Since 2016, Mélodie Zagury, Daphné Mookherjee, and Stas Kalashnikov have been publishing aleï journal out of Paris — a biannual magazine of photographs, art, and essays that operates less like a periodical and more like a group exhibition in printed form. Each contributor is given their space to fill however they see fit. The editors do not impose a house style, a thematic framework, or a visual template. The result is a publication that feels genuinely unpredictable from page to page, because it is.
The contributors list across thirteen issues reads like a quietly formidable address book of international photography: Takashi Homma, Elizaveta Porodina, Tom Wood, Ari Marcopoulos, Blommers & Schumm, Adrianna Glaviano, Estelle Hanania. Alongside the photographers sit artists, writers, and poets whose work ranges from fiction to free-form text. Portfolios sit next to interviews. Photo series submitted by photographers from around the world share pages with essays that nobody asked for and everybody needed. There is no retouching, no filtering, and complete creative freedom — a policy that gives the magazine its distinctive rawness and its occasional roughness.
Zagury and Mookherjee have extended their editorial practice beyond the magazine itself. At the Feÿ Arts festival, they curated a publishing section in which young publishers, philosophers, and rare-edition collectors were invited to present their personal libraries in a surrealist forest scenography — tree trunks, fresh moss, neon lights — inside a château's breakfast room. It is the kind of project that only makes sense if you understand aleï not as a magazine but as an ongoing conversation about what independent publishing can be when it refuses to behave.
The name aleï itself carries no explanation, which feels deliberate. The magazine aspires to function as a permanent and distinct object — something closer to an artist's book than a newsstand title. Thirteen issues in, distributed worldwide from Paris, it remains one of the most visually distinctive independent publications in the European photography landscape: intimate without being precious, raw without being careless, and entirely, stubbornly its own thing.
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