NYC Photographer Tyler Andrew On New Zine, ‘Wish You Were Here’

scans of pages and spreads courtesy of Tyler Andrew.

Tyler Andrew is a photographer and publisher from New York City, but these are very official titles. 

For most in the photography, art, skate, and zine communities of this city, Tyler Andrew is a friend. Often, the first friend people make when they move to the city. Or he is the guy who helped them find an apartment, brought them to the LIC DIY for the first time, hooked them up with a gallery, shot their lookbook for free, DJ’d their party, or put them on the guest list. Tyler is a prolific connector in this city, and walking around with him, it isn’t uncommon for the discussion to be interrupted by many a stranger’s ’yo, Tyler!’. 

He is a prolific photographer, zine printer, and friend of the city, and he has a new long-awaited print offering releasing this week; a zine of photos shot while on tour with several bands of the American hardcore punk and DIY scenes, shot across a decade and spanning multiple countries, tour vans, hotel rooms, and film stocks. 

The zine, Wish You Were Here, is a beautiful articulation of observation that spares the viewer what they would assume of a hardcore punk zine - an overwhelming mass of aggression and blurry masses pitted in assault - highlighting a quieter, sweeter, and more thoughtful perspective of these strange and severely niche musical endeavors. The subjects exist often in nature and in isolation, or in moments of collective love - a trust fall, a head asleep on a chest, and the early morning stoicism of the Colorado mountains rather than graffiti-filled bathroom walls or sweatily-cramped subterranean venues. The zine presents punk as people and looks to the genre’s periphery rather than the pupil. 

Wish You Were Here is available for purchase here, and the release party is on Sunday, October 20th at 109 Montrose in Brooklyn. 

If you wanna talk about Tumblr, we can. Tell me how that relates to this zine.

Well, i would go on tour and then just dump the photos onto Tumblr. The photos got traction and the Tumblr got popular, and because of how popular it was getting, it got easy to find spots to sleep on tour. I’d post, ‘hey, I’m going on tour in these places, can anyone put us up in any of these cities?’ and people would always respond. 

[points to the photo of snow]

I almost died that day. 

What the fuck?

We lost contorl, we were sliding backwards down a mountain and I was driving. This blizzard came out of nowhere. I was hyperventilating. 

Give me the one sentence logline for this zine.

I guess it’s what I did for eight years of my life. I didn’t think it was a big deal then - I guess it’s still not - but looking back, I can’t imagine doing any of these things now. 

So you were on tour with hardcore bands shooting photos for them as a job?

Yeah, but I was friends with these people before their bands got popular. We started off as friends and I think that that shows in the photos. 

And just from everywhere?

Yeah, all over. We played New York City, Los Angeles, but we also played like, Kansas City. We played everywhere. 

What would you like to convey in this zine? What would you like a viewer to take away from it?

I don’t know; I’ve been thinking a lot about the title, Wish You Were Here. It has a lot of meaning. Not just like, ‘oh, I’m traveling, wish you were traveling with me,’ it’s more like, some of the people featured have passed away and I wish that they were still here, and some of the people aren’t close to me anymore, and I wish that they were still in my life. It has multiple meanings.

One of the people featured in the zine - his name is Derek, but we called him Swigdog - he was on the first tour I was ever on when I was twenty two, and it was both of our first times being away from home for a month. He wasn’t getting it - he didn’t handle it very well, and because of that, he became the butt of jokes, and maybe those jokes were too far. I was making fun of him, too. After the tour was over, he passed away, and going through that - seeing how you can treat someone a certain way and then suddenly they’re not there anymore and you can’t fix it, you can’t fix what you did - that changed the way that I am as a person, and I definitely wanted to include him in the zine. 

This is a very youthful project and spans so much time that it feels almost like it is a letter to your younger self as well as other people.

I mean, yeah, it’s kind of like a documentation of my life and what I love doing, through documenting these bands, and it feels weird to look back on it because as it was happening, it feels very different to reflecting on it now. It feels big now, and so crazy, but when it was happening, I didn’t think anything of it. Some of these photos are ten years old, and it’s interesting to compare how I photographed then versus now. To me, it’s interesting to see what direction the photos went. Laying the zine out really helped me see the way that I’m photographing now, like a contrast. Not every photo I took in that period of time looks like how I shoot now, but it was there. I could see my style forming.

You don’t know you’re in the good times when they’re happening.

True, and it’s made me apply how I feel with this zine to my life now and asking myself if that is happening again, and if it’s not, I want it to be, and so I’m trying to adjust my life to make it that way and be happier. A lot of these photos are difficult to look at, and I had to stop working on it in the summer for a while because they were too difficult to look at. They are too emotionally tied to me. I feel like if there’s something in there that can make me feel that way, there’s some power to them that hopefully other people can see. 

How long did it take you?

Like, five months. Well, I put it off for four years, but actually putting them together took five months.

So you’re with these hardcore bands - punk is not a very luxurious genre. You’re camping instead of in the Radison. How do you think that that ethos has changed you?

I feel like because I grew up in the hardcore scene, I’m super DIY in every aspect of my life. I will do anything that I can to not allow someone else to have control of what I’m doing or how I’m doing it or what I’m putting out. Everytime I do anything, I put it out myself or do it alone because no one else is going to.

You’re very prolific in NYC zine culture, you make a lot of shit. What do you think the value of physical media like this is, particularly on a smaller scale like this?

I always push my friends and the people around me to make things like this, because it’s important. What else are you gonna do, post it on the internet and no one cares about it? At least if you print it, someone might see it and care about it more - I don’t know who - but you can hold it and have it and you can’t hold a digital file. I fuck with Monster Children, and I fuck with their website. I visited my mom’s house to get the tour laminates for the zine and I uncovered like twenty issues of Monster Children that I’d look at before I went out on tour, and I’d be like, ‘damn I wish I had some shit like this.’

What is your process for laying out?

It kind of follows a timeline, but it veers off a lot. There are some photos mixed in [non-chronologically], but it’s pretty much a timeline. I did that mostly for myself because I deleted my Tumblr, and so when I made this zine, I had a hard time figuring out when shit happened. I knew which photos I wanted to feature, but couldn’t remember which one was from when. I got into collaging last year and have been on a sick one with it since, but I didn’t have much to do for this zine. I had my tour laminates, my ticket stub from Japan, but that’s pretty much it. 

I also used certain papers and materials to print on, because I think it gives it a certain texture. It gives the photos printed on them a certain quality. It’s kind of lo-fi. It adds more to the feeling of holding a photo, if it’s a little rough. A long time ago, I laid out this book of like fifty photos from the first tour I ever went on, and the band’s manager or record label wasn’t stoked. They had a lot of issues and it kind of stopped me from wanting to tour with bigger bands. I think it’s better this way. 

That said, are you allowed to throw one band in as an example for who is featured?

One band? Hmm. Jesus Piece. Sick hardcore band. 

Why do you think that the hardcore/DIY aesthetic is so tied to things like zine making and these hard analog materials?

Because it’s raw. It’s raw music, and it’s authentic. The people who are making that kind of music, they aren’t trying to please anyone but themselves. They’re not trying to make a fake image or a fake thing. Both the hardcore and the zine cultures are very youth-oriented, and that’s built in. It’s youthful. No one is going to make money from these things. No one in a Hardcore band is expecting to make millions, and neither are the people making zines. The word ‘zine’ is thrown around a lot now. Everyone says they’re making a zine, and then it’s a fucking book that they’re selling. ‘Check out my zine that’s gonna drop,’ and it’s $60. That’s a book. Pre-order your book, bro.