Hamburger Eyes

Just because something is in black and white doesn’t mean it should be viewed that way.

Take Hamburger Eyes, the seven-year-old San Francisco-based independent photo magazine run by brothers Ray and David Potes and longtime friend Stefan Simikich. What started as a zine copied at Kinko’s (stealthily, when the manager was looking the other way) is now a functionally complex photographic amalgam that makes one think less of point-and-shoots and more about hitting the darkroom.

With international notoriety, nods from numerous noted photographers and a book deal that’s a big deal, the future is looking positively meaty for three guys who started out burning their skin off in a makeshift darkroom under the stairs.

Though now based out of San Francisco, the magazine and the movement started humbly in San Diego, where the Potes brothers, children of Filipino immigrants, call home. Ray, who at 33 is three years David’s senior, got his first camera as a Christmas present from his father at the age of 13; a year later, he began producing zines with Simikich, a classmate from high school. A makeshift setup in the basement of the Potes home served as the crew’s darkroom. “We would just process our film. We didn’t use gloves,” recalls Simikich, now 32. “We have so many war wounds from those days—warts and peeling hands from the chemicals.”

Ray and Simikich produced several photo zines prior to Hamburger Eyes—loose collections of random, “nutty and arty” photos between covers with names like Perineum and Perineum 2: Filipino Nightmare. In his early 20s, Ray earned some professional tech experience by working full-time for four years as the “darkroom nerd” at Transworld Media, the skate/snow/bike/surf publishing hub that, at that time, was still using film for all its editorial work.

“One day I decided I wanted to make a zine about people,” says Ray. “Hamburger Eyes was born. People seemed to like it more than anything else I made, so I kept it going.” The name was inspired by an inside joke: “It was slang we used, for when a girl was into you,” explains Ray. “Like ‘Yo, that girl is giving you hamburger eyes.’”

The first issue of the all-film-format Hamburger Eyes, which came out on Valentine’s Day of 2001, showcased all the trappings of their zine pedigree: it was a 40-page Xeroxed affair (printing equipment courtesy of Ray’s job at a local Kinko’s), featuring a total of seven photographers (the publishers and assorted friends). The scattershot black-and-white content ranged from a group of defiant, areola-exposing KISS fans to an almost reverent shot of gnarly switchblades and butterfly knives. They produced between 100 and 200 copies—all photos, not a scrap of verbiage. Ray says that this was essentially an accident that grew into one of the most vital and definitive characteristics of the magazine as a whole. “I actually had left some blank spaces for a friend to do some writing,” says Ray. “But he never came through, so I filled the spaces with random photos.”

The next three issues of Hamburger Eyes, which Ray oversaw from Hawaii (where the Potes family moved when the brothers were in their teens), were pieced together and released in a similar manner. “I remember some people didn’t get it,”

David, whose shots debuted in issue 2, recalls. “They would say, ‘I don’t know how this makes me feel.’ No words, just photos—and random photos. I remember passing it out and thinking, ‘That’s fuckin’ it. That’s good.’”

On the ground, the Eyes aesthetic is conveyed by the magazine’s scattered, the-theme-is-no-theme layout, helmed by Ray. Issue 3 features dynamo keg stands and a little Asian boy urinating on a sidewalk; issue 6 features shots of gnarly dogfights and jailhouse tattoos joined with monumentally beautiful nature scenes. In issue 8, a loungewear vamp draped across an ugly old couch rests atop a shot of a set of history-twisted toes spilling out of a cheap pair of flip-flops. On one page of the forthcoming book, an image of an ebullient older woman doublefisting cotton candy resides above a picture of a wheelchair-bound amputee splayed out on a patch of grass, prosthetic legs relaxing beside him.

The magazine’s bio statement introduces the magazine as a hybridization of a photo journal, a photo diary and a photo album. Simikich likes the latter distinction best. “When you go to a friend’s house and you flip through an album, it’s just random,” he says. “We’re not trying to lay it out as high art. It’s just our life, our friends, and everything around us that we find remotely interesting.”

“We definitely didn’t sit down and have a meeting about creating a business,” he continues. “It was more like, ‘Man, we have so many pictures, what the fuck are we going to do?’ So we put them all together to make these zines that really worked. And it kept growing like a disease.”

For the fifth issue, which debuted in the summer of 2003, the boys decided to ramp up the printing quality. They raised money—some advertising revenue, but mostly cash straight out of their pockets—to get Hamburger Eyes off-set printed and bound on glossy stock. Run numbers jumped from several hundred copies to between 3,000 and 5,000. “We did it as an idea,” says Simikich of the decision. “Let’s just do it, if it works, it works, but if it doesn’t, we’ll just go back to Xeroxing.”

It worked. Increased visibility helped the collective earn press nods from publications like Mass Appeal, Thrasher, Vibe, and Trace. Their pictures popped up in group exhibitions in San Diego and San Francisco. In 2005, they earned an Emerging Arts Award from the San Francisco Design Gallery. Handled by San Francisco-based Last Gasp Books, distribution grew, and demand for the magazine spread into Europe and Asia.

But though critical acclaim abounded in Eyes’ post-glossy era, costs were (and still are) an issue. Advertisers (Simikich sardonically refers to them as “people who have sympathy for us”) only accounted for so much revenue, leaving the crew responsible for covering the difference. Simikich says that renown and appreciation for the work often creates the illusion of monetary success. “Some people think we’re big-time because of the recognition, but if anyone looked at our bank accounts…if there was any money in them, there would be way more happening,” says Simikich, who runs a painting contracting business and concentrates on Hamburger Eyes after work hours. “But it’s not a [matter] of making money. We’re passionate about it. If we were a normal business, we would’ve been out of business a long time ago.”

“People get bummed because we don’t put [the magazine] out enough,” he adds. “It’s the whole department of getting ads. We don’t fit into it like how skate mags can target skate companies. When people look at our mag, it just is what it is. That’s why it started—our friends who were editors would tell us, ‘We love your photos, but we would never put them in our magazine.’ It was so weird. They would hype it, then they wouldn’t use it.”

Mainstream rejection plays directly into Hamburger Eyes’ loose mission statement—to tell, or at least proctor, “the continuing story of life on earth.” The phrase pops up in the sparse intro page of their upcoming book, slated for a February 2008 release by Brooklyn’s powerHouse. On the surface, it might sound like a trite sentiment, one that’s impossible to nail down when push comes to definitive shove. But in many ways, it’s an astute reaction to the fact that the publishing industry—where editorial content is susceptible to the influences and demands of advertisers—can be disconnected from both art and reality.

“It’s not a typical magazine,” says David of the Eyes approach. “All the ads are in the back. There are no corporate ads. That’s not to say all corporations [are evil]—but they definitely don’t want to take a risk on us.”

“Magazines are struggling to stay on top of what humans are doing, since that’s their business,” adds Simikich. “We don’t make money, so we don’t give a fuck. We want to do it, so we do it. No one tells us we can’t.”

“People try to pigeonhole you,” Simikich continues. “‘Oh, they’re party photographers.’ Uh, no. Sure, there are good-time photos. But I’m straightedge. I don’t even party.” Simikich bristles when recalling one art critic who drew parallels between Eyes and Vice. “Maybe you can compare them because they appeal to the same age group, but that’s basically like saying Def Leppard and black metal are the same,” he says. “They’re not. Other than that they both have guitars.”

David has noticed similar reactions on the contributing end, as well. “From issues 5 to 7, all the submissions were all of a sudden transients, skid row, graffiti, drug-type shots,” he says. “But that’s not what we’re about.”

So what are they about?

“When I look at magazine, I flip straight to the photo section,” says Ray. “Our mag is all photo section. I love the photography in Life magazine from the ’60s and ’70s, and I also love the non-stop explorations of National Geographic. Those magazines, back in the day, were relentless in pounding you with images. That’s what we are attempting to do. But I don’t think we’re anywhere near there yet.”

Attempting to pinpoint just what Hamburger Eyes is can be frustrating—but not necessarily in a bad way. The photos are at once stark, scatological, hilarious, ironic, disturbing, and heartwarming. But above all else, Eyes’ images reside in an evolutionary, postmodern milieu that reboots so quickly and so often that no one’s quite able to successfully codify it.

But that hasn’t stopped a staggering cross-section of industry talent from recognizing the significance of the concept. Contributors flock to the mag from the skate parks (Tobin Yelland, Dennis McGrath), the streets (Ari Marcopoulos, Boogie), and the studio (Angela Boatwright). Hamburger Eyes can’t pay them, but it’s never been an issue. “These photographers submitted stuff they wouldn’t normally submit to a magazine because they know they wouldn’t print it,” says David. “But we’re willing to showcase our passion for photography.”

“It’s not a paying gig,” says Rick Valenzuela, an international photographer currently residing in Philadelphia. “I generally despise that, but Hamburger Eyes is one of those outlets that, if you feel what they’re doing and want to kick in and contribute, it’s cool,” He had several shots from time spent in Thailand published in Hamburger Ears, the loosely music-themed issue that debuted this past summer. “It’s not like they’re running vodka and auto ads or trying to put me on assignment just for creddie.”

In Eyes’ eyes, one of the biggest misconceptions is that they stick to an all-film, all black-and-white aesthetic because they want some sort of purist commendation. They don’t consider themselves analog rebels; they’re not demanding merit badges for refusing to jump into the soulless maw of technology. They just do what they know.

“It’s the cheapest way to shoot photos,” explains Simikich. “You can get film for a dollar a roll and process all your film. That’s how it started, that’s what we’re used to. It’s not, ‘Fuck color, fuck digital.’ Everything has its place. I have a car that runs, so I drive it.”

“Film and cameras and whatnot are just tools,” adds Ray. “We only care about what you have made with it.”

The sincerity of such a statement is what makes each image, each page, and each issue of Hamburger Eyes so compelling. They’re not in it for the cash. They’re not in it for the renown. They’re not interested in self-promotion. Rather, they seem singularly interested in crafting an idealistic model of humble creative consequence, one that’s not bound by the pressures of contemporary media. And, despite their gallery of successes, the sense that there’s always more to conquer keeps the art invigorating. “We don’t really know what we are doing yet, or where we are going with this,” says Ray. “All the mysteries of Hamburger Eyes are the same mysteries we are seeking out.”

In February 2007, Ray and Simikich opened the Hamburger Eyes Photo Epicenter, a public darkroom and printing facility in San Francisco’s Mission District. “It was already there, it was a facility we were developing at for years. But the woman who owned it wanted to close it and get out of the business,” Ray explains. “We couldn’t let the place shut down, so we just took it over.” Hamburger Eyes is keeping the darkroom alive in more ways than one.