Hey! You!
Zine, Blake Lewis, $5 plus postage, 24 pgs, [email protected], blakelewisphoto.com
A menacing point. Some shadows. Blurriness. Confinement. Confusion… And that’s just what’s on front and back covers! Blake Lewis is a photographer based in London, UK, and Hey! You! is his first zine, a collected work steeped in intimacy and some ickiness (the good kind). Lewis captures a wide range of everyday scenarios here. There are a lot of street scene and images of people mid-activity. It’s more grime than glamour but then again, this is photorealism in the absolutely most literal sense.
Read Excerpts from Hey! You!
One of the most appealing aspects of this collection is the complete absence of pretense. Lewis isn’t trying to portray anybody or anything “living their best life” or whatever jargony rubbish idealists and semi-bummed 40-somethings are using in their Instagram copy these days. Instead, we get actual snapshots of humdrum life. People smoking, playing guitars, relieving themselves on street corners, or being dead in a graveyard (spoiler alert). The zine is also darn cool, because to some this could have just been a Tumblr page, but Lewis chose to print everything instead. Provocative choice.