HAMBURGER EYES

Photos by Ted Pushinsky.

There she goes again. The woman in all black. I would see her everywhere, walking to the bus stop I assumed. A day or a month goes by, I see her again. Long straight gray white hair. 5 foot tall. Always black dress, black coat, black bag, black everything. Always by herself. Year after year I still see her and I still wonder about her.

One day at one of Ted’s photo show openings, I see him talking to a woman. They know each other well. Wait, it’s her! “Who is she, Ted?”, “She was my photo teacher.”

I don’t think I met her that night but eventually I did meet her and she is a very nice humble lady. I saw her last weekend at the memorial for Ted. She had a bag with her filled with books and zines by Ted. She shared them with people to check out. Some of those were ones that we published and one of those books was titled, “Facing It.”

She pulled it out and we chatted about how maybe we can do another publishing of this book. Or that someone should republish it. I flipped through it and I could see why. I was embarrassed. It was xeroxed and kind of falling apart. We had just gotten our glue bind machine and were still experimenting with sizes, page count, and different glues. Some glues dry soft so the bind opens more, some dry hard. Looks like she got one of the hard glue ones. This book was 120 pages and approx 5″ x 7″, published in 2013.

Earlier that day Troy Holden had mentioned his copy of that book falling apart too. But mostly because he had studied it so much.

When I held this woman’s copy, I had forgotten that every photo was a 2 page spread. Naturally you want your photos to fill the entire page and Ted shot mostly horizontal. You’ll notice most of his books are horizontal books with the binding on the left shorter side. Which is totally fine if you are a legit print shop and have the right equipment to do it. We didn’t. This is why the zines we printed with Ted are calendar style, staples on top, flipping the page up to see the next page. And this is why we made “Facing It” all 2 page spreads. The problem with 2 page spreads is that the middle of the photos gets lost a little in what they call “the gutter” which is where the page meets the glue meets the binding. It’s especially noticeable with smaller books. But once Ted’s mind is made up, then that is what is happening.

We were all fine with it at the time and it’s always fun working with Ted and we edited the photos to compensate for the gutter, but seeing this woman’s copy made me want to re-visit these images properly. So these photos here are some highlights.

After discussing the book I asked her if she really was Ted’s photo teacher. She said, “I was his photo teacher’s photo teacher.”

See more of Ted’s photos at his website : http://tedpushinsky.com

In 2010 was when we started the CATALOG. We had other zines and books going on besides Hamburger Eyes but it was time to get organized. We had the studio and some copy machines, couldn’t afford to put out the new Hamburger Eyes, so we just started cranking out zines.

We released the first 6 all at once. It was “Spies Like Us”, which was supposed to be all portraits of photographers but ended up portraits of civilians too, so a portrait zine. “Waterfall Hunters”, adventures in Hawaii. “World Champs”, the after party in the streets when the SF Giants won the championship. All photos by me. And then the first 3 volumes of Cellybrain, which was the best of a cell phone photo submissions blog we had running (before Instagram).

I felt like posting these photos today because of “street photography”. I never liked the term. I shot and still shoot photos of everything. I guess I just don’t like labels or categories. I do like black and white. I can claim that. I can see how it swerved that way though. Living in San Francisco with a big photo gang pretty much and mostly shooting all nutty street adventures back then only attracted all the crazy street photos from other major cities. But if you really look at all the pages of Hamburger Eyes, you will see that there is also the beach, portraiture, documentary, travel, landscapes, lifestyles, etc.

“The Continuing Story of Life on Earth”. That is the subtitle we still put on the credits page of each issue of Hamburger Eyes. Only a few people know this, I stole that. I took it from a National Geographic subscription ad. We stole a lot of things. When we had ads, we did a lot of trade ads. So you might have seen an ad in another magazine that said something like “Hamburger Eyes, an Instant Classic.” That was jacked from Kodak. “Imported from the Future” was one of my favorite ones. That was from a Nikon F5 ad. But the National Geographic one stuck. It summed it up perfect and I think deep down, maybe still, I wanted us to be the black and white version of that magazine.

Anyways, enjoy these photos of Hawaii. My parents moved there in the 90s so I would go there a lot and my brother, sister, and I would go “hunting”. The folks eventually moved back to San Diego, so there goes the free food, car, and couch.

Pretty sure the first 13 issues of Hamburger Eyes had at least 1 photo of Hawaii in there. And these scans are from 2010, so that’s why they look like that.

Why don’t they play poker in the jungle? Too many cheetahs. (Waikiki Zoo)

Let know in the comments if you like these back stories and behind the scenes stuff.

I’m going to start highlighting past issues and publications as a feature here on the site. We have an awesome archive. Well what is left of it anyways, we did crash a big hard drive and blown up at least 2 computers. And for some reason I feel like telling a story right now.

Photo by John Oliver Hodges

Hamburger Eyes No. 14, I consider this one the missing issue. If you have this one you are stoked. With No. 13 we were feeling ourselves, our hardcover book just came out, and we had just secured a new headquarters that we named “The Photo Epicenter”. We were using a offset print shop in the SOMA of SF and we ordered 3000 copies. It was around 150 pages or so. This issue cost around $9000 to make and that is a really good deal. We would get distributors to pre-pay, we had advertising in the back of the magazine, worked out a deal with the print shop to make payments, and we had ways of raising funds quick.

Photo by KC Ortiz

Then the economy crashed. You never think these things will affect you until they do. Money became very tight. We had lots of new bills, advertisers weren’t buying ads, shops were closing, and the distributor was cutting their order in half or more and didn’t want to pay up front.

Photo by Alex Martinez

So we focused on the lab. We had darkroom and studio rentals and a gallery. And I got a laser printer and a xerox machine. From these machines we started cranking out zines. Tons of zines like 4 or more titles a month. I bought paper cutters and glue binding machines. I figured we will just go back to making zines and Hamburger Eyes will now just be a zine publisher. We did that for 2 or 3 years straight.

Photo by Dennis McGrath

Then I started a new zine series called “Mankind”. We made 3 issues. Perfect binding, laser print, over 100 pages. People were saying why don’t you just call it Hamburger Eyes. So, we made Hamburger Eyes No. 14. The feedback wasn’t good. People were spoiled by earlier issues of nice high quality printing. They didn’t mind all the zines we were making, but they wanted their “Hamburger Eyes” to be better. I get it, I do too.

Photo by Jai Tanju

We continued making more xerox zines and by the time it was ready to make a new issue of Hamburger Eyes, I found a good price for some online digital printing. Hamburger Eyes No. 15 was digitally printed by a company on the east coast. 88 pages stapled, 500 copies. The size has changed a little and the binding, but this is how we print our magazine now.

Photo by Elmo Tide

Anyways, I only ended up making maybe 75 copies or less of No. 14 and I don’t even have a copy. These photos throughout this post are a few highlights and I think this is a really good one that didn’t get much love because of the print quality. So today we will give it some love.

Photo by Troy Holden

Photo by Brian David Stevens

Photo by Cole Barash

Photo by David Potes

Photo by Ted Pushinsky

Photo by Micah Danges

Photo by Nina Mouritzen

Photo by Uri Korn

If you enjoy this story and want more, let me know in the comments.