Between 2005 and 2009, Flickr was an amazing place, filled with new talented photographers from every corner of the world. I was utterly fascinated with the level of content that some of these new artists were consistently posting, day after day, so I decided to create a venue, both online and in printed version, to feature their work. This is how the Green Tea Gallery Magazine was born.
The first issue took several months of work. Finding the artists, contacting them, interviewing them, preparing the articles, submitting it for review to them, updating the website every day with fresh content, were tasks that took much longer time than I had ever anticipated.
The design of the first issue was completed, but it was actually never printed. Which was a real shame because each of the artists I had featured was worth the attention. And to prove that, a decade later, most, if not all of them, have become very famous artist.
Jingna Zhang is now a fashion and fine art photographer and director living in New York City and Tokyo. Her work has been published on Vogue, Vanity Fair, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and many other magazines around the world.
Tim Gallo is now a freelance photographer who has worked within the Japanese film industry. In his portfolio you can find some of the most famous Japanese actors and actresses.
Gary Isaacs has recently published a very cool book, featuring noir photos from San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Even the author of the magazine’s logo, Michel D’Anastasio, a French calligrapher I had found on Flickr, has become a specialist in modern Hebrew calligraphy and a very well-known teacher of the beautiful art of calligraphy. Michel has shown his work all around the globe.
I regret that I did not have the time and the resources necessary to continue this project. One thing I will always owe to this project, though, is the fact that it shifted my focus from commercial photography to fine art photography, something that has deeply changed my way of seeing the world around me.
