Hi everyone,

This one is hard to write, but I’ve been putting it off for too long, and a handful of emails I received in recent days made it clear I couldn't keep doing that. We are well past every deadline I've announced, and some of you have been waiting patiently for now close to a year.

So here it is: I've made the hard decision to cancel Hintology: Issue #3, and I would like to present my sincere apologies. Here’s what got me there:

You already know about the Meta ordeal from our last newsletter, so I won't go over it again at length. What I will say is that it was the first domino. In its aftermath I enrolled in evening graphic design courses, which ended up taking up most of the time I had left. More recently, I went through a few rounds of illness and tendinitis that made working at a desk difficult for weeks at a stretch. In January, when I finally had a full free month to bring the book to completion, the hard drive with all the book's data suddenly corrupted. That whole month went into recovering it. By Spring break, the last realistic window where I thought I could still catch up, I was burnt out, and late with my other assignments. I had to accept that pushing through would only make things worse.

But there's something that goes beyond the series of setbacks. When I launched this issue, my intention was never to design it alone. So of you might know that I wanted to bring in other graphic designers along, each taking a section and exploring it in their own way. That diversity was central to the concept I envisioned, and it never came together. There were some conversations, but they ultimately didn’t materialize, and I ended up carrying the full weight of the project on top of everything else.

And to be fully transparent here, my life is different now than it was when the first two issues came out. I had more time then, more financial stability, and I was living and breathing abstract photography. These days, I unfortunately unable to engage with it with what little time I have left - not because the thrill is gone, but because the conditions for that kind of sustained focus just aren't there anymore. I've been finding my way toward other things too: poetry, music, reading novels, finding other means to make sense of life... and I think that's also part of the equation here.

There is also something I feel I have to name directly: the submitted works are now a year old. These are living, current bodies of work, and I'm not comfortable asking artists to keep waiting while their practice moves on. There is a certain sense of urgency about assembling such a body of works in that it has to stay relevant for the contributing artists - and I don’t feel comfortable pushing the deadline further.

This is the third time Hintology will be going quiet. The first was early on, when Instagram cracked down on our page. The second was when I had to leave China and start over in Montreal, but we came back from that one with something more ambitious than anything we'd done before through these books. I don't know what shape this new pause will take or how long it'll last. What I know is that the two issues we were able to release are things I'm genuinely proud of, and I believe they hold up.

So… to everyone who submitted work for Issue #3: I’m truly sorry for letting you down. You trusted this endeavour and gave it something real. That trust wasn't given lightly, and this is not how it deserved to be returned. If you ever made a donation at the time of your submission, please do reply to this email and I'll sort out a full refund.

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On Instagram: we came back in June 2025 after several months offline and published curations every few days until mid-September, when our account went down again. Sara Melzer's voxpop interviews during that period were a real highlight. Since then we've mostly gone quiet there, posting only the occasional Stories, which feels safer given what happened. The restrictions Meta has introduced since the suspension (posts limited to five hashtags, no visibility on the #Hintology hashtag) have made our original model hard to sustain, and we haven't found a way around that yet.

What I'd love for Hintology to become, if it is still capable of becoming anything, is once more a home for thorough articles: interviews, opinion pieces, real conversations about experimental and abstract photography as art forms. The obstacle here is that I'm not a business person, I don't have a revenue model, and I've always been uneasy about advertising. I've done this work for free out of passion, and I don't know how to change that without compromising something essential.

So I'll just ask: if you have ideas, or if you'd want to be involved in some capacity, or even take parts of this project somewhere I haven't imagined, please feel free to reply. Hintology has only ever really worked through collaboration. I'm just no longer in a position to be the one holding it all together at all time.

That doesn't mean it has to end.

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I still have somewhere between 100 and 150 copies of Issue #1 and Issue #2, and I'd rather they find readers than sit in boxes here.

Both issues are thus now permanently discounted to $26 CAD (from $42), which is a mere $19 USD for a 160+ pages high-quality softcover art book.

Both are now freely available to read online as PDFs (Issue #1, Issue #2). The downloadable high-resolution versions (Issue #1, Issue #2) have been lowered to $6 CAD (down from $8).

If you've been curious about the project, this offer remains until stocks are depleted.

Thank you for patience despite everything,