Print is dead. Good writing isn’t.

The editors of Broken Atlas know the world’s changed, expanded into something like the Infinite. We’ve been there and back, on the far frontiers of a permanent frontier. We all understood the point when Roy the Replicant said, in Blade Runner, “I’ve seen things… attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion,” he was speaking as witness for the coming marriage of hot experience and cool imagination. The name of the game is providing a context open to all possible users. The way our name came about is telling. Chris Frey was sitting with colleagues in an office one day not so long ago, the kind with fax machines, (remember those?) and someone said, “We need a new atlas, the world changing,” and Chris said,

“Well, you can’t make a new world without breaking a few atlases.”

We will keep on breaking atlases, breaking rules, because that’s the only way to see where we are. The flash of breaking rules illuminates the coming action.  Watch, now —!

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Editor: Christopher Frey
Webtronics: Lionel Mann
Contributors: Larry Frolick, Donald Weber, Aliza Ma, Andrew Gregg, Michael Takasaki, Craille Maguire Gillies, Kat Kensington, Ed Wilkinson-Latham, Tyler Stiem

[Photo: Lorne Bridgman]

Christopher Frey’s career in immersive/investigative journalism began as a teenager when he went undercover to play a succession of hired corporate mascots, including the Campbell’s Soup Girl, Mr. Peanut and Santa Claus, gender-bending whenever necessary. (His reportage from that era remains unpublished.) For a brief period he gave up his literary ambitions to scream in a suburban Toronto hardcore-punk band. Music soon gave way to filmmaking, but the pressures of financing his genre films though pharmaceutical experimentation forced him into a two-year overseas sabbatical working as a towel boy in an Osaka bathhouse. In 1996 he launched a magazine that shall for now go nameless, but which won Magazine of the Year at the National Magazine Awards during his tenure as Editor-in-Chief. Now an award-winning Toronto/Rio de Janeiro-based journalist, Mr. Frey covers culture, economics and technology in a globalizing world. Broken Atlas began as his own virtual woodshed. He contributes regularly to Monocle, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Azure, Canadian Geographic, EnRoute, CBC Radio and Maisonneuve. Broken Atlas is also the name of his book-in-progress, a work of first-hand reportage on the fulsome ironies of globalization. It’s due out in early 2011, from Random House. Contact him at frey@brokenatlas.com. (He tweets under Cf_huzun.)

Donald Weber is one of Canada’s preeminent photographers, winner of a World Press Photo Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography, awarded by the Canada Council. Specializing in intimate portraits of our unredeemed world, his work has been exhibited worldwide and he has worked on assignment for Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Magazine in Afghanistan, Darfur, Russia, Congo and Southeast Asia. A contributing photographer with VII Network, Don has lived abroad since 2006. Visit his website at www.donaldweber.com

Larry Frolick is the author of four literary non-fiction books, including Bastard Eden/Our Chernobyl (2008), a documentary collaboration with photographer Don Weber that won the Lange-Taylor Prize (USA). Larry has won four National Magazine Awards, including one as Canada’s best new journalist. Currently completing a Masters in Cultural Studies on Social Modernism, he travels frequently in the developing world.

[Photo: Julian Katz]

Aliza Ma is a relentless cinephile. As a child, she remembers sitting in a dark nationalist theater in Beijing, where her grandmother was the manager, eavesdropping and revelling in the cineres of post-revolutionary China. Her continuous fascination with moving image has guided her work in archiving, translating and exhibiting film. She has worked in programming for AFIFest, Sundance and the Toronto International Film Festival. Mostly, she is interested in the engagement between contemporary (inter)national filmmaking with landscape, cartography and imagination. Don’t get her started on wabi-sabi… (Aliza tweets under mm_subarashii.)

Michael Takasaki is a Toronto-based advertising copywriter. He also takes photographs, mostly to annoy the higher-ups in the Toronto Transit Commission. And of things he eats. For additional evidence of his personal obsessions visit his flickr site. He has been a contributor to Christopher Frey’s various publishing endeavours whenever they were running a little short.

For the past nine years, writer and editor Craille Maguire Gillies has been making a highly unscientific (and expensive) investigation into which province is the most bureaucratic by moving from Ontario to Saskatchewan to Quebec to Alberta. Turns out, getting a health card and driver’s license is a nightmare in both official languages. A former editor at the travel magazine enRoute (where she shared National Magazine Awards in the Words and Pictures Best Single Issue categories), she has contributed to the Globe and Mail, Canadian Geographic, PBS MediaShift and CBC Radio. Some of that work can be found at craille.com.

Lionel Mann mashed up being techie at a non-profit for eight years with international travel writing and photography assignments, including a bi-monthly column on travel and technology that appeared in numerous issues of Outpost Magazine and the National Post. He is currently looking after his 20-month-old son by night and working as an independent web professional and photographer/writer by day. Visit his website www.lionelmann.com or follow him on twitter.

Andrew Gregg left southern Ontario in 1986 and got into television—in the Yukon. His career has always been a bit accidental. A lucky break led to a stint at CBC’s The Journal beginning in 1989 and a quick decision to quit in 1996 led to wildly fun documentary filmmaking career. Andrew has worked all over the world, making films for CBC, including the premiere episode of Canada: A Peoples’ History, several episodes of Life and Times , “Locked Horns” for Witness and “Geologic Journey: Rockies.” His work has also been seen on Discovery Canada, History Television and CTV, and internationally on Discovery, National Geographic (with colleague Wade Davis), NHK, Smithsonian and ARTE. He is currently finishing a four-part series called “The Adventurers” for CBC’s Nature of Things, shot in Borneo, Egypt, Polynesia and Baja. His next project is with photographer Chris Rainier, on a journey to meet the Mentawai of Siberut, off the west coast of Sumatra. That project has also been sold to Brave/The Doc Channel/Smithsonian Television. He is also planning to work on a new CBC series, “Geologic Journey: World.” Most of Andrew’s work is done with 90th Parallel Productions in Toronto.

http://www.90thparallel.ca/
http://www.explorersclub.ca/

Kat Kensington was recently liberated from 10 years at a desk job in the financial services industry. Now working as a freelance writer and an aspiring novelist amid the worst economic environment of her generation, Kat divides her time between New York and Toronto. Here she reports on the vicissitudes of this brave new world.

Tyler Stiem is a Canadian writer and photographer who likes Africa. A lot. He writes about African culture and politics to the exclusion of just about anything else. He should probably pack up and move to Dakar or Nairobi or, I dunno, Bujumbura, but for now he’s based in London, where he works for an African development organization. His journalism has appeared in The Walrus, Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, Outpost, and Descant, and he is a sometime contributor to CBC Radio’s Dispatches program. He’d like to point out that the self-portrait of his hand (handsome, isn’t it?) was taken in Mexico.

Visit his photo blog Strange Shores.

Edward Wilkinson-Latham is an international correspondent, travel writer and photographer. His work has appeared on numerous occasions in publications such as Time Out, Toro, Vogue, GQ, The Globe and Mail, Outpost, SHARP for Men and National Post. He has been nominated twice at the Canadian Magazine Awards and received an honorable mention for his work. His photography has appeared in a number of travel and art publications and he has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, US and Europe. The above photo demonstrates Mr. Wilkinson-Latham’s familiarity with the tropics.

Visit his website www.wilkinsonlatham.com