How years of photographing Los Angeles turned into my first zine, with a floor full of small prints, weeks of rearranging them, and considerably more decisions about paper than I expected.
I’ve photographed Los Angeles for years. I live here, so making pictures of the city has always been a natural extension of moving through it. Some of the photographs in this project go back as far as 2017, long before I had any idea they might eventually become part of a zine.
Over the past couple of years, though, I’ve started taking street photography more seriously and spending much more time simply wandering the city with a camera. Most of the work has come from walking, driving, noticing something, stopping, and photographing it. Storefronts, architecture, signs, people, color, strange details, and those little visual moments that make Los Angeles feel like Los Angeles.
As that practice became more intentional, I started thinking about what might happen if some of those photographs existed together as something physical rather than individually on a screen or as photography prints.
That became LA / FRAGMENTS No. 1, my first zine.
Finding the Sequence
The zine didn’t begin with the question of what I should make a zine about. It happened the other way around.
As the photographs of Los Angeles accumulated, I began to see relationships between images that had been made months, and sometimes years, apart. A color in one photograph answered something in another. Architecture, people, signs and small observations started to form a loose visual language.
The title LA / FRAGMENTS eventually made sense because that’s largely how I photograph the city anyway.
I don’t photograph Los Angeles comprehensively. I notice fragments of it.
A wall. A person crossing the street. A peculiar building. A color combination. A sign that’s probably going to disappear. Something funny. Something beautiful. Occasionally something that’s both.
The zine became a way of editing and sequencing some of those fragments into a physical body of work. And it is only some of them. I have far more photographs of Los Angeles than could fit into this first edition, which is part of why I think of LA / FRAGMENTS No. 1 as a beginning rather than a conclusion.
Sequencing Without Telling a Story
This was probably my favorite part of making it.
I printed small work prints of the photographs and started laying them out on the floor. Then I moved them around.
And moved them again.
And again. And again.
This went on for weeks.
I wasn’t trying to create a traditional narrative with a beginning, middle and end. Instead, I started thinking about the sequence more in terms of rhythm and rhyme.
A color in one photograph might find an echo in the next. A shape could lead naturally into another shape. A busy image might need something quiet after it. Two photographs that had nothing to do with each other geographically could suddenly make perfect sense beside one another.
It became less about what each photograph showed and more about what happened when you turned the page.
Working with physical prints was important. Looking at a folder of JPEGs on a monitor wasn’t the same. On the floor, I could see the whole thing at once, move photographs instinctively and notice relationships I hadn’t seen before.
It was basically editing by walking around my living room.
Turning the Floor Into a Zine
Once the sequence finally stopped changing every five minutes, I needed to turn it into an actual publication.
I used Affinity to build the files. One of the nice things about Affinity now is that it’s free, which makes it a remarkably accessible way to design something like this without committing to another software subscription.
The zine itself is deliberately simple: 8.25 × 6 inches, landscape, with the photographs doing most of the work.
Designing it introduced an entirely different set of decisions. How large should an image sit on the page? When should a photograph run larger? How much white space does it need? What happens across a spread? Where does the sequence need a pause?
Some photographs I loved individually simply didn’t work within the sequence of the zine.
That was part of what made the process interesting.
Then Came the Paper
Once the design was finished, I used Mixam to produce the zine.
This was also the point where I discovered just how many decisions can hide inside the seemingly straightforward instruction: print a small zine.
Paper weight. Paper finish. Cover stock. Coated or uncoated. Binding. Size. How photographs reproduce on one surface versus another.
For LA / FRAGMENTS No. 1, I landed on a 70 lb satin interior, which gives the color photography a nice richness without making the pages feel overly glossy. For the cover, I went with a heavier 100 lb uncoated stock, creating a more tactile contrast with the pages inside.
The zine is saddle-stitched and the first printing is limited to 100 copies, each signed and individually numbered.
There was something satisfying about making all of those decisions. The paper, dimensions and sequencing aren’t packaging around the photography. They change the way the photography is experienced.
From Photographs to Something You Can Hold
That may be what I like most about making a zine.
Photography spends an enormous amount of its life on screens now. I love making prints, but a publication creates a different experience. You pick it up. Turn a page. Move backward. Notice two photographs together. Leave it sitting open somewhere.
The sequence becomes part of the work.
Making LA / FRAGMENTS No. 1 also helped clarify something I’ve been thinking about with Wayne Ford Studio more broadly. I don’t only want the Studio to be a place where individual photography prints are sold. I want it to be a place where ongoing photography can take different physical forms: prints, Pairings, Small Print Sets, posters and publications like this one.
And after spending weeks crawling around the floor rearranging tiny photographs, I’ve already started thinking about what No. 2 might look like.
Apparently I didn’t learn my lesson.
See the Finished Zine
LA / FRAGMENTS No. 1 began as a collection of photographs, sequences and ideas, then slowly became a physical object. The first printing is limited to 100 signed and numbered copies.
