Photographing our Literary Culture

My name is Matt Bialostocki. I'm a photographer and bookseller with a vested interest in the literary culture and community of Wellington and New Zealand.

Getting Boosted would be game-changing for my photography, and life-changing for me. If you have a vested interest in my work - if you are a writer, reader, bookseller, publisher - if you're a photographer or if you just believe that what I am doing is important - I hope you will donate. Enabling me to keep doing what I do would be a huge step in supporting me.

For four years I've been working on a project to document this community through photography. I have thousands of photographs from publishing events, readings, discussions and panels from this time. I have photographs of writers and readers, of publishers and booksellers. Slowly I have amassed a body of work that I am proud of and I build on this almost every week.

I want to expand this project. I want to make it to more events, and photograph more writers in the spaces they write in. I don't care if you're a bestselling author or if you've just hand-sewn fifty copies of your first chapbook. I want to open the project up to anyone who wants to be involved. If you're reading this then there's a strong chance that I want to photograph you. I won't be stopping anytime soon. Literary events are almost always in very low light, requiring something beyond the average camera - and this has had a cost.

The majority of the time I take photographs without financial compensation. This is because my time is given freely and I love what I do. However photography does have a monetary cost and I have difficulty bearing it alone. $3,265.00 is precisely the cost of my hardware. I had to buy a new camera at the beginning of the year after watching my old one slowly grind down, and finding extra work to pay it off detracts from the time I can spend actually photographing the vibrant community that I'm attempting to document. A $50 donation means I can spend two hours taking/processing photos. I want to keep doing this and I want to keep doing it with no pressure on the people I'm focusing on for this project.

Any excess of this financial target will go towards creating a digital archive of this project that the public has access to. This side of the project is still in development.

Thank you for your time, and please help spread the word. You can help me out.