Soko at One

Soko is an Argentine magazine that started about a year ago because two people—Adrián Carlos Grygierzcyk and Pampa García Peña—wanted their own space to make things without anyone else’s permission. They called it an experiment: just photographs and text and drawings and whatever else caught their eye. No business model, no theoretical framework, just the simple decision to make something.

The anniversary issue has work from Jenny Mortsell, Pablo Franco, Jonathan Zawada, Belinda Chen—people who clearly understand what the magazine is doing and want to be in it. There’s a lot of color, a lot of sex, a lot of visible craft. The kind of magazine that exists because the editors made it happen, not because there was some market opportunity.

Independent magazines usually don’t make it to year two. The economics don’t work, or the founder gets tired, or the vision never had any teeth to begin with. But Soko’s still here. Which suggests they started right—made it for themselves first, and the rest of us get to look in.