25 Years of Hamburger Eyes: SF's DIY Photo Zine Is Still Going

On April 30, 2026, Hamburger Eyes marked its 25th anniversary with the release of a book pulling together a quarter-century of work. It's a small milestone in the scheme of things, no press tour, no ad campaign, but it's worth pausing on, because a self-published zine outlasting 25 years in an industry that's rewritten itself around Instagram twice over is not the norm. It's the exception.

A Black-and-White Zine That Turned Into a Publisher

Hamburger Eyes started in 2001 in San Francisco as a black-and-white photography magazine, the kind of scrappy, photocopier-adjacent project that either dies quietly after a few issues or finds an audience and keeps going. This one found an audience. Over 25 years it's grown into a working independent publisher, putting out more than 250 zines, magazines, and books, alongside exhibitions and collaborations, while staying rooted in the same raw, unpolished, street-level aesthetic it started with.

That's the part worth noticing: it never professionalized itself out of what made it interesting. A lot of zines that survive long enough either fold into a bigger publisher or sand down their edges to look more like a gallery catalog. Hamburger Eyes has stayed a zine, same PO box, same open call for photographer submissions, same willingness to run work from someone with no gallery representation next to work from someone with plenty.

The Anniversary Book

The 25th-anniversary release, Hamburger Eyes – The First 25 Years, is a 162-page, 8.5×11 softcover collecting work from 161 photographers pulled from that back catalog. It's perfect-bound, printed on 100# matte stock, and, in a detail that fits the DIY spirit, ships with a commemorative pen. Hamburger Eyes describes it simply as:

"a special collection of photos selected from 250+ special zines and special books that we have published over the last 25 years."

No manifesto, no retrospective essay pitch, just the work, which tracks with how the publication has operated for two and a half decades.

On View at the SF Public Library

The book's release lines up with a 25th-anniversary exhibition at the San Francisco Public Library, running April 23 through September 24, 2026. That's several months of runway for anyone in the city who wants to see the work in print rather than on a phone screen. For a project that's spent a quarter-century in zine racks and record-store consignment shelves rather than gallery walls, a public library show is a fitting kind of recognition: accessible, unglamorous, open to whoever walks in.

Why It's Worth a Mention Here

San Francisco's photography scene has always leaned on outlets like this, cheap-to-produce, easy-to-submit-to, run by people who shoot as much as they publish. That's a different kind of infrastructure than a gallery or a magazine masthead, and it's part of what keeps a local street-photography culture actually active instead of just aspirational. Twenty-five years and 250-plus titles later, Hamburger Eyes is still doing exactly that.