The Stories Behind Alex Papke’s Latest Zine

Alex Papke is always shooting photos.

Makes sense because that is his job. If he stopped shooting photos he wouldn’t be able to feed himself or pay the bills. When you’re shooting photos for a living, you’re shooting more photos than you could ever possibly get into a magazine or even onto the internet. The only real problem we have with this is that Papke’s photos are really fucking good and we want to see them, all of them.

Travel Notes is a 48-page zine in which we don’t get to see all of his photos but we do get to see some of his favourite photos from the last couple of years of traveling on various skate tours. When we found out about all this printed goodness we decided we should throw a party! It had been a while since the last event at 1700 Naud (RIP) and it was finally to open the doors of our new LA office and a great excuse to drink a ton of Orange wine and 805 Cerveza’s.

I let the hangover from the weekend wear off and caught back up with Papke to try to make some sense of what had just happened and get some more insight into what makes this print project special to him.

What is the premise of this book? Or zine? What do you call it?

I guess it’s a zine. I feel like I don’t have enough pages or a hard cover for it to be considered a book. I’ve been going on skate trips as a job for the past five or six years, when I’d come back all my favourite moments from those trips would be the photos that wouldn’t go anywhere. Whether it be a couple sleeping on a bench or like, I got really into shooting the end of a dinner table - twenty people in a different country eating a crazy seafood dinner. I would get so excited about those photos but they would go absolutely nowhere and it’s just fun to have an outlet for them. I compiled a bunch of those images and started playing around with them, printing them out, laying them out roughly and scanning them back in.

Are they all printed, scanned and all film photos?

They’re all printed and scanned and about 90% of them are film photos. There’s a couple in there that I must have been on a trip and run out of film.

I find it hard to go back through my digital incidental photos, whereas the film ones have a whole other value to them.

100%. I think the problem with the digital photos is that I shoot too much of it. I’ll go on a trip and shoot 10-20,000 photos or something and sifting through that to find one photo is kind of difficult. Whereas if you shoot 20 rolls of film on a trip, you’re going though like 200 photos which is a lot easier. The post production on the film photos is a lot less because they come back from the lab and look amazing already. You might have to do a lot of work to a digital photo to make it look special and how you wanted to in your head.

It just feels more redundant immediately.

Yeah, it doesn’t feel right. I lot of those are just shot on a medium format camera with a pop up flash and it’s fast and easy. Even for the cover photo, we went out to this seafood restaurant in Portugal and they came out with these insane plates and plates of crab, lobster, shrimp and everything. We were so focused on eating. I had my camera bag but it wasn’t like I wanted to pull out a whole setup and take a bunch of photos, but I could pull that camera out real quick, take a photo and get back to eating. I ended up getting food poisoning after that (laughs). But I remember getting that photo back and realizing that was one of the only recollections I have of eating that meal.

Are you shooting these all on the Fuji?

Yeah, GA645. Wide - the wide’s nice and sharp. Most of them were shot on that. I have a photo of Rick (Howard) in there pushing an old tire that we found on the side of the road while we’d pulled over to take a piss. Shit like that, it’s so easy to take out and capture the moment without really thinking about it. It’s nice too because you can’t think any more about it or go back and look at it until you’re home. You take the photo and sometimes you don’t get it back for like a month. Then it comes back and you’re like ‘Whoa, that one is so sick’ and you’re already so tired of looking at all the rest of the digital photos. You’re so focused on taking a photo of the actual skate trick because you’re thinking this is what everyone’s gonna care about, this is how I’m gonna get paid. Then you finally get back all these extra photos and it’s such a bonus. I got a photo of Rowan (Davis) in there and we’d gone to a gas station and they had a bucket of Fireball shots for $20 and for some reason we bought it. We had a six hour drive and Rowan was in the back seat downing these shots. He’s like a 21-year-old kid. We went to a KFC and he went inside to go and get food and he dropped a beer and simultaneously slipped in the puddle, ate shit and got us all kicked out. So, we went to find our hotel. I was his roommate and he immediately went to the toilet and was just hunched over the toilet throwing up. Black out little kid. I went in there and took one photo of him on a point and shoot and totally forgot about it. The film came back and I was like ‘oh, I fully got him.’ Hunched over the toilet and he didn’t remember it. I never sent him the photo, never sent it to Girl (Skateboards) and I was going through the photos for this and realized, this was exactly what I wanted for this. I love those photos of something that gets easily forgotten. Everybody’s talking about the crazy trick that someone did two weeks later but no one’s talking about Rowan throwing up on the toilet that night. It’s cool to have those memories too.

It’s a peak behind the curtain. 

Yeah exactly. There’s such a dry formula of shooting what goes on, on a skate trip with your friends, but there’s so much more that actually happens.

The brand can’t necessarily put a lot of that stuff out. You can’t even post that stuff on Instagram.

Fuck no. You can’t really put that stuff on the Internet. A lot of the photos I put in there are faceless and nameless. Like that photo of the butts in Times Square - you take a photo real quick and forget about it and the film comes back and you’re stoked you nailed it.

What’s your favourite film stock to shoot on at the moment?

I like Kodak Gold pushed a stop. That’s what a lot of the stuff in there is. Medium format Kodak Gold. It’s cheaper than the Porta 400 and it’s got a really cool red tone. When you first get the negatives back it’ll be really warm but once you print them out and scan them back in it makes them have a little ‘cooler’ tone again.

Where are you selling this thing?

Selling it all on my website alexpapke.com

Do you have anything else to sell on your website?

I actually took it all down a couple of days ago cause I was so sick of trying to sell stuff. I had this photo of Bobby Worrest that was one of my favourite skate photos ever and no one would print it in a mag and no one bought the print either. Maybe it wasn’t as good as I thought. The only place it is printed and framed is in my office. I like it, nobody else liked it. Maybe I’ll put that back up there, you guys can buy that if you’d like too.

How important is it to sell something out? Or is it more important just to make something regardless?

I think it’s more important just to make something. We threw an event for this and I don’t think even a quarter of the people that went to the event bought the thing. It’s just cool because so many people actually came out. So many people that I never expected would have come. I didn’t even see half the people. It was so nice the next day I was talking to friends and they were mentioning kicking it with people I didn’t even realize were there. We were even able to make a t-shirt for this thanks to you and AS Colour. That was a really cool process cause I’ve never done that on my own before. It’s cool to see all the people that are down to get involved with it and show up and support.

Was that the first time you’ve screen printed a t-shirt yourself?

Since highschool yeah.

Has Breanna (Geering) seen the t-shirt with her mug on it?

I don’t think so. Rick (Howard) actually hit me up the other day like ‘I need to get one of those Breezy t-shirts, that’s so cool you did that.’ So, I think I’m going to give him all of the rest of the Breezy t-shirts and he can give one to her if he is able to. There are only like fifteen left because we said the first ten purchases of the zine came with a free t-shirt but the bartender just gave everybody t-shirts who bought one. There were a couple of people there who only bought the zine because they wanted the t-shirt. So, shout out AS Colour. It’s funny too cause that photo I got back on a roll of film from a Midwest trip and I thought, stupid, stupid photo. Then when I was going through photos for this I cropped it and turned it so it really just had the buck tooth and the nose piercing and realized now I fucked with it.

Now you need to get a skate photo of Breezy in her own t-shirt.

Good luck with that. I’ll put that on the to-do list for the next ten years and see if we can make that happen.

What’s the next print project you’re gonna work on or are you done after this?

No, I was actually just thinking about it on the way over this year. Girl turns thirty this year and I’ve been lucky enough to document a lot of the stuff that has happened in the last seven years, so maybe I’ll make something out of that, but don’t hold me to it.