With an introductory text by Katie Evans. Display typeface by Selina Bernet
Printed in Latvia, edition of 500 copies
Sorties first issue, titled This is not just an image. This is not a just image, explore how images of women are historically shaped by a male-dominated gaze that positions them as objects of desire. By questioning whether framing gender through oppositional binaries reinforces these very power structures, representation is shown to be non-neutral, as images repeat and reshape meanings already embedded within cultural and ideological systems. The issue embraces both “rich” and “poor” images as politically charged tropes that reflect contemporary contradictions and modes of representation.

Sorties is a living bulletin, one with an organic yet periodic cadence. Yet, as a bulletin, a “sealed” notice, we find ourselves returning to the roots and truths of the word itself, where bulla first referred to a swelling or a rounded form, an inflation or a knob, a proliferation of bumps and blisters. Sorties is, in this sense, a swelling of sorts: its initial form an accumulation of infested, infected iconography; depictions saturated with a masculine narrative, a sense of history extensively patriarchal. Sorties is both a collection of stories and a series of counter-responses. There is strategy, and there is an unknown journey set in motion; the two are intertwined, completing one another, never mutually exclusive.