Our First Issue: What's Inside

"Did you know a roll of film is exactly 5 ft long, about 1.5 meters? We took the magazine's name, 5ft, from that length of 35mm film, which holds exactly 36 frames."

After a long preparation, the first official issue of 5ft magazine is finally on paper. Shoot the same film and you still get entirely different colors and stories depending on the person and the place. This issue spreads that appeal across one volume. Here is a quick look at what the first issue holds.

The Theme: What Light and Shadow Leave Behind

One line on the cover reads "What Light and Shadow Leave Behind." Every photograph and every piece of writing in the first issue gathers under that theme. At its core, the issue looks from many angles at the romantic, lyrical appeal of film and at the emotional ripples that form when people meet places.

The film used for the first issue is Kodak Ultramax 400. It usually gets filed as "an ordinary consumer film," but look closely at its color and texture and that label is hard to stand by.

Six Perspectives

Three photographers, two contributing artists and one writer worked on the first issue. Each comes from a different place and takes on the same theme in their own way.

Six people, six different answers. How such different scenes can unfold under one theme is something we hope you'll see for yourself, page by page.

A Preview of the Spreads

We are opening just two pages from inside the magazine. Same film, completely different textures.

Park Soon Yeol wrote this in the magazine: "For me, people always had to be at the center. In my photographs, 'light' meant 'people.' 'Shadow,' on the other hand, meant everything that wasn't people." A lifeless cup, bent light, the shadows that form inside it. His gaze moves quietly through calm scenes that look like still lifes.

Noh Ae-gyeong follows an amusement park that was once dazzling and is now abandoned. "Even through the changes made by humidity and the passing of time, this place still exists, holding on to its glittering memories." Walking through a space that is worn but not gone, where past and present live side by side, she asks about the nature of time and things.

Gositel, and the Photographer Beyond It

The other big pillar of this issue is the interview. Shim Kyu-dong debuted with the photobook 〈Gositel〉 in Noonbit's photographer series (눈빛사진가선), from the photography publisher Noonbit. His work, which looks squarely at people living in cramped rooms, holds a place in Korean documentary photography. 5ft magazine sat down with him for a long conversation about 〈Gositel〉, his new series 〈Single-Person Households〉 (1인가구), and his own thinking about light.

The First Issue at a Glance

• ● Photo: Noh Ae-gyeong, Park Soon Yeol, Jang Hyeong-su
• ● Essay: Kim Hyun-a, 〈Gear for Rigging Romance〉 · 〈Why Nothing Happening Makes Me Happy〉; Yoon Dong-gyu, 〈What Light and Shadow Leave Behind〉
• ● Interview: Shim Kyu-dong
• ● Camera Review: Pentax 17 (BRISNAP TV)
• ● Film Review: Kodak UltraMax 400 (Film Social Club)

Coming in the Next Issue

Issue 2 is shot on Cinestill 800T, the motion picture film loved for the red halation it throws around night scenes and streetlamps. In the camera review section, Kang Hye-won of Ally Cameras joins us to look at three unusual German cameras: the ihagee exakta, the zeiss ikon contessa and the voigtlander vitessa 500. New photographers, new light, new stories. That is what we promise with every issue.

To get there, 5ft magazine dreams of being a magazine built together, by bringing more people in around a shared purpose, rather than one that makes photographs for its own satisfaction.