Making a magazine is always a challenge. Making one with your editor-in-chief in New York and your designer in Warsaw, across a six-hour time difference, is something else entirely. Fathers is a quarterly magazine about fatherhood and the changing role of men, created between these two cities by editor Ania Czajkowska and designer Karol Błędowski. There are no fast cars, no grooming tips, no lifestyle fantasies. The content is both humble and extraordinary: interviews, reportage, and photo essays that treat the father-child relationship as a subject worthy of serious, beautiful publishing.
Each issue is printed in a small, bookish format that hints at a handbook quality — something you might carry in a jacket pocket and return to. The fifth issue explored unconventional parenting, featuring cinematographer Wojtek Zieliński on uprooting his family from Poland to a farm in Portugal and Anna Maria Szymkowiak on the importance of being open with her son about being transgender. The cover showed artist Paweł Althamer clutching a polka-dot teacup with dirty hands — nothing special about the photograph, and that was the point. The subject could be any man, any father.
magCulture called Fathers “a wonderful exception” in a landscape where honest men’s magazines are rare. Poland is not the country most people associate with progressive gender politics, which makes the publication all the more notable — a quiet proof that the conversation about masculinity and caregiving needs to happen everywhere, not just in Scandinavia. After Czajkowska stepped down as editor-in-chief, the magazine entered a new chapter, but the voice it established — intimate, unpretentious, emotionally honest — set a standard that few fatherhood publications have matched.
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