This zine, Summer Home, by Xiao Ma (Smile), documents the road trip they took from Bennington, Vermont, down the East Coast to Louisiana, and back again at age 21. This is communicated primarily via film photographs they took during the trip, alongside correlating text as well as journal entries from the time.
It then makes sense that the cover of this zine is one of those photographs, of the open road ahead of them. Without the title or any other text on the cover, the core component of this zine and its orbiting narratives and ideas, is communicated effectively solely through this image. The image not only communicates that this booklet contains a story or idea surrounding a drive or a trip, or that it uses photographs to tell that story or idea, but it also creates a feeling, of the unknown, change, instability, and contemplation of what’s behind, ahead, and current, in time and space, that become core elements and talking points of Smile and their trip. And flipping through this zine, taking in each image, drawing, and scrawled journal entry, feels like taking a trip of my own as I follow Smile on theirs.
It is an intimate look into moments of their life and inner thoughts that creates an environment of quiet moments and contemplation, that in the end kind of feels like a call to action, to explore the world and where you fit in it.
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