By Kimberly Chun

photo by Stefan Simikich

"This guy is awesome," the lean, capped Potes, 27, raves. "His photos are so good. He's rugged. I don't know how he can get those photos. You don't just walk into the PJs and be like, 'Hey, dude ...' He's gotta bro down for a while, and after a while, people warm up to him."

Boogie is just one of a loose, friendly but focused cadre of photographers, old and young, professional and hobbyist, that make up Hamburger Eyes, who will appear in "Bay Area Now 4." And though they prefer the descriptor gang to collective, don't tag them as harder than they are: This crew is more tapped into surf-and-skate culture than 114-proof thug life, and they like to have fun, judging from the multiple bikes, boards, and barbecue grills jammed into the spartan entrance of their headquarters on Potrero Avenue.

Ascend the stairs, hang a right at Black Flag's Who's Got the 10 1/2 record poking out of a milk crate, and you stumble on the surprisingly tidy epicenter of what their Web site vaunts as "the most epic magazine ever." Framed prints of images from the four-year-old journal's pages line the walls. Sun pours in from the windows overlooking the Potrero Del Sol Park and the freeway on-ramp that lifts the constant stream of cars off the dusty, litter-swept pavement and away. "Call it bro-tanical gardens," Ray jokes.

Natives of San Diego and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, the Potes brothers have found the perfect place to land in San Francisco, here at this bright, bleak concrete intersection that's home to other ex-Aiea dwellers and anarchists, in the form of the Survival Research Laboratories and Subterranean Records hideouts on the other side of the park. It's land's end – where the street-level goes airborne.

And likewise, Hamburger Eyes are poised to take off, with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts show, continuing attention from art, photo, and mainstream lifestyle pubs like Vibe, and a readership that stretches from hamburger-loving capitals such as Wisconsin to more exotic locales like Finland, Australia, Italy, and Japan.

The bros only made 30 copies of the first hand-stapled and Xeroxed issue (which got its name from a Bugs Bunny cartoon about two characters stranded on a desert island who gaze at each other only to see a hot dog and hamburger) to hand out to their friends. But since then the mag has steadily grown, from a zine to a journal. With issue five they began offset printing, used better binding, and started supplementing the pages with advertisements. Number eight sold out in two weeks, they say, so the newly released number nine will top out at 3,000 copies and be distributed all over the world through SF's Last Gasp and Japan's Press Pop. "It trips us out," drawls Ray – a 30-year-old sporting black-framed spectacles, shoulder-length locks, and a serious mien. "Who's reading us in Argentina?"

The first-generation Filipino American brothers – and the other eyes in Hamburger Eyes – can always be counted on to have cameras on hand: Ray got his first at 11, and since high school the pair have been making zines with titles like Perineum and Filipino Nightmare. Hamburger Eyes, however, stuck with its human focus and diaristic intimacy detailing "the continuing story of life on Earth." The marriage of raw subject matter and a reverence for the traditions of the darkroom and classic documentary photography in the style of National Geographic and Robert Frank give the zine its crucial tension – they've yet to print digital photos, Ray says, because he can tell the difference and it alters the "flow." "We're all kind of darkroom nerds, and I think that also goes into how we edit photos," he explains, adding that he worked in the darkroom of TransWorld magazines, trying to get his work on the pages of those pubs and others, only to get snubbed. "I've submitted to every magazine and been shut down. There was obviously no room for my photos out there, so I put them out myself."

Ray photo-edits the hundreds of submissions they receive for each issue, coming up with a mix that often includes regulars like longtime Mission District photographer Ted Pushinsky; Berkeley native, Index and Dazed and Confused contributor, and the Poteses' mentor Tobin Yelland; Vice magazine photo editor Ted Barber; visual artists such as Barry McGee ("That was kind of a big thing for us. This was before he started showing more photos," Dave says), Ed and Deanna Templeton, and Cheryl Dunn; and photojournalists like Dennis McGrath and Vic Blue.

What does Ray look for when he weeds through the discs jumbled in his desk drawer? "One day I could be, like, I love this guy's photos," he says. "He's going to be in the next issue, for sure, and then the issue will come out and I won't use the photos. It just wouldn't fit. Basically, I'm just looking for things that just stick out to me."

"There's a certain mold," Dave adds, finishing his brother's sentences as usual.

"We do have a certain aesthetic," Ray continues. "It's a documentary thing. Like, it's obvious we don't run fashion photos though people send a lot of that. We don't have, for example, studio photos, but I'll get a lot of that."

"But we're not trying to be, like, coming off hard," Dave says. And don't compare them to Vice. "It's kind of fashiony," says core member and photographer Jason Roberts Dobrin.

The Hamburger Eyes gang would rather avoid any easy associations and themes and instead go with their gut when it comes to walking outside and simply taking pictures. "It's more like we all got cameras in our pockets right now," Ray says, chuckling. They have individually appeared in group photo shows, and they have been thinking about taking their gang of photos on the road, like a band on tour, but who knows whether circumstances will sweep them off their feet and onto the blacktop. "We just go with the flow," Ray says, leaning back at the kitchen table as Dobrin looms overhead and associate editor and photographer Stefan Simikich spreads out on the floor. "We just go where it takes us. We didn't know we are artists."