Hayley Louisa Brown

0:15[Applause]

0:19hi I'm it working you can everyone hear me yeah okay I'm hay yeah hi and I am the founder of a magazine PA grip which came out it first issue last year.

0:37So I'll start by talking a little bit about me I'm a photographer originally I started doing fashion photography and then I realized that I hated it.

0:48And it was really boring and so I just started doing portraits and M music photography which is what I really love doing I used to get to off when I shot fashion all the time for just taking portraits of the models because I didn't really care about the clothes so I thought I would translate that into something that I could be a bit better at so here's like a little bit of my work and Hill snow and kendri Lamar and Y and N that's yeah my work I've grown up loving music. And that's one of the main reasons I wanted to get into photography sorry ♪

1:42oh okay. So now oh okay.

1:46So I have to talk into this now okay did everyone hear what I said before yeah okay. So when I started shooting musicians I started to get commissioned by a magazine called Clash because I was friends with Matthew Josephs who was the fashion editor there at the time.

2:04And I kind of just used to bug them all the time and asked them to let me shoot artists that I liked which eventually just led into them giving me a job there as the hip hop and rap editor so I did that for about a year before I continued just to do photography and I always wanted to to produce a magazine from when I moved to London in about 2010 2011 I was going to loads of hip-hop shows and seeing that. There was this energy that I'd never kind of seen before in that genre of music. And it felt more like going to see like a rock or a punk show than anything I'd seen before.

2:41So I have always loved Punk that was kind of my first love growing up like my uncle was a punk when he was younger so I grew up going to his house for like takeaways and to listen to The Clash when I was like four um I've just realized that I've picked two damned covers that wasn't intentional and it makes me look like I don't know anything sorry so yeah I kind of grew up with my uncle feeding me The Clash my dad feeding me Mariah Carey and Boys to Men and my mom making me listen to Donna Summer so yeah these magazines are kind of some of my biggest influences slash which is an American West Coast Punk Zen and obviously sniffing glue which is the infamous London Punk scene started by Mark Perry in the 70s so that kind of combined with my love for hip-hop is kind of what I I came together in my mind when I was starting a magazine one of my earliest memories of Sky TV was seeing the two pack California Love video on MTV Bas and I was kind of obsessed with it and and from then on I would like see things like Vibe and the source in the one wh Smith that was near a big train station about half an hours drive away from my house when I was growing up. So that would be my whenever I went shopping with my mom I'd be like please can we go to wh Smith so I can buy the source or whatever whatever it was but I've always kind of Loved These magazines I love the thoughtfulness of the imagery and I especially love the fact that the source tagline is the magazine of hip-hop music culture and politics I think that's amazing I think it kind of shows that music is so much more than just music and that there's so much more behind it.

4:39So in 2014 I sort of not quit photography but really pushed it away from being my main career to focus on making this which is Brick which is my magazine the first one released in May 2015 and we had Whiz Khalifa and school boy Q on the covers features inside with tanache Joey Badass YG Cameron TI a bunch of other artists it was designed by Rick Bell and Joe wasel at delivered by post and was edited with my friend Grant Brien who is now the hip-hop editor at Clash and for me making a hip-hop publication was something that I'd really wanted to do and I wanted to do it in a way that reflected the things that I found so important in Publications when I was growing up and things that made me want to be a photographer in the first place which was beautiful photography like my room when I was a teenager as I'm sure everybody else's was covered in torn out pages from magazines that I loved and I wanted to make something that had that same impact for young people now because I just didn't feel like there was anything that was that was saying that about the music that I loved so one of the things that I kind of did to elevate the way that rap music was looked at was to include an essay section which was kind of inspired by a book called Born to use mics which I don't know if anyone's read but it's like an academic collection of essays all written by American academics surrounding Nas's IL Matic album each scholar took a different song and kind of wrote a soci sociological essay surrounding the reference points that he makes in the songs it's super interesting and another book called pimps up hose down by Tracy Whiting which talks about young women and and their relationship with hip hop and so I wanted to push that kind of intelligence and I forgotten the words I was going to say there academic that's the word like the academic side of it make it something that is really interesting to read and like an object that you want to keep we had our first launch party in here. And we blew up a load of the images from the from the first issue up to a Zer and had them all around the walls which again was really exciting for me because it allowed us to elevate up into like a gallery space and make it something a bit more exciting and now.

7:18This is issue two which came out last month with ASAP Ferg and Vince Staples on the cover Neil Bedford shot ASAP Ferg and he shot got whiz for the first issue as well he's one of my favorites and we had features inside with gold link Action Bronson Rich Homie Quan Anderson pack a bunch of people which is really exciting I think should this work yeah this is just a video from when we were at the printers yeah.

7:49So with the second issue we have been now we're now stocked in wh Smith and Barnes & Noble in in the US which is really exciting because it was was a huge expansion from the first issue where we were just stocked in independent stores so it's really nice that people have liked the mag and wanted to wanted to stock it.

8:12So yeah here's just kind of a look in into the pages what was what was in there we had a photo diary with Vicky grout it's me zooming in the mag title there we go yeah and also the Mast head is shiny just so you can see so yeah.

8:33I just thought I'd show you a few spreads from the new issues this is as sap fer by Neil Bedford we went out to Texas and shot this in South by Southwest and it was ridiculous the record label hadn't actually sorted any us any of the passes that they told us that we had so it was sort of Neil and I running around tricking people into letting us go backstage for half the time.

8:59But it turned out pretty well um every issue I say every issue we've had two magazines out.

9:04So I don't know if that counts we do an archive feature with a photographer.

9:11And this is from Eddie ocher feature who is Brixton born and bred he's one of the most incredible photographers and most inspirational people that I've ever met I would highly recommend checking out his back catalog this is obviously Jay-Z there's shots in there that no one's ever seen before of a liar wuang Clan Biggie and he's put in there all of the stories behind the behind the photo shoots as well. And it it's so interesting to read there was so much stuff I think we're going to do it across the next issue as well because there's too much to fit we also visited the Hyman archive which is the biggest magazine archive in the world and took a delve into their hip hop magazine archive there's a bunch of interesting stuff in there that I'd never seen before we did a feature on Ray black who's incredible rible vocalist from London these images are by Holly Fernando we did a whole this is England section kind of spotlighting London everyone seems to think the Magazine's American so it was really important for me this time to kind of really shine a light on the UK and what we do and who does it well we also did a feature on Outlook Festival there's like a really weird kind of undercurrent of hip-hop artists that perform an Outlook but I feel like it's mostly looked at as like a Dance Festival so we sent Samuel Bradley out to Croatia to do this and he took it's like a 40-page portfolio we've got in the issue of his portraits which is really beautiful and he made this little film which I'm going to show you ♪

11:52yeah. So that was filmed by Samuel Bradley at Outlook and this is us on the on the the Shelf in real life.

11:59So yeah that kind of just is a quick overview of of who I am and what I do so we're just starting work on the third issue which will come out in the new year and working on the website it was really important to me to have the magazine as a completely physical object so we're kind of just looking at expanding video content and doing things to complement the print online rather than doing an online version of the of the so that's kind of all going to come together in the next few months and yeah that's it thank you