Why a Zine
The premise is simple
You go outside. You walk. You look at things.
That’s it. That’s the whole project. Blockwalk started as an app for organizing photowalks — a way to get people out the door with a camera and a loose route. But the walks kept producing something the app couldn’t hold: stories. Not narratives, exactly. More like accumulations. A sequence of images that, laid end to end, said something about a place that no single photograph could.
A zine felt like the right container for that.
Why not a blog?
We thought about it. A blog is easy. A blog is expected. But a blog implies a certain pace — regular updates, SEO, engagement metrics. We wanted something slower. Something you could hold, conceptually, even if it only lives on a screen.
A zine is a conversation with a place. A blog is a broadcast.
The Japanese independent photo zine tradition — Provoke, Record, the lineage running through Moriyama, Araki, Kawauchi — showed us that a small publication could be radical in its intimacy. You don’t need a gallery. You don’t need a publisher. You need a walk, a camera, and something to say about what you saw.
What to expect
Each issue is a walk. Sometimes literal — a route through a neighborhood, a stretch of boulevard at a particular hour. Sometimes figurative — a theme, a texture, a way of paying attention.
We’re starting in Los Angeles because that’s where we are. The city resists the postcard. It demands footwork. The good stuff is between the landmarks: the stucco, the power lines, the light at 4pm on a Tuesday in November.
How it works
- Photo essays — the core. A set of images from a walk, with minimal text.
- Photobook reviews — what we’re reading, looking at, learning from.
- Interviews — conversations with photographers who walk.
- How-tos — practical guides for organizing your own photowalk events.
This is Issue 00. The scaffolding issue. The one where we explain ourselves and hope you’ll come back for Issue 01, which is where the actual photographs start.
See you on the sidewalk.