I took a photograph the other day of someone talking on a cell phone.

Nothing extraordinary. Just a person standing there with a phone to their ear.

But it made me stop for a second because you really don’t see that very often anymore.

Everybody has their heads buried in their phones, texting, scrolling through social media, watching videos. But actually talking on a phone?

Somehow we’ve reached the point where that feels nostalgic.

And I’ve been noticing these little things more and more.

I was walking through the park recently and passed someone smoking a cigarette. I was trying to get a photograph when the wind caught the smoke and blew it directly into my face.

And let me tell you, it smelled so damn good.

I smoked for about 15 years, and that smell instantly transported me back to the early 2000s, when I was a dumbass drinking and smoking too much.

It wasn’t that I suddenly wanted a cigarette.

It was the memory.

A smell brought an entire period of my life back for a few seconds.

Then, on Pico Boulevard, I saw one of those enormous old satellite dishes.

When I was growing up on a farm in rural Indiana, we lived on 21 acres out in the middle of nowhere. Around 1994, the only way we could get satellite television was with one of these enormous dishes.

I’m not talking about the little DirecTV dishes.

I’m talking about something that looked like it could communicate with NASA.

My Yaya bought one, and every time you changed the channel, the entire dish had to rotate toward another satellite. You’d sit there waiting 30 seconds or a minute while this giant motorized thing slowly moved into position.

Seeing one again on Pico instantly brought me back there.

And all of this got me thinking about something else:

Why the hell do I like photo magazines so much?

Opening the Pack

I’ve been making my street photography magazine, Survey, and I’ve experimented with different printers, formats, papers, and approaches.

Then recently it occurred to me that part of my obsession with the photo magazine might go all the way back to collecting baseball cards.

I grew up in the ’90s, and I was obsessed with baseball.

Barry Bonds. Sammy Sosa. Mark McGwire. Baseball was everything to me for a while. I played it, watched it, and collected as many baseball cards as I could get my hands on.

And there was a ritual to opening a new pack.

You didn’t know what was inside.

Maybe you’d get the card you’d been looking for. Maybe you’d discover something completely unexpected.

There was anticipation every time you opened one.

And isn’t that basically what I’m looking for when I open a photography magazine?

I turn the page because I want to be surprised.

I want to wonder what’s coming next. I want to encounter a photograph I wasn’t expecting. Something strange. Something beautiful. Something that catches me completely off guard.

The experience isn’t entirely different from tearing open one of those packs of baseball cards.

But there’s something else.

The Smell of the Thing

The cards had a particular feel. The paper. The thickness. The surface.

And especially the smell.

If you collected baseball cards, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. You’d tear open that pack and there was a particular smell to those cards.

Maybe I’m just a weirdo who smelled baseball cards.

But I don’t think I’m alone.

And I realized that some of the photo magazines I’ve been printing have a strangely similar quality.

I’ve tried several different printers while developing Survey. Some are considerably cheaper than others. But I’ve actually eliminated printing options partly because I didn’t like the way the finished magazine smelled.

That’s how important the physical object has become to me.

Because apparently I’m not just making something to look at.

I’m making something to hold.

Something to open.

Something to flip through.

Something that has weight.

Something that even has a smell.

Photography Is Physical

And maybe that’s why I’m not convinced AI, automation, screens, and all this other crap are going to replace the physical side of photography.

There’s something primal about picking something up.

Holding it.

Feeling the paper between your fingers.

Smelling the ink.

Turning a page and not knowing what’s on the other side.

You don’t get those sensations looking at a photograph on a screen.

A digital photograph can obviously be beautiful. It can be powerful. It can even become a memory.

But the physical photograph occupies the world with you.

And I think that matters.

Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to the printed magazine. Maybe that’s why I still want to make these things even when printing them is expensive and putting photographs on a website would be infinitely easier.

A magazine connects photography to something beyond simply seeing an image.

It becomes an object.

And objects accumulate memories.

Eventually, the magazine itself can become nostalgic.

The smell of the paper. The weight in your hands. The photograph you remember turning the page and discovering for the first time.

Maybe 20 years from now, somebody will pick up an old issue of Survey and have that experience.

I don’t know.

But I know that when I saw someone talking on a cell phone, smelled cigarette smoke in the park, and passed an old satellite dish on Pico, seemingly insignificant things suddenly opened doors into entire periods of my life.

That’s what nostalgia does.

And maybe that’s what photography does too.

We photograph things because eventually, everything becomes the past.