The above is the proposal video that Mossless founder, Romke Hoogwaerts created to try and fund his ambition, a magazine showcasing four photographers per issue. He aimed to raise $4,000 in donations via Kickstarter by Christmas Eve of last year and by the time that date rolled around, the final tally was closer to $5,000. This past week I caught up with Romke using a fancy new thing called electronic mail and this is what he had to say. (In all honesty, this was the best interview I've ever done on here!)

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Was Mossless a blog before it was a magazine idea or is the publication a development from the online side? It was three years ago when I was sitting at home thinking how much I wanted to intern for a book publisher like Phaidon. I was a few months away from moving to New York to go to SVA for Film and Video. Knowing I was taking completely unrelated studies to publishing and never even had any experience in the print I thought, well, shit. There goes that. Then sarcastically: it would be easier to just start my own thing, followed by oh god now I'm screwed.

Why curation as opposed to your own work (pictured below)? I'm hesitant to call what I'm doing curating but I am interested in the field so I'll answer it anyway. I love looking at photographs and I'm pretty business minded. I love taking pictures too, but I'm not too interested in what I come up with. I don't know if there's a lot of merit to the pictures I take and I'm scared that if I focus on becoming a photographer, I will be going after a career that is potentially very brittle. If I'm out of shape, creatively speaking, I could blow it. But I'm always down to do laborious work, and again, I love looking at pictures. So if I end up making a living as a curator you can be sure that I will be in candyland.

After much moving around, you’ve now settled in NY, at least for now anyway. You must pass by at least a thousand people each day who want funding for their own creative projects. Do you think your surroundings influenced you in going for it yourself instead of trying to get funding through an institutional program or corporate sponsorship? It's weird, I never realised that it was odd that I moved around so much when I was younger until I settled in here. In the communities I used to live in every kid lived like that and it was always a competition as to who was most displaced in their life. You get thrown into situations you're not familiar with, and I think that cultivated a love for that feeling... not knowing what you're doing. I keep giving myself these crazy projects, most of which I never really flesh out - this is just one that I really pursued. And then not having corporate sponsorship ensures that I'll have as much creative freedom as possible.

You’re one of the success stories of a project taking the Kickstarter funding route. Obviously it’s not an easy task and not something anyone can expect when they start out. What do you think was the key to getting people so interested in helping you reach your goal? I learned that mass emails are not effective. At all. I'm not sure if I got a single pledge from the hundreds of emails that went out simultaneously. Once I sent emails tailored to particular people, actually sincerely asking if they were interested... that's when things started moving. We had an event which was helpful- it helped establish that we were actually doing things. Lastly, the blog aphotoeditor posted about it. I had no idea they had until after we'd completed our goal. Their audience is an older, more established crowd. I think at least a fourth of our pledgers came from there.

Do you think people adopted the blog format as the new independent publishing platform too quickly? Is there a sense that people are now reverting back to printed media due to the sheer volume of people exploiting online presence for their own voice? Hmm. I think we'll only really know the answer to the first part of this question once blogging is totally dead. I don't really know. But I think there was a point in 2009 or so that too many blogs started popping up, things got a little hazy. People started clinging to big aggregator blogs and websites rather than a trove of little ones. It's become kind of like Walmart versus mom-and-pop stores. It's hard to compete and it's almost as if blogs aren't pining for the attention of readers anymore but of bigger blogs and websites. Which is odd. To answer the second part of this, yes. There's another comparison here and it's digital music and records. There's also way more photographers now, even more every year. Chances are you won't get published unless you do it yourself first, so lots of photographers are just making books so that they can get some legitimacy. Everyone has a website, but not everyone has a book. And good books are tasty so this is great for everyone.

What would you say to someone looking to self-publish something for the first time? Take your time and don't use print on demand. This is your baby. Joerg Colberg interviewed the Dutch book publisher Hans Gremmen a few months back who had some great things to say about this: "Somehow I really like that these aspects of bookmaking take time. That’s because you think about what you are doing, and you often reconsider it. A photographer sometimes has to decide whether to go on a Summer vacation or to to save the money, to put it in the book, for instance. This commitment is important. There should be some risk in making a book, with print on demand nobody has to take a risk. Which makes it very random. What is the necessity of getting it there if nobody wants to invest in it?"

Romke Hoogwaerts currently resides on the Lower East Side, NY and can be found online at the following;

I first came across zines when I first started going to local punk shows. There was usually five or six different ones on the merch table or occasionally people would sell them out of their backpacks.

The first one I ever read was by a guy named Dylan Haskins called Rent This Space. He was four issues in and this one encompassed photos and writings (if my memory is right) about his recent travels around America, the G8 protests in Scotland and going on tour around Ireland with a bunch of local bands whose members were a part of Basta! Youth Collective (the group responsible for organising the majority of local gigs at the time). It was, and still is, one of the best put together zines I’ve ever come across. Dylan went on to open an arts space here in Dublin, host a children’s TV show and then most recently run for government, but that’s a whole other story.

That zine inspired me to make my own one. Bear in mind I was 16 at the time so it was mostly super-specific gig reviews and ill-informed attempts at opinionated writing. The only part that kinda worked for me was the photos I included. All that aside, I was quite proud of it. I called it Little Thoughts after an old Bloc Party song. It was kinda fitting.

After that came several aborted attempts at a second issue before I finally made another one under a different name, Bonfire Hopskotch, relating to a particularly messed up dream I had at the time. This was something that definitely should not have seen the light of day. It was poetry. Dear god, to this day I’ll hold it against my friends for not telling me how terrible it was and that I shouldn’t have put it out.

I kept buying zines at punk gigs but that was the last one I put out. I made one with my friend Mark during a pair of free maths classes about stuff around us in the room. That one never was released either despite probably being the best of any the ones I did. I’m going to do a pretty detailed search of my old school books tomorrow because it’s definitely in one of them, hopefully just not one of the ones that were thrown out.

Last August I put together a zine of photos that I took during a year of anxiety medication called I Said It Was Simple, Not Easy and had more déjà vu’s than I thought possible. The principles never changed, only now the glue stick and loose A4 sheets of copy paper became design software and a PDF file. Sixteen year old Alex can do this stuff, why can’t you? And don’t say finance, because I’ll have tips for that too.