Over the past few years, there have been whispers that “print is dead.” As a fresh English grad with clichéd literary aspirations, this caused me slightly more anxiety than anticipated. When I moved back to Vancouver from the UK, a lacklustre literary career certainly felt emphasized. Compared to other cities, Vancouver is small, and its literary marketplace is even smaller. While major cities like London and Toronto have the population to support independent bookstores and boutiques, Vancouver seems to struggle when it comes to sustaining its niche market. As a result, the past digital decade has ushered in a new era of publication: hyper-relevant, digital outlets which give you easily digestible articles to read during your commutes to work. Overwhelmed with unread articles, disposable clickbait, and digital overload, I began to get the impression that these iterations were true, print was in fact dead, at least in Vancouver. That is, until I met Gergo.

Our first encounter was at a backyard buli (a Hungarian party) in 2018. It was a few months before I was set to go back to the UK to finish off my degree. Just off of Main Street, the sky boasted hues of blues and pinks at 7 pm, beer taps were overflowing, and a variety of Costco birthday cakes (I counted at least 4) were being served. There I met Gergo, immediately introduced to me as ‘family’, and the creative mind behind BROAD. Pretending as if I hadn’t been regularly captioning my posts with #broadmag, I asked Gergo a bit more about the magazine, and how he got into photography. After some habitual small talk, I learnt that he was born in Hungary and had immigrated to Vancouver as a teenager. He explained how at first, photography was just a means to document and process his experience, however, as he started to work in photography, it quickly became his dream job, he tells me, “it was no secret that I wanted to make this dream of mine, into something real someday.”

BROAD Marketing Samples0401.jpg — ***How did BROAD mag come about in the first place?***

Gergo: BROAD started on a sleepy winter morning when something inside my head told me: “you will start a magazine today.” And I did! That morning, I signed up for a new Instagram account and called it BROAD––I wanted it to be large in scope. One thing I knew was that I wanted to make a magazine about the things that were interesting to me and could make a positive change in an increasingly shitty world. I felt alone and kind of powerless online in a sea of never-ending content ready to be consumed. I was on Instagram and wondered: why are we all sharing these images? What’s the real use of it? How can we connect it to make something more meaningful out of it? So, BROAD started as a platform to collect inspiration and ideas from around the world. As we built on this concept, we started to foster and attract a community of like minded people.

The following summer, almost a year to the day we first met, I got a message from Gergo asking if I’d be interested in writing for the magazine. His words verbatim were, “I’m about to make this into a real magazine. My goal is to have a platform where we all do what we love and what we are best at.” As a long-time follower of BROAD, I was ecstatic to say the least, so, this was an easy job to accept. Within the first week of October, Gergo and I had our first official BROAD meeting to go over the proofs and talk things over. He mentioned that he had always loved to collect and make magazines as a kid, “I would staple together a bunch of letter size sheets and filled them with drawings, comics or whatever I could think of at the moment.” Throughout our talk, I was reminded of print’s essential power as a medium–the way magazines hit you at a subconscious level, how they almost effortlessly engage our emotions and senses. I thought about my own collection of magazines, in particular, a collection that started when I was around ten years old. I was walking around the neighbourhood with my mom when we saw “FREE” sharpie’d in bold onto a big box of National Geographic magazines. After we took them home, I spent most of my days pointing out my favourite photographs, making collages, and reading through decades of stories. On rainy days, reading these magazines made me feel like the whole world was in my basement––before social media, it was a means to feel connected to a world that felt otherwise unreachable. Documentary photography quickly became my way of translating the experiences of others from around the world; my favourite issue from April 1970 had a white tiger cub on its cover, “White Tiger in My House” by Elizabeth C. Reed, photographs by Donna K. Grosvenor. Stacked underneath was another issue from 1997, where A.R Williams and Vincent J. Musi followed the daily routines of Montserratians who lived under a volcano. There was a certain kind of feeling these magazines evoked, they weren’t necessarily trying to be timely, they were instead focused on the authenticity of human experiences- making them tangible, collectible, and shareable.

***What sort of photographs inspire you? How do you go about choosing submissions?***

Gergo: I find inspiration in simplicity and a photograph’s ability to convey a story with very minimal elements. Photographers who can do that definitely get my attention. There is a massive amount of talent in the BROAD community and it’s always a joy to dig into it and find the gems to show our audience. When I’m choosing submissions for a topic I look for many different things. Sometimes the image content is so powerful it needs no commentary at all, often it’s the synergy between a well thought-out series of images and the writing accompanying it that grabs me. The submissions that get our attention are the ones that have a strong cohesive look and an interesting concept that shines through clearly. If it can also make me smile that’s definitely a plus!

Regardless of BROAD’s online success, Gergo maintained that nothing could beat the experience of print, a sentiment to which I readily agreed. Living in an information-saturated world, we scroll, we refresh, we bookmark articles––that we say we’ll eventually read but never seem to––and become trapped in a never-ending cycle of internet fatigue. BROAD’s first printed issue is a response to this exhausted pattern, a collective effort to publish visual culture for the digital age. Here, we embrace the beauty in the ritual of reading a magazine, which forces us to slow down, reject online transience, and smell the paper. With these aspirations, BROAD is not a photography magazine, at least not in your traditional sense. Although it’s photography based, BROAD endeavours to rediscover the connections between cultures in an ever-changing and increasingly fractured world. Photography is therefore, the lens through which our contributors use to translate their global experiences across political, linguistic and cultural borders.

With the climate crisis on everyone’s mind, it seemed essential to take water––a resource which has become increasingly commodified, privatized, and marketed to us––and analyze it from a more human perspective. Whilst access to safe, clean water is a fundamental human right, it continues to be polluted, wasted and treated with unconstitutional disregard. The water crisis in Flint, Trudeau’s unfulfilled clean-water promise to Indigenous communities, and the overarching inaccessibility to safe drinking water around the globe, are all normalized into isolated issues which only affect the so-called “global underdogs”. With the media’s division between “us” and “them”, apathy and disaffection become inherent responses to the crises around the world. As activists and organizations lobby for change, this issue of BROAD aims to show how artists, photographers, and tinkerers can also participate in this political discourse. By bringing an international community together, we’re able to see the intersections of these issues, and how we’re all affected and inter-connected on a larger, global scale. While our goal isn’t to be strictly didactic, we do hope our readers will learn a few new things, and feel motivated to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle. In vol. 1, we learn from Geoffrey Wallang that in his hometown Shillong, India––one of the rainiest places on the planet––a lack of adequate water-supply infrastructure forces locals to purchase water in order to bathe, drink and perform everyday tasks such as laundry . And as Zindzi Zwietering documents ‘Day Zero’, we’re able to analyze how class struggles are exacerbated by the city’s water restrictions. The social commentary of these articles, combined with their brilliant photography, act as a microcosm for the diversity of our relationships with the world, so if you want to know more, go purchase your own copy!

BROAD Marketing Samples0398.jpg — How has it been watching BROAD grow from instagram to physical print?

Gergo: It’s been a lot of work but a lot of fun as well. It takes a fair amount of dedication to keep things going with such a large project, and you also need a fair amount of humility to ask for help when you’re stuck. First off, we received an overwhelming amount of submissions to our open call, which made me realize people were taking this really seriously. I spent weeks and weeks sorting through it all and very slowly the arc of the content finally started to crystallize. Then came gathering and preparing all the content which took way longer than I initially anticipated. I realized I was doing work that is normally done by an entire editorial team so it was very slow going initially. Now that we are launching the first issue we have developed a small but driven and amazingly talented editorial team so the next issue should come together a lot faster. During the making of this I have connected with people in all corners of the globe and made quite a few friends along the way. Which is definitely the coolest thing to come out of it so far for me! I am very proud of the work we’ve put together.

A few paragraphs ago, I mentioned my existential doubt over my ambitions of venturing into the publishing world. This magazine’s title, BROAD, encompasses my outlook after months of working with Gergo and the team. Having read what the contributors have said about the ways in which something as simple as water connects us together, I find myself feeling more humbled, and distinctly closer to other people. A printed magazine has an archival quality, if I ever feel alone, BROAD is right in front of me, with its empathic pages, ready to remind me that I’m not. I hope when you’re reading the magazine, you’ll feel the same too, and will agree with me when I say that print is not dead, but a way towards a better future.

Gergo Farkas is the editor-in-chief of BROAD, VOL. 1 - WATER SINGLE ISSUE IS NOW AVAILABLE TO ORDER .

Alexa Fahlman is a copy editor, writer, and photographer for BROAD.

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