Axis 14 is my journal: raw portraiture and photography from the places in between. No studio, no script, no styling. People and spaces, shot as they are.
Why I started it
I have made fashion and portrait photography for years, and most of it goes through a brief, a team and a look decided in advance. Axis 14 is the opposite. It is where I put the pictures that are made because someone walked into the frame, or a street looked the way it did for ten seconds.
It is published from Prague and Berlin, and each issue is a handful of stories that I could not fit anywhere else. Vol. 01 begins in a small town in Slovakia, with three boys on a bridge and a hooded figure on a cobbled pavement.
Shot, not generated.
Portrait, Street and Light
The journal is made of three things. Portrait is the person, close, and usually in black and white. Street is the place they live in, seen without staging. Light is what connects the two: window light, overcast light, the last light on a wall. Every story belongs to at least one of them, and the best ones to all three.
The manifesto
Every frame in Axis 14 is a photograph of a real person in a real place, made in camera. I wrote the manifesto as four pages that say so, and they open every issue.
No prompts. Just people. Nothing in this journal is typed into a machine and handed back. A person stood there, and I pressed the shutter.
Still human. A portrait is an agreement between two people for a few seconds. You can feel it when it was there, and you can feel it when it was not.
Real is the new rare. As perfect images become easy to make, a face with a pore, a street with a crack and a frame with some luck in it start to matter more.
Grain over gloss. I would rather keep the texture, the shadow and the imperfect edge, because that is where the person is. It is also why so much of Axis 14 is black and white.
Follow the journal
Axis 14 is on Instagram at @axis14.journal. Each story below is a chapter from Vol. 01, and new stories will be added here as they are published.