Olivier Zahm worked as an art critic for Artforum, Flash Art, Art Press and Texte Zur Kunst during the 1980s and early 1990s. He is a renowned curator and has worked with over 150 exhibitions of contemporary art throughout the world, including institutions like PS1, MoMA, and Centre Pompidou. In 1992, he founded Purple Prose magazine (1992 – 1998) with Elein Fleiss, and the publication has created spin-offs like Purple Fiction (1992 – 1998), Purple Sexe (1998 – 2001), Purple magazine (1998 – 2003), Purple Journal (2004 – present), Purple Fashion (1995 – 1998, 2004 – present), and Purple Books, a publishing house. The “realistic”, sometimes dubbed “anti-fashion”-, aesthetics of Purple was a reaction against the glamour of the 80’s, and can be linked with the global counterculture of that time, with the work of Juergen Teller, Terry Richardson, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Mario Sorrenti. In 2014, Olivier Zahm published his first book of his own work as a photographer, O.Z. Diary, with Rizzoli.