In person: Louise Munro, photographer and co-founder of Slave magazine

Sure, there are magazines like Vogue, but they tend to use established lensmeisters with celebrity clout. Then there are the likes of Dazed and Confused; more edgy, yes, but still out of most graduates' reach. So what’s a woman, newly graduated with a BA in photography from Edinburgh’s Stevenson College and with an eye for what makes a great picture, to do?

Louise Munro has loved photography from the minute she picked up the family ‘snapshot’ camera at around the age of 15. Then, given the opportunity to do a short module in high school – Edinburgh’s Boroughmuir – she was well and truly smitten. “I went out and took all these photographs, and my art teacher said I had a natural eye and that my photographs were really good.

“I actually bumped into the teacher again when I was in my first year at Stevenson College, at a garage filling up the car with petrol. I said to him I was now at college studying photography and he said, ‘Good, I'm glad to hear that. You had a natural ability.’

“I've always been quite an artistic person,” Munro adds, “but I was quite unsure about what area of art I wanted to get into career-wise.”

In those early days, she’d take candid, documentary-style images – one of her most vivid memories is of a picture she took while still at school. “I went to Edinburgh International Conference Centre and I took a photograph of the glass reflecting a guy window-cleaning on the other side of the road. You could see someone hanging out of the office window having a conversation with him. The conference centre had only just been built so it was really shiny and glossy. The way I captured it, my teacher thought it was cleverly done.”

It wasn’t just teachers who encouraged her. “I was always encouraged at home by my father and grandfather. They told me that if you can find something you love doing and make a career out of it, it'll never feel like work.”

After school, she took two years out to work, then applied to study at Stevenson. But just as she started the course, she discovered she was pregnant. “I carried on with the course and planned to carry on with the HND after that but my son was born prematurely, which put a bit of a spanner in the works,” she says, “so I had to drop out.”

Her son David is now eight and is “a lovely little boy, the light of my life”. After taking another two years out to care for him, she returned to college to finally complete her BA.

But having graduated in November last year, the question arose of what she would do with her hard-earned degree. “I was talking to another student, Ania Mroczowska. We were both doing a fashion element to our course, and fashion is notoriously a very hard industry to get established in. You have your magazines like Vogue and Elle and you have Dazed and Confused, which takes submissions from some up-and-coming photographers, but you still need to be quite established to get your foot in the door. It's all about who you know in the industry and we thought, ‘Where do we start?’”

The answer was to start their own magazine, Slave. “Ania's partner is Artur Dziewisz, who is an amazing graphic designer, so we asked him if he'd like to be involved and he said, ‘Definitely.’ We were really lucky on that side of things because if we didn't have him on board, the web design would cost us an absolute fortune. The three of us started brainstorming with ideas, working out what kind of magazine we'd like to do, and we decided we would do it quarterly, to keep it more interesting. There are other online magazines that have quite strict guidelines about submissions, and we decided we want to be art, fashion, culture and photography, and we want it to be for up-and-coming photographers as well as established photographers. We don't want to have restrictions for themes or anything like that.

“We will have spring, summer, autumn and winter, but that would be it. All we'll ask is for people to be as creative as possible. We're about the creative image.”

Having just published their fifth issue, the Slave team are celebrating their first birthday and have been “completely taken aback” by how things have gone. “The first issue came out and we thought maybe it would be like a little local magazine, but we were having submissions from Australia, America, all over Europe. It just snowballed, and every issue keeps getting bigger, editorials get better. We’re getting editorials from more established photographers as well.

“We don’t know what the future holds,” she says. “All we know is that it keeps on growing. We started this magazine to help people in our situation – people who didn’t have a place to showcase their work – and now it’s giving them a worldwide platform. I just love taking photographs, so if I can spend the rest of life doing that, I’m happy.”

slavemag.com