H013

Photo by Ray Potes

Some photos from Hamburger Eyes No. 13 published in 2009. File this one under Hamburger Eyes “Behind the Music”. It was super hard to edit down this issue to a few photos for this post so this post might be the longest one ever. Back then our issues only came out maybe once or twice a year. We had a long time to edit piles of submissions and we would cram at least 50 photographers into one zine. This issue had 150 pages and we printed about 3000 copies. I don’t know how many photogs but it was a lot.

Photo by Karna Kurata

I consider this era of Hamburger Eyes to be our “heyday” or when we peaked. Probs between 2007 – 2009. For some reason we had a lot of press, we had huge photo exhibitions happening in different cities, and we had just gotten our book deal with Powerhouse. We had good distribution, advertisements in the zine, and the darkroom facility that we would hang out at basically just handed the keys and the lease to us.

Photo by Bill Burke

But the economy was crashing. You don’t think these things will effect you until they do. A bunch of retailers were closing, which meant the distributor was ordering less and a lot of those retailers were also our advertisers. And we got a gigantic amount of bills added to the plate because we had the lab. To give you an idea, just to run the r4 processor was $600 a month and some times, actually a lot of times, we didn’t even have 1 customer.

Photo by Bryan Derballa

I was like, let’s keep the lab going and I am ok with Hamburger Eyes being done. Issue number 13 is a good number to go out on. It is a great issue with great photos. It was a great run. We’ll just teach classes and workshops, make this one room a gallery/book store, have events, rent out some of the offices, etc.

Photo by Bill Daniel

But I still felt like making zines at least. I had a nice lazer printer and there was tons of room for xerox machines etc. So we started making zines. Tons of them. I considered Hamburger Eyes a zine publisher and we published at least 2 or more zines a month. At that time when people were asking for a new issue I told them it was done, we just make these stapled zines now. It was a few years of that.

Photo by Elena Carrasco

Eventually we got more equipment like paper cutters and perfect binders and started making our own books. And then we got into outsourcing the covers to make them nicer and then eventually digital printing got affordable with better quality which led us up to today.

Photo by Arthur Pollock

It is weird to say we peaked 10 years ago and still be going. As time goes on you can see the cycles and I think we are in a good part of the cycle right now. For example every couple years the film vs digital argument gets fired back up. Anyways, this year is feeling like less projects which is good because it feels like more issues of Hamburger Eyes. We got 2 issues coming out in June and are already getting a jump on July and August. Get ready for a big summer.