Once in a blue moon, you meet someone who shares your background, your love to everything and anything print, even your zodiac, and the permanence of what we create, cherish and adore: magazines.”
That person is no other than Emon Hassan, the founder and publisher of the two plus years old zine emonome. A beautiful 40-pages zine that tells a different photographic story every issue. Emon is a filmmaker, a photographer and a musician, but his latest creativity is manifesting itself, monthly, in emonome, the zine that he started in 2024 and is going strong into its third year…
When I asked him about how he fell in love with print, his answers brought back memories of yours truly scribbling and creating his own magazines as a child growing up in Lebanon before going to college and before journalism and storytelling became my career and profession.
Emon told me, “I think back to my first ever published thing, as a teenager, I wrote a short story that I hand-wrote into notebook paper. And then I bound it with staples and put a cover.
My distribution was I give it to the first person, and it’s their job to read it and decide who they should give it to. And then at some point, it made its way back to me. I only recently realized that’s kind of the model I’m still doing in that sense.”
What a lovely testimony to the power of print and the art of storytelling. As you read this interview you will find more about the essence of storytelling, print, and the genius work of creating movies and films on paper from the opening credits to the end… a complete cinema in 40 pages…
So, without any further ado, please enjoy this lightly edited interview with Emon Hassan, founder and publisher of emonome.
Samir Husni: My first question to you is you’re a filmmaker, you’re a photographer, a musician. Why did you decide to do an ink on paper magazine in this digital age?
Emon Hassan: Well, I’ll tell you the story that leads up to that. So in 2005, I had a short film that was included in a film festival in New York City.
And one of the organizers said we don’t have a big promotion available. So why don’t you start a blog and promote your film? I launched that blog and I called it Emonome because I liked the name. It’s a palindrome.
It’s perfect as a Pisces. I started blogging, trying to promote the film. But I really got into what the blog stood for in terms of its open endedness, in terms of information that comes to me.
Then what I saw, the idea was that anything that influences me, that I read or listen to, I’ll blog about it. If that inspires me to create something, I will also blog about it. I liked that it didn’t have an ending.
It could go in any number of directions. I did that for years and that helped me navigate the landscape, online landscape that led me to many opportunities, including about six years later, starting as a photojournalist for The New York Times. In the 2010s, I got very busy with my photojournalism and short documentary work for various platforms.
It was an accidental turn of events, which was very fortunate. I didn’t do a whole lot of blogging. Around the end of 2020, I was thinking of how I should think about the new decade, because every decade I think, what can change? What should I do next? How are things changing? I noticed that the online work had been so saturated and with social media and everything, I was trying to figure out where my work as a photographer, my personal work lived.
The more I looked at online, the more I felt like that I would have my stories and work be done up to a point. After that, it would be off to people who would decide if there was worth publishing or worth telling. I did not like that because it was affecting how I did my stories.
In 2024, I launched my self-published first photography and poetry book as an e-book. Once the e-book came out, most of the people who are on my mailing list said, this is great, but how are you going to sign an e-book? You should do a print book, then we’ll talk. A couple of months later, I launched a print book and the process itself was quite illuminating in terms of how I felt seeing a physical thing in my hands and how those garnered responses from people who bought it.
I was thinking about things I could do that were on a regular basis. I still liked the idea of a deadline because doing newspaper work for about 10 years, it really made me work my best. My partner, who’s also my editor, she said, you’ve always liked blogging. Why don’t you do it as a zine? It was instantly, I saw that, this is it. It’s print form. I can do zines and I don’t have to follow certain rules, either for myself or in terms of perception of what a zine should be.
I decided to launch a zine. Before even the first zine came out, I knew it was going to be monthly because if it wasn’t monthly, then I would probably never do it again. Because it was monthly, it had me thinking a certain way.
That’s how it started as a print because I felt that the audience that were coming to me because of print were the people that I wanted to relate to all along. It was sort of a very refined process that connected us through print.
Samir Husni: Did anybody tell you, Emon, are you out of your mind? What are you thinking doing print in the 21st century?
Emon Hassan: I don’t think they told me directly.
I would read stuff that would make it seem. But I thought that people tend to say something but want something different. So, it was because I thought nobody wanted print is why I did the first book as an e-book.
I will quickly tell that you should do it as a print book because we need to feel the book and the photographs. That’s what made me think that don’t go by what the industry chatter. Go by what people are directly telling you.
Samir Husni: With your pictures, with your photography, did you find a big difference between when it was only digital to when you start making prints and selling prints and signing?
Emon Hassan: Yes. I think when I started to do it in the book form where, you start at page one and then end at page 40, I started to look at photography very differently and I started to think storytelling because it was the idea that the book is probably the only technology that you never had to explain to people. They all know that it will start here and will end here.
Whatever you put in between is totally left to the imagination. Once I started doing it in print and it was in the book form, I was able to channel my filmmaker brain into it and tell stories in a way that would weave through. You know where it began and where it ended.
There’s the opening image. There’s the closing image. I was able to do a lot within the constraints, if you will, of the cover and the back cover.
Samir Husni: Have you ever thought a book or a magazine is like a movie? There’s a beginning and there’s an end?
Emon Hassan: Yes. I see the zines as a cinema in the print form for me, the way I approach it. Yes, I do. That was a big part in designing and crafting every issue.
Samir Husni: If somebody comes to you and say, what’s the power of print today?
Emon Hassan: I think I’ve always believed that even through the height of digital is that the longevity of the paper form, the print form is something that will outlive me.
With digital, people approach it as something that can be discarded. The power of print is in its permanence.
There’s something about the print version, which is that you hand it over to somebody or passit around or pass it down aspect of it is to me is something I think about because you read something and you say, I really love this. You should read it and it goes around. The power of it, in other words, is it’s also the longevity of it.
From a photographer point of view, I know exactly how that photograph will be seen by everybody. If I were to do it in digital, it all depends on if your computer is color calibrated or if it’s like a certain definition, you will see a different picture than I do. That will translate differently in terms of the storytelling.
In the print form, if I’m in charge of seeing how the print works, then I know whatever I see is what anyone will see out there.
Samir Husni: What role does AI play, if any, in your photography?
Emon Hassan: No, not in my photography, because I feel like it will never equal to the way I think. It’s not like I haven’t played with AI, but it gets boring very quickly because all it’s doing is rehashing what others think are great photographs, which I may not agree with. For me, having honed my craft repeatedly it’s 10, 20 times easier for me to come up with original ideas or respond to something. Photography is responding to a situation that I’m in. And there’s nothing in AI could do that.
Now there are certain technologies available in the apps that you use to edit them. And more companies are integrating them with or without our consent, like denoising or that sort of thing. I tend not to use them anymore.
I used to use it when you have manual like denoise. I feel like, if I took a picture a certain time and it has this noise, then that’s the story. I don’t need to make it look more perfect because perfection is not what I’m going for.
Samir Husni: Excellent. Tell me, before I ask you my typical questions, since you started the zine, have it been like a walk in a rose garden or did you have some challenge?
Emon Hassan: No, it’s not been. Well, first, I think it goes to one of your original questions was, and on top of that is the perception of what a zine should be or where zine is.
I’ve gotten a question if it’s so polished, can it be called a zine anymore? My response to that is I don’t look at the zine as the form of it. I look at zine as a decision I’ve made against something or to stand up to something, which is the publishing empire that decides whose story is important to tell or not. To make it polished is my decision as a photographer and as a publisher to say that this is my product, it’s zine, but the zine is more like, that’s my punk rock.
I chose it a certain way. I would say that’s my zine is a serious endeavor. Most people don’t make a second issue of a zine.
I’ve done 24 already, 25 coming out soon. I am into it for good. There were challenges in terms of printing and such. I don’t think that’s unique to just zines. I think any business will face those challenges. But I think perception of what a zine should be and how seriously or not seriously should be taken.
It’s something that I don’t deal with as much, but I know it’s in the back of people’s minds, but that’s shifting now.
Samir Husni: Emonome is not cheap. You’re charging $15 an issue.
Emon Hassan: I would say it’s on par with what it should be. And as it came to consensus once I had the original back and forth with people, that I figured that was appropriate for that.
Based on how much time I spend, all that must come into consideration. There is one thing too, when people think zines should be free. I don’t believe that at all, because why am I doing it if I don’t consider it as a serious business?
Samir Husni: Tell me, if I come one evening, unannounced to your house, what do I catch Emon doing? Watching TV, reading a book, looking at pictures?
Emon Hassan: It’s all those things. I’m constantly, thinking about storytelling…different storytelling.
It will either be reading a book or listening to an audio book or looking at a video about certain things. Always trying to learn how I can do it better. I’ll read books for inspiration, either photo books or just fiction, anything that has to do with storytelling told a certain way. It doesn’t matter. I don’t discriminate against any type of storytelling. I want to learn. I’ll let it sort of wash over me.
Sometimes I’ll won’t do any of that. I’ll just listen to music for a few days and be like, none of that. No nonfiction enters my world. It’s just going to be fiction or music or just silence sometimes.
Samir Husni: I read that you were a guitar instructor.
Emon Hassan: I used to be in the early two thousand when I was playing music in New York. That was my main source of income, to play cover in cover bands. I had an original guitar duo.
During that time, I was also teaching guitar and I was doing great. I had a bunch of students.
Samir Husni: Then you moved from sound to vision.
Emon Hassan: Sound came as a way from vision. I was always like ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I didn’t know what a filmmaker was. I didn’t know that you wrote your films.
I thought you just were there when it happened and you captured it. When I was 14 or 15, my mom bought me a guitar because she didn’t want me to go play in the sun outside. She didn’t know that I would really take to it.
So it was, it was sort of parallel. I knew they were not related in any way, but I knew from very early on that, no matter how many different things you do, they’re all going to help you to be a better storyteller.
The more input you have from different fields, it’s only going to help you as a storyteller, not to take anything away from it.
Samir Husni: My typical last question, what keeps him on up at night these days?
Emon Hassan: It’s probably very different reason that most people will give you. I’m up at night in the anticipation of the things I can’t wait to get to in the morning.
So I’ll go to bed thinking I can’t wait for this night to be over so I can get up and get to doing what I do, my routine. A lot of people stay up at night thinking about what their industry, their work and everything is going. But I’ve kind of lived it in my head, some years ago, of where things might be going. So, that doesn’t keep me up.
What keeps me up is if I’ve done my best that day and if I could have done any better and I’ll just quickly calibrate and be like, in the morning, I’ll wake up and I’ll try to do a little better.
Samir Husni: Thank you and all the best.
To learn more or to subscribe to the beautiful zine emonome click here.
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