On a spring Saturday afternoon in Melbourne, High Street in Thornbury moved with its usual ease — trams humming past, cars gliding by, the scent of roasted coffee drifting from across the road. A few steps from a framing shop, behind a discreet glass façade, Perimeter Books glowed with quiet activity. The room filled quickly: photographers, students, curators, and friends gathered shoulder to shoulder, speaking in the low, familiar register of shared enthusiasm.
It was 11 October, and the bookshop was hosting the launch of the newest instalments in the CCP.PE.ZINE, a collaborative publishing series created by the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) and Perimeter Editions (PE). At the front of the room, Daniel Boetker-Smith, CCP’s Director, stood beside Dan Rule, Perimeter’s Co-founder and Publisher. They spoke briefly about the project’s intent — to offer emerging photographers a tactile space between exhibition and book, making photobook publishing accessible without diluting rigour.
Around them, people leafed through the two new releases — Shimla by Yask Desai and Tomorrow by Ryley Clarke — while others revisited the first pair, Fourteen by Minami Ivory and Corrosion by Nik Ranepura. There was no formal program, only conversation and books — the kind of quiet exchange that sustains photographic culture at its best.
The CCP.PE.ZINE project unites two institutions with a shared belief that photography is dialogue, not commodity. Founded in 1986, CCP has long offered a platform for experimentation and mentorship. Perimeter, established in 2011 by Rule and Justine Ellis, has since redefined independent publishing in Australia, representing over sixty international imprints while maintaining its own distinctive editorial line.
Together, they have built a model that merges curatorial insight with design discipline. Each zine shares a carefully considered architecture — printed locally in Melbourne, A5 in size (210 × 148 mm), with matte-laminated softcovers, saddle stitching, and full-bleed images that extend edge to edge. Designed by the Perimeter Editions team, the series favours clarity over flourish: clean typography, uncoated stock, and a tactile surface that invites touch. Its quiet consistency allows each artist’s voice to emerge with clarity, their tone and sensibility unimpeded by stylistic excess.
Boetker-Smith has described the series as a space of “experimentation rather than validation” — a testing ground for ideas still forming, practices that thrive in the tension between risk and resolution. The editions are limited yet affordable, intended to circulate widely through Perimeter’s distribution network — a modest but vital gesture toward accessibility and sustainability within Australian photobook culture.
Minami Ivory — Fourteen
The first in the series, Minami Ivory’s Fourteen, opens not with declaration but with stillness. Born in Hokkaido and now based in Tasmania, Ivory works across photography, painting, collage, and performance, her practice defined by what she calls “mark-making as reclamation.”
Fourteen forms part of her ongoing project Weapon of Choice, which re-examines the experience of sexual violence and its cultural silencing. Rather than illustrating trauma, Ivory reconstructs its emotional residue — the textures that remain after language fails. She has spoken of inadequate sex education and patriarchal systems that “mute the vulnerable,” yet in these images that muteness becomes visible matter.
Printed edge to edge, the photographs hover between abstraction and recognition: faces dissolve into haze, torsos blur beneath veils of pigment, a hand reaches and vanishes. Each image bears the trace of labour — scratched, erased, painted over — as if the act of making were also an act of recovery.
The restraint is deliberate. Fourteen refuses spectacle. It invites intimacy and endurance, suggesting that healing is not closure but continuation. Its modest format amplifies this quietness; to hold it is to sense both fragility and insistence. It is, in essence, a book about survival — not as statement but as gesture.
Nik Ranepura — Corrosion
If Ivory’s work turns inward, Nik Ranepura’s Corrosion looks outward — into friendship, belonging, and the poetry of everyday life. A self-taught photographer based in Naarm/Melbourne, Ranepura describes the book as a portrait of “the subcultures and communities I’m immersed in … an imagined space tinged with the city’s same fragile grey.”
Shot on 35mm and medium-format film, Corrosion unfolds as a sequence of lived moments: a friend lifts his shirt to the sun, a stairwell gleams after rain, a woman’s hair catches the afternoon light. The photographs are tactile and unposed, their imperfection integral to their warmth.
Ranepura’s sequencing is musical — one image breathing into the next, guided more by tone than by subject. There are no captions, no overt narrative, only rhythm. The title hints at decay, yet what emerges is renewal: the beauty of endurance, the quiet grace of communities that hold each other through time.
He writes that his work is “an ongoing attempt to make sense of closeness,” and that closeness defines the book. Grain becomes a texture of care. The images, small and luminous, evoke what it means to belong not through declaration but through proximity.
Yask Desai — Shimla
With Yask Desai’s Shimla, the series turns toward history — personal, familial, and postcolonial. Desai, an Indian-Australian artist, returns to the northern Indian hill station where his father once lived and worked. The book is both travelogue and elegy, an exploration of how places persist within memory.
He recalls visiting the Indian Coffee House as a child, a space that decades later remains unchanged. To him, it represents “a quiet civic monument” — a continuity of conversation, a metaphor for endurance.
The photographs translate that notion into light and texture. Streets fade into mist, façades tilt toward the sun, walls bear the fatigue of time. Every image feels suspended between presence and absence, between what is seen and what can only be remembered.
Desai’s restraint is his strength. He resists nostalgia, favouring what might be called observational melancholy — an awareness that to photograph the past is also to alter it. Shimla listens as much as it looks. In its muted palette and patient pacing, it becomes a meditation on inheritance: how the act of looking back also redefines what lies ahead.
Ryley Clarke — Tomorrow
Ryley Clarke’s Tomorrow returns to Melbourne, though to a city filtered through light and reflection. Clarke, who works between still photography and film, frames the book as “a cinematic coming-of-age story” — an observational study of transition, perception, and time.
His images capture what he calls “moments of instability and upheaval,” when the familiar world shifts slightly out of register. Glass, concrete, dusk, and motion recur as motifs. The result is an urban nocturne rendered in quiet tones: windows glowing like afterthoughts, pavements soft with reflection.
There are no figures, yet human presence lingers everywhere — in the architecture of movement, in the spaces between frames. The sequencing is minimalist but rhythmic, echoing the pulse of the city itself. Tomorrow feels less like documentation than reverie: a sketchbook of perception, where light becomes memory’s medium.
As the fourth in the series, it acts as an epilogue or, perhaps, a threshold. It connects the inward gaze of Fourteen and Corrosion with the outward reflection of Shimla, completing a quiet circle of observation — from body to street, from homeland to horizon.
A Series That Breathes
Taken together, the four zines form a subtle map of contemporary Australian photography. They share no single theme, yet each redefines the photobook as a space for empathy and experimentation.
Ivory reclaims the image from silence; Ranepura builds community through care; Desai excavates the architecture of memory; Clarke translates time into atmosphere. Their methods differ, but their attention is alike — slow, tactile, deeply human.
The CCP.PE.ZINE series demonstrates what collaboration can achieve when hierarchy is replaced by mentorship. CCP’s curatorial guidance and Perimeter’s publishing craft merge into a single organism — an ecosystem of possibility rather than product. Distribution through Perimeter’s international network gives these small publications global reach, yet their essence remains local: hand-to-hand, page-to-page, made to be lived with.
Each zine quietly asserts that photography’s life does not end on the wall but continues in books, in hands, and in conversation — a slow circulation that sustains the art form.
As the afternoon light softened and the launch drew to a close, people lingered near the main table, still talking with Boetker-Smith and Rule, still turning pages. Outside, trams rattled north toward Preston, cars passed in slow procession; inside, the air carried the faint scent of paper, ink and coffee.
Around the room, the shelves of photobooks — the long continuum of the medium — seemed almost to observe the scene. The giants of photographic publishing looked down from their spines, bearing witness to this next generation finding its voice.
In that moment, it became clear that the CCP.PE.ZINE series is more than a publishing initiative. It is a conversation between artists and mentors, between past and future, between page and eye.
The scene felt both ordinary and momentous: a handful of slim books, a room of engaged readers, the quiet hum of continuity.
They didn’t look like endings. They looked like beginnings — the quiet kind that change how a culture sees itself.
- All images courtesy of Perimeter Editions and Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)
- More information: Perimeter Editions and Centre for Contemporary Photography
