Inaugural Print Issue: A Portrait of You
Pier To:
A multimedia cultural collective focused on exploring the human story through the lens of curiosity, reflection, and growth.
Leading the Collective
My role as Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief
Pier to: was born in summer of 2020, in the wake of the global pandemic. It is a space to hold and support the growth of the people. We raise their voices and stories, showcasing the story of growth as one of friction, confrontation, stumbles, learning, and unlearning.
I founded Pier to: as a vessel for people to create, and draw out the colors of what it means to grow up in the world we live in. Through printed magazines and experiences of gathering, it continues to be that space.
In my role, I’ve led teams of 40+ artists, creatives, and writers to refine their work and curated how best to showcase them through print and digital formats.
Excerpts from the Collective
Photojournalism
Intimate Interviews
Collections of Personal Essays
Pier to: Values
Growth
The foundation of this collective is exploring individual growth through various lenses. Growth is a process, a journey, and one that we want to document and share for other people to hear these growing narratives and grow with them. Growth is learning, relearning, and unlearning.
Exploration
The key tool for growth is exploration. We don’t expect the journey to be linear nor do we think there would substantial benefit in having a strictly linear sequence of growth. Exploration indicates multiple beginnings, hidden terrain, and discovery. The destination of the journey revolves around the journey itself.
Perspective
As much as we are hesitant to admit it, our perspectives are intrinsically subject to bias. In a world so fixated on selling ideology and mass culture, it’s difficult to escape our respective bubbles and find growth in exploring different approaches. In bringing various perspectives to the table, we hope to add depth to our understanding of our world and realities.
Accessibility
Much of the information and knowledge considered substantial is often sheltered from the view of the public under the exclusive shroud of prestigious academia. Our mission is to bring quality content, ideas, and narratives to our audiences in a way that is digestible and nondiscriminatory.
Reflection
We want to escape the common conception of growth as only moving forward time and introduce reflection as another mechanism for growth. We believe that in reflection and understanding who you were can help you understand who you are now and who you want to be.