Photographer Mark Lim kept sending his images to indie magazines, carefully sequenced, with suggested layouts and titles — and they kept butchering the work. So in 2011, he and art director Lizzy Oppenheimer started NicOtiNe from Brooklyn, a biannual fashion and art magazine built on one radical idea: let the photographer's vision survive intact. No mood boards, no reference images pulled from other people's work, no formula.
The result is a publication that operates more like a group exhibition than a traditional editorial magazine. Lim and Oppenheimer see themselves as curators rather than editors, and they are openly baffled by the industry's obsession with pulling from existing imagery to guide new shoots. Each issue is almost entirely visual — sleek, glossy, and deliberate — featuring both established fashion photographers and emerging talents who are given the rare gift of creative freedom without interference.
The magazine's tenth issue leaned into the milestone with tongue firmly in cheek: ten contributors, all aged in multiples of ten, ten pages per story, ten cameras per shot. That playfulness, paired with serious production values and a Parsons-educated eye for composition, has earned NicOtiNe a quiet but devoted following among photographers and stylists who are tired of editorial processes that sand down every original impulse.
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