Less than a mile from where I grew up north of Boston, Connors Farm hosts a popular 7-acre corn maze in the fall.  Normally this is of interest only to locals, but in 2011, the farm made national news after a family called 911 when they couldn’t find their way out in a timely manner. They were found by police 25 feet from the parking lot.

In contrast to the maze, which is designed to confuse the walker, a nearby seminary had a small labyrinth of yew bushes on their property, arranged in a circular pattern with a single path winding through it. Its highly structured passage is meant to clear the mind and provide reflection, and its intended purpose was not lost on me even as a child.  While at a glance, the maze and the labyrinth might seem indistinguishable, the experience is wholly different.

Considering the difference between a labyrinth and a maze is a useful exercise for evaluating the utility of printed photography against a web-based presentation. In the aftermath of an exhausting election with a worrisome result, people are reportedly cutting back on news consumption and leaving Twitter in droves. Web-based media, particularly when viewed on addictive social media platforms, have reached a place where they largely communicate their own hunger for your attention.  People are pulling back, and looking for alternatives, and that is where print is making a comeback 

After 15 years of photographing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, primarily for online outlets and grant-funded projects like GroundTruth’s Foreverstan, I was hungry to create a physical, tactile, real object that could represent the parts of that experience I felt I could communicate in a novel way. There is a kaleidoscopic intensity to combat that defies context and description, but presenting to the reader one image at a time in a fixed sequence, more order and impact is given to my core arguments about the wars than I found possible in a web-based presentation. The paper choices, the binding types, the narrative structure all matter deeply as you organize the reader’s experience and transport them to your world.

While my first proper photobook, Attention Servicemember, cost $32,000 to design and print, took 15 years to photograph and two years to produce, I have also worked on many more modest zine publications over the years.  For me a zine usually costs between $100 and $500 to print, and can be turned around from an idea to a product in a couple of weeks. There are many printers who specialize in zines, but a cheap laser printer is certainly enough to get started.

Over the past five years, Report for America has supported more than 30 photographers, who tirelessly serve their local communities, representing them fairly for the historical record. Last year the cohort produced our first zine as a collaboration, with the only common thread being that the images were all made at night.  Courtesy Photos, Vol. 1, is essentially an invitation for a night out on the town with nine local photojournalists – from an anime rave in Los Angeles to a search and rescue operation in rural New Hampshire.

In September I wrote about El Tímpano’s Hiram Durán’s project photographing La Pulga market in East Oakland, an important third place for immigrant communities there. As a group, the Report for America photographers decided to explore that concept into our next zine project, the soon-to-be-released Courtesy Photos, Vol. 2.  The eight current photographers pooled their recent images that depicted their interpretations of the third place, and we sequenced an edit together.   

Sociologist Roy Oldenburg coined the phrase in 1989, and essentially if your home is your first place and your work is your second, your third place is where you hang out and socialize.  Of course, Oldenburg’s parameters feel largely outdated, which gave us some space to be creative in pairing images in tension with the tenets of sociological theory.

The zine will be printed in the next few weeks as a newspaper by Mass Books, and is available for pre-order here. Despite their inexpensive and somewhat ephemeral nature, an increasing number of libraries are collecting zines, including Courtesy Photos, Vol. 1 which is available at Washington’s National Gallery of Art library.

Telling stories is one of the fundamental activities of human culture.  The slow, deliberate, structured path a story takes can reveal truths that a frenetic social media feed of half-digested ideas simply cannot. It’s intimidating making print publications in an era when people are watching four TikToks at once on VR headsets – how can a little newspaper compete for whatever is left of folks’ attention? But feeling the paper, turning the pages, and moving through the story at your own pace, is convincing even if the economics of printed materials aren’t exactly sustainable. We aim to break even on our zines, and that’s ok. Making something special and durable for 100 people is its own reward.

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