Purple — Issue 44: The Analog Issue

The autumn/winter 2025–26 issue of Purple, the Paris magazine Olivier Zahm founded in 1992, is given over to analog media.

The editors frame it as an argument for physical experience against the flattening of culture by digital media, pointing to a younger generation drawn back to film, vinyl, live events and print. They say the point is dissent and optimism rather than nostalgia, and Zahm holds that a magazine on paper is itself a radical idea, not simply something that carries ideas.

Among the texts are Hakim Bey on immediatism, Emanuele Coccia on animism, Byung-Chul Han on the gaze and Daniel Pinchbeck on technofeudalism, while David Lynch and James Cameron each answer the question "Why analog?". Artists featured include Alighiero Boetti, Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince and Roman Signer.

The issue was printed with sixteen covers, among them pictures by Juergen Teller, Mark Borthwick, Cameron McCool and Zahm himself, and work by Thomas Ruff, Irving Penn and Katerina Jebb. It includes a special edition, Venice, New York, supported by Bottega Veneta.

Purple Institute, Autumn/Winter 2025–26. 483 pages, hardcover, 24 x 33 cm.