Saif Rahman, a Carleton computer science graduate and avid generalist photographer, recently celebrated the release of the second installment in his zine series The Carleton Years.
Designed to look like a school notebook and entirely handwritten by Rahman, The Carleton Years is a portfolio of photographs he took during his day-to-day life while obtaining his undergraduate degree at Carleton.
The Charlatan spoke with Rahman to discuss the motivations and artistic creation process behind his latest installment of The Carleton Years.
The Charlatan (TC): Where did the idea for The Carleton Years come from?
Saif Rahman (SR): I started working on The Carleton Years because in the time I spent at university, I’d been working on a lot of things, and things were very different for me because I moved all the way from Bangladesh to come here for school. So, my style of photography and the things that I was seeing changed drastically, and I wanted to document what I was looking at and photographing in that period.
TC: What was your artistic process when creating The Carleton Years: Vol. 2?
SR: Once I made The Carleton Years: Vol. 1, the second volume only took me two or three months. The process goes a lot faster knowing the design I decided on for the series worked. Beyond that, the curation process is essentially the same for all my publications. I look at a period and pick the pictures that I like and narrow it down to 100 that I like, and then 50, and then further until I hit about 30 pictures.
TC: Why did you choose a zine as the medium to present your work?
SR: In Ottawa, there are a few smaller publications I’m aware of — one I work closely with is called Do It For The Grain, which is a zine for analog photography. Because I’d been working with them for a long time, I’d seen the possibilities of making zines and independent publications. I did some research on whether I would be able to do something like that myself and it turned out to be the right fit because of lower volume and cost.
TC: What do you hope people take away from your zine?
SR: My work is about trying to enjoy what your life is like, trying to look for and capture the nice things, the details you appreciate. What I like to showcase in a lot of my work is that you should try and romanticize a little bit the life that you have. Everything I’m taking pictures of are things I see on a daily basis. I’m capturing things that are out there — available in nature most of the time.
TC: What challenges did you face when creating this zine?
SR: The biggest challenge for me is sitting down and curating the photos because I take a lot of photos of everything I like. And to be honest, a vast majority of it is not that great; it’s just for me. But I’d rather have taken the picture and it not amount to anything than go away not having the picture, so there’s a lot of work to sift through to find the ones that are worthwhile to show.
TC: Would you consider creating a third volume for The Carleton Years series?
SR: There are photos that I still really like, but not as much that they fit into my top 30, so I did consider making a third one, but at the moment I think it’s better for me to step away and try something different. Maybe in the future I’d consider making an extras volume.
TC: What’s next for you as a photographer?
SR: My work is continuous. I do it for me, anyway. It’s what I do to relax. At the end of the day, I clock out of work and I go for a walk with my camera. If I take a picture, I take a picture. If I don’t, I don’t. I’m not worried about it.
In terms of another publication, I have ideas. First and foremost, I want to make my zines accessible, so I price them on the lower side. But I feel I could make them even more accessible if I printed something smaller, so I’m going to play with a few more sizes and designs. I’d like to do things with more ambitious layouts. But that’s secondary. The quality of work and just making the work is what’s important. So that’s what I’m going to continue to do, and if and when I feel I’m ready to release something new, that’s what’s going to happen.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Featured image provided by Saif Rahman.
