Tabula Rasa Magazine, Volume I: Identity
The inaugural issue of Tabula Rasa, a New York- and Copenhagen-based magazine treating fashion photography as an independent, advertisement-free medium, gathers eighteen photographers' takes on a single theme: Identity.
Each contributor, drawn from varied backgrounds and working in distinct styles, produced an exclusive series responding to the issue's brief, turning the fashion image toward the photographers' own identities and the concept of identity more broadly. Under editor in chief Sabrina Banta, the magazine positions itself deliberately between magazine and art book, free of advertising and unbound by seasonal or trend-driven constraints, aiming instead for a plurality of outlooks rather than a single house style. Banta has described the title's premise directly: as children we don't yet know the limits of our imagination, curiosity alone sets the boundaries, and the magazine takes its name from that unmarked, fearless state.
Volume I launched in 2014 alongside a companion website, and the issue was carried by galleries and bookstores including Artbook at MoMA PS1, Gagosian, McNally Jackson Books, and International Playground in New York, Wood Wood in Copenhagen, and Daikanyama T-Site in Tokyo. The magazine describes itself as a non-profit platform for photographers, stylists, and writers to collaborate outside a producer-consumer relationship; more recent social media activity suggests the publication has been on extended hiatus since its early issues.
