Good Magazines Don’t Need Printing Presses

For years now, some of the most interesting editorial work being published has never touched paper. Digital magazines distributed as PDFs—downloadable, browsable, free or nearly free—have quietly built a parallel publishing world that the big glossies mostly ignored until it was too late to co-opt it. The ones coming out of Buenos Aires and São Paulo and Barcelona often have better art direction than anything on a newsstand in Berlin.

Soko Magazine is one of the better examples. Out of Buenos Aires, just dropped its second issue, and it’s the kind of thing you open expecting nothing and then sit with for an hour. The centerpiece is a shoot with Elly Jackson of La Roux—that face, perpetually unsmiling, making her look simultaneously furious and bored, which is basically the ideal aesthetic. There’s also work from Nirrimi Joy Hakanson, a young photographer who shoots exclusively in natural light: soft, slightly overexposed, more like memory than documentation. Add photography from Manolo Campion, Jonathan Leder, and Nacho Ricci, and the whole thing holds together with a consistency that plenty of print magazines fail to achieve even with actual budgets.

If you want to go further down this rabbit hole, PDF Mags aggregates hundreds of these. My current favorite from the archive is the Vice Guide to Berlin—useful in that slightly sardonic way Vice occasionally managed before it became a media brand, the kind of city guide that assumes you already know where the tourist traps are and just wants to tell you where to drink on a Tuesday.