Pregame Snaps

Local artist and street photographer Tonia Nelson released the sixth volume of her zine Genuine Curiosity this week, featuring a collection of photos and moments captured around Lambeau Field through the last two football seasons.

For Nelson, Genuine Curiosity serves as a way to put together her street photography work in a tangible way that can be shared with the public.

“Genuine Curiosity is just one of the ways that I put my photos out into the world,” Nelson said. “I spend a lot of time photowalking, mostly in Green Bay but really all over Northeast Wisconsin or anywhere that I happen to be… I tell people that I’m a street photographer, and in Northeast Wisconsin a lot of people don’t know what that means. I often default to documentary photography and then they kind of understand it a little bit better. [Street photography] is typically done in public spaces — sidewalks, parks, streets, public events, that sort of thing… Genuine Curiosity is an analog way for me to put it out into the world. I post them online a lot… but Genuine Curiosity is a way that I can make it a little bit more tangible.”

When Nelson began photographing the pregame experience in the fall of 2023, it wasn’t initially out of a desire to create a themed zine volume but rather a desire to practice street photography in a more densely populated area than is typically found in Northeast Wisconsin.

“I’ve been working on these photos for two football seasons,” Nelson said.

“When I started doing this, I didn’t know I would make a volume of the zine out of it. I just knew that I wanted to get into a densely populated area and take pictures of people. It’s easy to look back and see how it would lead to a volume of Genuine Curiosity. I was going out to home games and walking those streets and sidewalks around Lambeau Field before the game… If you’ve been to a home game, you know people are just everywhere. They’re everywhere and they’re fun and they’re having a good time. So I’m just taking pictures of people… I pulled together a bunch of my favorites and put them in this zine.”

With two seasons worth of photos and limited space in the zine, Nelson said she focused on selecting photos that interacted well with each other to tell a story.

“When I’m putting a zine together, I’m looking for pairs of photos,” Nelson said.

“What I’ve really started to do with my sequencing in these zines is when you open a spread and you have the two pages open — two photos side by side — I want those photos to connect in some way. That was one thing I looked for in all the photos that I liked from my pool of images. Where could I find those diptychs where I had two photos that shared a story or a theme?... Where do I find which photos all fit together in a large group of 20 versus standalone images by themselves?”

Nelson’s passion for storytelling through photography stems back to her education at UW-Green Bay, where she studied in an interdisciplinary social change and development program.

“That’s really where I built the foundation of my own personal perspective on things, and that’s really what these photos are…” Nelson said. “The program I did was a mashup of things — its foundation was history and sociology.

Knowing that that’s the lens that I’m looking through, both figuratively and literally with the camera, I think I’m more of a storyteller with my photos… There are some really good technical photographers out there that are really focused on the technical aspects of what they do… That’s just not what I’m focused on. I’m focused on the story.”

And the story in this sixth volume of Genuine Curiosity is one of a uniquely local experience.

“It’s about football and game day and it’s about Green Bay,” Nelson said. “What I’m showing here is unique to this area… You go to other cities that have professional football teams and they might be trying to create this experience, but Green Bay and Northeast Wisconsin really set the bar for this.”

Copies of Genuine Curiosity Volume Six: Pregame Snaps are available at Lion’s Mouth Bookstore or at tanianelsonart.com.