Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French editor Olivier Zahm.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
Olivier Zahm is a French magazine editor, art critic, art director, curator, writer, and photographer He is the co-founder, owner, and current editor-in-chief of the bi-annual art and fashion magazine Purple. In addition to his innovative print publishing, he is a recognized pioneering cultural influence at the dawn of the electronic era during the Digital Revolution. His early blogs garnered notoriety, and featured highly stylized photographs taken by him, that took his audience on daily tours of his fantasyland populated by the artists, intellectuals, designers, filmmakers, socialites, models and celebrities who regularly appeared in his magazine. His aesthetic has been described as anti-fashion, counterculture, and unfettered by the constraints of the mainstream publishing world. His online activity served as an early electronic precursor to popular social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. His magazine remains one of the only independent and privately owned publications of its kind. Created in the beginning of the 1990s – it still remains a major reference for other alternative magazines today.
The reason I introduced sex - or erotic imagery - to Purple is not only because I don't want sex to be hidden but because also I consider it as an extension of fashion, the way the body expresses seduction and beauty. It's very artificial to put sex in a ghetto. Plus, sex sells.
For me, the Internet is the opposite of memory; the Internet is amnesia, it's about today and tomorrow is another day. Printed issues are about recording time, leaving a trace and making it relevant.
Publishing magazines costs a lot of money and people don't read magazines anymore, they're all captivated by Instagram. I have to reinvent myself every season to keep the interest of the reader. Twenty-five years later, my mission is the same: Captivating the readers, not flattering the industry.
Everyone is scared of having a free sexual life and what they do is go on the Internet and masturbate. This is the pure sexual misery today. They don't even go to the movie theater like in the '70s.
Sven Schumann did an interview with photographer Wolfgang Tillmans in Berlin addressing the question: What is photography today when everyone is a photographer? These kinds of questions and answers you find in a magazine, on paper and not on Instagram. For me this is the essence of a magazine - it's questioning what's going on today and celebrating true creativity without compromise.
I consider that sex is part of life as much as architecture, fashion, art or food. Sex is life, simple. And I refuse to consider that sex should be hidden. When you hide sex, problems start because sex becomes dangerous.
You don't understand, photography is not about getting the right picture, it's about documenting your everyday life.
There are so many possibilities around what a magazine should be today. I still believe in the printed object because, for me, print is memory. This is my main message for this 25th anniversary issue.