking, design, editing, launch events and promotion, "while Ningbo is more like a sales center — put crudely, it's basically the shipping room," since Ningbo's port made it easier to send books abroad. Now, with production costs in Beijing up, the books are printed in Ningbo too, and Yan You still has to watch how each sample copy comes out, and how far it still falls short of what he wants.

This February, Jiazazhi opened a real, physical bookstore in Ningbo's Jiangbei District. The first floor holds the shop and an exhibition space; the second floor holds a studio and a library of photobooks and magazines collected from around the world.

Time From Different Sources: Images from Ciman Village is the work of photographer Cheng Xinhao, his second book with Jiazazhi. In Naming a River (《对一条河流的命名》), from June 2016, Cheng made a sampling survey of the Panlong, the mother river of Kunming, in Yunnan. The whole book is one continuous foldout: one side a scattered-perspective landscape of the riverbanks, the other side "fragments" tied to the river — people met at some particular place and moment along its banks, hundreds of millions of years of change recorded in rock, and so on.

Ciman Village, the subject this time, sits outside Lijiang in Yunnan, only three kilometers from the edge of the city, and is relatively well-off. As Lijiang's tourism boomed and the city spread outward in recent years, the expectation of being urbanized spread through the whole village. People grew restless over every rumor, waiting for the day the city would take them in; some laid careful plans for farm-stay and folk-custom tourism. Then, suddenly, a bridge "vaulted" straight over the village, abandoning the place that had been hurrying to catch up.

At the center of one of Cheng Xinhao's photographs stands a tree, wrapped around a disused road, with the brand-new national highway running above it. At the April 8 event, the photographer — who holds a doctorate in chemistry from Peking University — talked about how the project twisted and turned: how eagerly he had set out surveying with the field methods of sociology, and how he stalled on a question he could not get around, "why not just make a documentary instead," and "what can still photography actually carry." The audience included people from the photography world, a developer there to support the opening of the creative-industry park that houses the photography library, students from Ningbo University — its Jiangbei campus is four kilometers away — and residents from nearby who wheeled in strollers, everyone passing around the strange-looking sample copy.

After the talk, Cheng Xinhao and Yan You went on arguing about the cover, which was still undecided; the print run, 800 copies, had been fixed long before. The previous book, Naming a River, printed 500 and sold out in four months. In an essay titled "Why I Make Jiazazhi," Yan You wrote about selling books: "A lot of people assume my books only sell because friends support me. What they don't realize is that for several titles we put out last year, the number sold abroad came close to the number sold at home." A normal print run is 500, which Yan You breaks down roughly as 150 to online stores in China, 150 to online stores abroad, 50 for book fairs, and 150 to bookstores abroad.

"I hope the Jiazazhi Publishing Program isn't just my own personal project — I hope it can serve China's best young photography artists and give them a platform," Yan You said. That platform is taking shape. Photographers who once spoke only in images long ago began using words as well, to express, to explain, to work through what puzzles them.

In 2014, Yan You worked with VICE on a series called "Documenting China," talking with four photographers. Zhang Kechun, who between 2010 and 2013 followed the Yellow River west from its mouth at Dongying toward its source, explained the story behind the Buddha head in open country that he chose for the cover of his photobook The Yellow River (《北流活活》). Behind the head is Helan Mountain, where a local coal-mine boss built a temple and later took vows and became its abbot. Coal mines large and small cover the other side of the mountain, and the mine bosses together donated a Buddha statue. The huge head in the photograph came out flawed in the casting and was dumped beside the pit.

Yang Yuanyuan made Ten Days in Kraków (《在克拉科夫的十日》) with Jiazazhi. Yan You also talked with her about another series, on Pyongyang. On the city's streets, in its restaurants, on decorative walls and the backdrops of news broadcasts — everywhere advertisements or other images "ought" to be — two kinds of image take the space instead: the leader, and scenery standing for the "perfect city."

In a commercial society, advertising usually covers these public image spaces, and Yang Yuanyuan was alert to the clash. She saw that near-utopian scenery as of a piece with the tightly scripted itineraries of Pyongyang tour groups: "Both point to a stage-play perfection, a set-built reality running parallel to the country's real one."

In 2016, the first real photography magazine Yan You had been planning for years finally went to press. That first issue printed 2,000 copies and sold out in ten days; today you can only read it at the photography library upstairs. It carried an interview with Alec Soth, whose 2004 book Sleeping by the Mississippi, shot along the river, influenced a great many people, independent publishers among them. Yan You also asked photographers to write, in that issue, about how they read other photographers' work.

"I hope this magazine can give young photographers a platform for writing, and that along the way we can explore together what is possible in the future for photography, an art that is neither new nor old."

Before that first issue, Jiazazhi had tried plenty of things, from Douban to Weibo to a WeChat official account. Besides recommending books with short videos, the account's "blog" tag alone held a whole spread of columns: "Square Table," "Interviews," "Jungle Talks," "The Path" and "Fake Exhibition." Yan You thought "The Path" worked best — inviting photography artists he liked to write on subjects unrelated to their own work, and yet related.

"Fake Exhibition" went up once a week, Saturday afternoons. The WeChat editors were based in Beijing, but everyone joined the discussion; Yan You called the group the "curating dream team." "Besides the curating dream team, we have a book-selling dream team — everyone has to work the stall. As for the bookmaking dream team, that's basically just me."

Fake Exhibition is read sideways, a white ground running off in one direction without end, another kind of "wall." The curating dream team once put together an issue for Danila Tkachenko, an artist based in Moscow, whose camera turns on abandoned observatories, missile test stands, rocket-engine plants, deserted polar science towns and the wreckage of crashed aircraft in Russia's coldest reaches — places once vital to technological progress, now forgotten and left to freeze. They appear on no map and in no public archive, and people long ago stopped expecting anything from these products of the Cold War arms race. They once held perfect technology; they were never promised a future.

The comments are unusually serious: some readers correct mistakes, some write down their impressions, and some say plainly that they aren't buying it. "Honestly, a lot of these photos have no meaning at all — or rather, the meaninglessness belongs to the reader. Maybe for the person who took them, the photos recorded a state of mind at the time, and the viewer is just left to fill in the blanks."

"I've always felt that photography, as an art, is long past the age of passion when you slung a camera over your shoulder and went out into the street or onto the road. Photographers need to read and to think — and of course they need writing to sort themselves out. I hope I can find, in their writing, traces of what connects to their work, clues they may not be aware of themselves."

As for what sort of person ends up buying Jiazazhi's books, Yan You is sure of his answer: "Let the market come find us — though I suppose this can hardly be called a market."

Images courtesy of Yan You