Go Away Come Home.

©Ryan Schierling

Twenty years ago, I made magazines.

Well, little magazines. 

We just called them 'zines. They were xeroxed – filled with photographs and writing about whatever it was we were doing back then, usually skateboarding and BMX and lamenting about girls – and often traded via mail with other like-minded teenagers in far-flung parts of the country. It was an incredible creative outlet and I met a lot of interesting people.

I've still got a stack of 'zines from the late '80s in the closet – with some notables being Stapled and Xeroxed Paper by Spike Jonze, Aggro Rag by Mike Daily, Marcel Marceau's Speech Therapist by Nor-Cal Swami Scott Davidson and Disobedience by Alberto Kroeger. 

But self-publishing a full-color, high-quality magazine hasn't ever really been an option. 

Until now.

Go Away Come Home is a 56-page visual retrospective of my 2007 and 2008 summer tours with Seattle band Spanish For 100. Five weeks of shooting. A month of editing. Two weeks of magazine layout. Two blind-drunk days of wondering whether or not this was a good idea.

After having lived on a hard drive and/or strips of black-and-white negatives for the last year, it's good to finally have given these images a home. 

Copies are available here.

There are additional projects/magazine issues underway, so send me an email if you'd like to be notified when they are available.

Emily Silver.

Emily Silver, 2004. ©Ryan Schierling

It's always an odd feeling when, many years later, you see someone you've photographed before and haven't seen since. In this instance, I got that strange feeling when I saw the women's Olympic 4x100-meter freestyle relay preliminary heats this weekend. Bainbridge Island's Emily Silver, who I photographed more times than I can recall during her decorated high school swimming career from 2000 to 2004, is all grown up and helped the United States 4x100 freestyle relay team to the Olympic finals, despite having surgery on a broken hand after coming into the wall too hard during a sprint on July 5.

The team, sans Silver after the prelims, went on to win a silver medal in the finals. Emily's folks, Bob and Mary Sue have blogged about their daughter's Olympic progress over at Bainbridge to Beijing. Congratulations to Emily and the Silver family!