New Rules: Navigating photography’s unfixed future — Download our free guide

To work in creative industries right now is to feel uncomfortable. As Gem Fletcher says of the photography industry in this first zine of our new series, “we exist in a liminal space, far from where we started and it’s unclear if a destination exists”. We have witnessed creative workers struggling to excel in a troubling late capitalist landscape where technology and the dying media industry have been at odds and a thirst for profit has created conditions that weaken the value of the work itself. None of this is new. Many of the problems have been slowly building for well over a decade, but 2023 felt like the most difficult year yet.

With that in mind, WePresent decided to put together New Rules, a new series that will positively tackle how to thrive as an artist in unstable creative industries that are changing beyond all recognition. “New Rules: Navigating photography’s unfixed future” is a group portrait by photographers, curators, tastemakers and editors like Emily Keegin, Bubblegum Club, Janina Sabaliauskaitė, Campbell Addy and Antwaun Sargent, many of whom stepped away from the traditional trajectory to find a different path. They have crafted alternative routes forward, embraced marginalized voices and built new infrastructure for coming together to share work and life. None of this was easy, but for many of these artists, as you will soon learn, the real risk was to resist evolving at all. This is not a moment for staying still. It’s time to be part of the change.