Jennifer Mai

I’m an editorial writer for Still Edition, where I write about art, visual culture, design, and the stories behind images that are easy to overlook. I’m especially drawn to work that sits slightly outside the obvious — old magazine covers, unusual illustration, photography, forgotten archives, overlooked artists, and visual ideas that once felt futuristic, strange, or hard to place.

What I enjoy most is digging into the context around an image: who made it, where it came from, why it looked the way it did, and what still makes it worth looking at today.

I write for Still Edition, where I spend a lot of time looking closely at individual works, artists, publications, and creative movements. What interests me most is often the context around an image: where it came from, who made it, what was happening around it at the time, and why it still feels interesting years or decades later.

I’ve never been particularly interested in writing about art in an overly academic way. I prefer approaching it through curiosity, research, and close observation. I like following references from one image to another, digging through archives, finding connections between different periods, and occasionally coming across something completely unexpected along the way.

A lot of my work revolves around editorial art, print culture, science fiction imagery, photography, design history, and other corners of visual culture that don’t always receive much attention. I’m interested in how images travel through time, how our perception of them changes, and why certain pictures somehow stay with us while thousands of others disappear.

For me, writing is really an extension of looking. The best subjects usually start with an image that makes me stop for a second and wonder where it came from.