Summer 1996

My pre-internet analog self-portrait at the start of Reviewer Magazine

by Reviewer Rob

I’m going though binders with sheets of 35mm negatives to digitize and I see that I occasionally took a selfie with my Nikon FM3 back in the pre-internet, pre-Reviewer Magazine era. It was never very common for me to do that and when I was shooting lots of nightclubs strangers (usually females) would sometimes ask me if they could shoot a photo of me, but I’d demure, not wanting to hand my camera to some random person in a bar. I had spent so much time indoors laying out issue one of the magazine, and in this photo I’m struck by how skinny I was, how pale I looked even though it’s summer. I’ve monochromed the image because I am alarmed at my sickly pallor. It just looks better to me in black and white. This was the month I’d spent many, many hours at Kinko’s on Garnet Avenue, reducing the typewriter copy down to small (10 point?) type to lay out on Bristol board with double-sided tape, meticulously pasting up the first issue of Reviewer in a way no one taught me how to do but sort of figured it out myself. I didn’t know it at the time but boy did I have some tough times ahead of me. Doing a magazine was a job I had no training in but one I wanted to do badly.

This was 1996, and the internet was something that was around but it hadn’t reached me yet. I wouldn’t even have an email address for maybe five more years, and owning a website wouldn’t happen until well after that. Everything was analog: books, print, business cards, fliers, and film. Bill Clinton was still in his first term and about to win his second. It was the MTV era. People were happy, housing was cheap, and the economy was beginning to really boom. Good times for all were being had. Man, I had no idea what was coming. No fucking idea at all.

Above: a black & white digitization of the color 35mm negative. Below: the sheet of miscellaneous color negs marked “Summer 1996” and “Various” that I’ve dug up from the archives.