In this day and age, everyone has a lot of cluttered photos in their phone albums. You might snap a photo and then forget it in the album, taking up storage space on your phone.

These pictures are side slices of life. Why not make a zine of these photos to tell your story? This Toolkit will teach you how to use photography as a narrative structure through zine.

You can use an App like Freeform to create your e-zine, or you can print it out and make a physical store.

Follow the steps!

Step 1 (2 mins)

Watch the video to realize how to use Freeform to make an e-zine.

Step 2 (5 mins)

Go through the photos in the album and find out which ones you like or would like to introduce to others. Think about what story you want to tell or what thoughts and feelings you want to convey through these photos.

Step 3 (5 mins)

Using Freeform (on phone or iPad), draw an A4 or A3 scale rectangle and divide it into sixteen or eight parts. Use dashed lines to represent creases and solid lines to represent cuts.

Step 4 (8 mins)

Put the photo in the page. You can add doodles, text, and other techniques to complete your narrative. If you have a printer handy, you can print out the electronic pages and then fold it into a physical zine.

Of course if you have paper and printed photos you can also collage and doodle directly on the paper.

Congratulations! You have completed your photo zine.

Seizing Shadow: Make Your Own Photo Zine by Xinru Zhang is marked withCC0 1.0