Producing a DIY photo zine from a home printer can be challenging, but what about photographing and publishing a zine off the grid and on the road in 48 hours?
(See my zines: www.sodacitizen.com/store)
Coming at you from Colbert, Georgia. I'm in my Gazelle tent (amzn.to/4bweUpo) here with my mobile office working on a zine that I photographed yesterday it looks three records. I'm preparing for the Athens art book fair, which is tomorrow.
And hopefully I'll have a new local zine for these folks here in Athens. And I've said hopefully because well, producing a zine on the road out of my van from a campsite without any electrical hookups presents a few logistical challenges. During my return to zine making a battle for Epson printers, two of them I returned, the people were in customer service and Epson couldn't answer my basic questions about double sided printing and what weight paper could be used with what function basically I knew more than they did.
The bad news is that I wasted a lot of my time and money trying to figure this shit out. The good news is, you don't have to because you're watching this video.
The Epson ET 8550 (amzn.to/4cjeDaC) will double side print on 32 pound paper. If you use the rear feed tray, don't use the duplex printing and don't print it out of the bottom tray because you need to avoid any scenario where the paper moves around on a roller. One of the biggest challenges for this project was packing the van for three tags, photography, scene making and bending at the fair. I spent the first day making photos at once three records the second day producing the scene at my campsite. And the third tabling at the Athens art book fair selling that scene and a few others.
I chose WUXTRY Records for the subject matter of this zine because it's an iconic record store and an iconic music town. Peter Buck met Michael Stipe here and they formed REM. The B52s, Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, Drive by Truckers, Vic Chestnutt, Pylon, Mazerati, Widespread Panic, and many others have called Athens home over the years.
A few days before showing up in Athens. I gave the record store call. I spoke to Jared, he said he'd be working on Thursday with another co worker and it'd be okay if I spent some time making photos there. I used Hippcamp to book a site on private property near Colbert, Georgia, about 20 minutes from Athens. This ran me about $20 a night for a total of 60 because I had a campsite for three days and wasn't on the move. I was able to pack everything inside of the van and avoided loading anything onto the roof. I wanted to avoid loading things on the roof because I'm lazy and it's hot. It's a pain in the ass pulling things off and putting them back on the roof. pulling this off I use the gazebo gazebo canopy tent to power stations, astroturf a laptop to camping tables and the Epson 8085 ink jet color printer.
For the interior pages.I'm using a 32 pound Koala double sided matte photo paper (amzn.to/4clznyz) for the exterior it's 48 lb. same style Koala paper. This zine is 16 pages plus a cover full color stapled bound and half the size of a letter sheet of paper.
I found the Bostitch booklet stapler (amzn.to/3L4PODx) to work a little better than the long arm stapler I've been using. And I'm really happy with the Fiskars trimmer (amzn.to/4eDIWKG) that I have. During the printing. I ran one battery down to 30% and then swapped it out with one of my band that was hooked up to the solar panel. I was also charging my phone fans in my computer. I use these green cargo boxes as a platform to do my cutting and folding. Because I wasn't quite confident about the pressure that I have to put on these camping tables. I know I can stand on these green cargo boxes.
Like most of my colleagues in photojournalism. I use Photo mechanic for my calling, and my organizing, I'll print a contact sheet out for the zine making and just cut the little prints up. When it comes to calling and sequencing photos for books and zines. I find it absolutely necessary to get my hands on physical prints, so that I can arrange them on left and right sides of pages and see how they'll look when they face each other. Speaking on the photography part of this project, I will say that making photos and watch three records was a complete exercise in detail shots, all the little handmade signs and iconic, small pieces of visual imagery that do a lot of heavy lifting for storytelling.
I found it actually challenging to balance the human elements that came into the store and that work in the store with all these amazing colors and little teeny details that don't so much of the Athens music scene over the many years that WUXTRY has been there