Bardia Koushan is a photographer and designer based in London who, like most people working in creative industries today, learned a significant portion of what he knows from the internet. The observation was not unique, but the response was. In 2018, Koushan launched a Kickstarter campaign for Autodidact — a biannual print magazine built on a premise that is both simple and demanding: choose a single theme for each issue, then invite creatives from around the world to respond to it honestly and personally. Two stipulations apply to every contribution: the stories must be honest, and they must be personal. No abstractions, no secondhand opinions, no hiding behind expertise.
The first issue explored duality — the idea that everything in the world consists of two, often contradicting qualities — and the responses ranged from the visual to the literary, from the confessional to the abstract. A monologue mused on psychoanalysis, religion, and Admiral Nelson's sex life. The cover featured what appeared to be identical twins in matching yellow dresses standing in an incoming tide, but a closer look revealed they were not identical at all — a visual thesis statement for the entire publication. Subsequent issues have tackled themes like "mistake," and each time the editorial model produces something rare in contemporary publishing: genuine surprise. Because contributors are responding personally rather than professionally, the work goes in directions that no editor could have predicted.
The name itself is the philosophy. An autodidact is a self-taught person driven by curiosity, and the magazine operates on the belief that the internet has made us all, to greater or lesser extents, autodidacts. Our minds have been opened to new interests and possibilities, and creatives are increasingly multidisciplinary, drawing from a wider pool of influences than any formal training could provide. Autodidact gives those multidisciplinary minds a space to reflect on what they have learned, not from institutions, but from the messy, unpredictable process of figuring things out for themselves.
For a magazine about self-teaching, Autodidact is itself a lesson in what happens when you ask the right questions and then get out of the way. Each issue is an education in the oldest sense of the word: a drawing out of what people already know but have not yet been asked to articulate.