Pure #3, Volume 2 does not resemble a publication losing control of itself. Its real disturbance comes from how controlled it remains.
The cover is almost brutally simple. PURE 3 appears in large stencil lettering above a grainy close-up of two adult faces pressed together in an encounter that could be read as intimacy, aggression or both. VOLUME 2 sits beneath it. There is no elaborate collage, no explanatory subtitle and no warning that the object intends to move through mass murder, sexual violence, antisemitism, forensic material and the media construction of criminal celebrity.
It looks less like a manifesto than a file somebody has removed from the wrong cabinet.
The first interior page is titled “TRIUMPH.” It declares Josef Mengele’s postwar escape a victory and attacks the moral framework through which his crimes are ordinarily understood. The writing is openly antisemitic, contemptuous of victims and fascinated by the fact that a man responsible for enormous suffering was able to avoid capture and die beyond the reach of a courtroom.
The word “triumph” performs the first major reversal of the zine. History normally treats Mengele’s escape as a failure of justice. Pure treats the same event as evidence of strength.
From there, the issue reproduces a lengthy dossier assembled from biographical writing, journalism, survivor testimony, photographs and reports concerning Mengele’s life, crimes and flight. The zine depends upon sources created to document atrocity, but it removes the moral structure those sources were intended to support.
The information remains. The reason for gathering it changes.
This is one of Pure’s principal methods. It does not need to invent most of its material. Newspapers, historians, police, courts and publishers have already collected the names, photographs, timelines and testimony. Sotos changes the sequence, emphasis and emotional temperature.
The perpetrator receives continuity. Victims appear as episodes inside his story.
Mengele is given a childhood, education, career, ideology, habits, movements, disguises and old age. He appears as a young man, a fugitive, a face beneath a reward headline and a personality reconstructed through witnesses. The people harmed by him appear mainly as groups, quotations, evidence and numbered suffering.
The imbalance is not accidental. Pure repeatedly gives the person who caused pain the strongest identity.
This is also how ordinary crime reporting often works. The killer receives a name, photograph, nickname, childhood, preferred method and psychological profile. Victims become a count. The perpetrator becomes a character capable of generating sequels.
Pure does not create that arrangement. It strips away the civic language that usually disguises it.
A newspaper may claim that it publishes a murderer’s history to explain danger, assist justice or educate the public. Pure removes those claims and leaves the attention itself exposed. The reader is forced to confront the possibility that information can be sought because the criminal has become compelling, not because knowledge will protect anyone.
The zine appears to accuse mainstream media of hypocrisy, but it makes that accusation while consuming the same material with even less restraint.
This creates the central critical problem: exposure and participation become difficult to separate.
If Pure merely celebrated its subjects, it could be dismissed as crude criminal worship. If it clearly condemned them, it would become another true-crime publication that promises moral instruction while using violence to hold attention. Instead, it occupies the more contaminated position between those poles.
It speaks with admiration, contempt, erotic fixation, mockery and documentary detachment without placing reliable borders between them.
That instability gives the object its force. It also gives it an escape route.
A defender can say the zine is ventriloquizing the language of killers, tabloids and consumers in order to reveal their cruelty. A critic can say it reproduces the same cruelty while granting its maker the prestige of being transgressive. Both readings remain available because the publication refuses to clarify where quotation ends, performance begins or endorsement becomes critique.
Ambiguity is not only the subject. It is protective equipment.
The design reinforces this uncertainty. Most pages use ordinary typed text, small archival photographs and generous white margins. The typography is not hysterical. There are occasional heavy headings, but much of the issue resembles a college reader, legal exhibit or inexpensive historical pamphlet.
That bureaucratic plainness does more than make the pages readable. It treats radically different materials as though they belong to one administrative category.
A survivor’s testimony, a killer’s statement, a newspaper headline, a photograph and a piece of hateful editorial writing receive the same paper, grain and typographic weight. The copier equalizes everything it touches.
The result is a visual world without an obvious moral hierarchy.
This is especially disturbing when the issue moves from the Mengele section into profiles of other violent offenders. A heading such as “LUSTMORD” gives murder the shape of a category or genre. Individual crimes become installments in an expanding taxonomy of male appetite.
The details change. The basic structure remains.
A man harms women or girls. The criminal receives a name and narrative. The victims become the material through which his personality is made visible.
Crime-scene photographs deepen this structure. They are presented with the cool captions of forensic documentation. The camera identifies position, condition and evidence. That language may be necessary within an investigation, but removed from its legal purpose and placed inside a privately circulated zine, it changes function.
Evidence becomes spectacle.
The distinction does not depend entirely upon the image. It depends upon why the image is being shown, who has consented to its circulation, what context surrounds it and what the viewer is being invited to do with it.
Pure offers little restoration of personhood. It does not return ordinary life, relationships, character or interiority to the photographed dead. The body remains proof that something occurred and proof that the reader has entered material unavailable in ordinary publications.
Access becomes part of the pleasure, even when the pleasure is disgust.
The Green River page makes the publication’s priorities especially clear. A large table lists victims, dates and locations. This could have been an act of remembrance. Names can resist the conversion of murdered people into a number.
Beneath the list appears a headline stating that Portland prostitutes “ignore” serial killings.
The headline redirects responsibility toward women living under threat. The killer’s actions become almost environmental, while the women are framed as foolish for continuing to work, travel or exist within danger.
This is a familiar form of victim blaming, but the zine does not surround it with criticism. It allows the accusation to hang below the list like a conclusion.
The page produces a terrible double movement. It names women, then flattens them into a type. It records their deaths, then asks why women like them failed to behave properly.
The perpetrator is granted agency. The victims are granted responsibility.
Pure’s fascination with prostitution, sexual commerce and vulnerable women must be understood within this pattern. Sex workers appear frequently in crime reporting because their lives are treated as publicly available and their deaths as partly self-explanatory. Their work becomes a convenient narrative reason for why violence found them.
The zine does not challenge that contempt in any stable way. It often intensifies it.
This is where the argument that Pure merely exposes media cruelty begins to weaken. Reproducing a victim-blaming headline can reveal its ugliness. Repeating the surrounding attitude without creating any counterpressure can also help the attitude survive.
A work does not escape exploitation merely because it knows exploitation is occurring.
That is the deepest weakness in the critical defense of Sotos. His work can accurately identify that journalists, audiences, pornographers, police, publishers and collectors transform suffering into consumable material. Yet identifying the machine does not place an artist outside it.
Pure is another machine built from the same supply.
The zine exists partly because the raw material already existed in respectable circulation. Photographs had been taken. Interviews had been conducted. Headlines had been printed. Books had sold. Criminals had become famous.
Sotos did not have to break into a sealed archive of cultural depravity. The culture had already placed most of it on shelves.
The photocopied underground supplied the second condition.
During the 1980s, a publication could be assembled from typewritten pages, clippings and reproduced photographs, copied cheaply and mailed to a small network without passing through an editor, legal department, commercial printer or national distributor. The audience did not need to be large enough to justify the object economically.
A few intensely interested readers were sufficient.
This allowed voices excluded from conventional publishing to circulate, including political radicals, queer writers, experimental artists, musicians and people documenting scenes ignored by commercial media. The same freedom also allowed material based on cruelty, racist fantasy, criminal worship and exploitation to travel.
A distribution system does not acquire virtue from being underground.
The third condition was a subculture that treated extremity as evidence of sincerity.
Within parts of industrial music, noise, power electronics and transgressive publishing, disgust could function as a test. A creator demonstrated independence by approaching material that respectable culture would not tolerate. An audience demonstrated commitment by refusing to retreat.
The forbidden object became a credential.
This produced valuable work when artists used difficulty to confront war, institutional violence, sexuality, state power or the commercial packaging of suffering. It also created a predictable market for people who could go one step farther than the previous person.
Once extremity becomes status, the limit must continually move.
Pure occupies the point where transgression threatens to become conservative. Its perpetrators may violate social rules, but the world they create is built from very old arrangements: powerful men at the center, women and children reduced to usable bodies, racial hatred presented as forbidden knowledge and cruelty mistaken for honesty.
The zine shocks polite society while reproducing domination in its most familiar form.
That is not revolution. It is hierarchy with the lights turned lower.
A fourth condition is the true-crime marketplace. Long before podcasts and streaming documentaries, publishers understood that murder could be serialized as entertainment. Crimes produced books, television specials, magazines, collectible objects and careers for commentators.
The audience was permitted to describe its appetite as concern.
Pure removes that permission. It asks what remains when the educational justification is discarded and the reader’s attraction is allowed to look predatory.
This may be the publication’s strongest insight.
People often want the photograph they have been told they should not see. They want the hidden statement, the uncensored document, the room beyond the police tape and the detail removed from the newspaper. They may call the desire historical, psychological or critical, but the desire still involves gaining access to another person’s catastrophe.
Pure understands that access has value.
It also understands that condemnation can increase that value.
A banned or prosecuted zine becomes scarce. Scarcity creates collectors. Collectors create prices. Legal danger creates mythology. Disgust produces discussion. Every attempt to push the object out of circulation may add another reason to seek it.
Controversy becomes part of the printing process.
Peter Sotos faced the most serious documented controversy surrounding Pure in the mid-1980s. In January 1986, he was indicted in Cook County on three counts of possessing child pornography in his home. His lawyers challenged the Illinois statute, arguing that private possession was constitutionally protected under an earlier Supreme Court ruling concerning obscenity.
The trial court dismissed the charges on that constitutional ground.
Illinois appealed, and the case was consolidated with People v. Geever. In 1988, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed the dismissal and sent the cases back for further proceedings. The court distinguished child pornography from other obscene material because creating and circulating it records the abuse of actual children and continues the harm after the original act.
The opinion is important because it draws a line that discussions of transgressive art sometimes blur.
A written fantasy, however hateful or disturbing, is not the same object as a photograph produced through the exploitation of a real child.
The first may raise questions about obscenity, artistic value and free expression. The second is inseparable from the conditions under which the image was created. No later claim of criticism can undo the abuse preserved within it.
The available Supreme Court opinion documents Sotos’s indictment, the lower court dismissal, the reversal and the remand. It does not, by itself, establish the final outcome after the case returned to the lower court. Later summaries frequently describe him as convicted, but that should not be repeated as settled fact without the final docket or judgment.
The legal controversy did not end the artistic one.
Sotos later published books that continued to use the language of sexual criminals, pornography, news reports, victims, relatives and spectators. He frequently wrote through unstable first-person voices, making it difficult to tell whether the speaker was a predator, consumer, media narrator, authorial performance or combination of all four.
He also became associated with Whitehouse and produced sound collage work using voices taken from public discussions of sexual violence and abuse. Once again, the critical question was whether isolating those voices exposed the media’s appetite or created another product from the same pain.
Critics have accused Sotos of turning real suffering into aesthetic material, hiding personal fascination behind theories of media criticism and granting offenders greater imaginative life than their victims.
Supporters have argued that the work destroys the comfortable distance through which ordinary audiences consume true crime, forcing readers to recognize their own voyeurism.
The work is capable of doing both.
It can reveal that media compassion often contains appetite. It can also feed that appetite.
It can challenge the heroic image of the concerned observer. It can also use victims as tools for producing that challenge.
It can expose the perpetrator-centered structure of crime reporting while becoming even more perpetrator-centered than the reporting it attacks.
The controversy persists because there is no clean object hidden beneath these contradictions. The contradiction is the work.
Pure #3, Volume 2 can exist because every part of its construction was already available: public fascination with killers, newspapers willing to package murder, photographs preserved as evidence, an underground that rewarded extremity, cheap reproduction technology and readers who wanted proximity to forbidden material.
The zine gathered those ingredients and removed the language of public service.
What remained was not an alien substance from outside society.
It was society’s existing appetite without its napkin.
The most useful critical response is therefore neither to treat Pure as a mystical object of absolute evil nor to rescue it automatically as courageous art.
Its ugliness is human and infrastructural.
Someone selected the clippings. Someone copied the photographs. Someone stapled the pages. Someone mailed money. Someone preserved the issue. Someone scanned it. Someone continues looking.
The chain is made from ordinary acts of attention.
Pure’s final and most disturbing argument may be that attention is never innocent.
The necessary reply is that not all attention is equal.
Attention can restore a name, document a crime, challenge a lie or recognize another person’s humanity. It can also enlarge the perpetrator, repeat humiliation and turn the dead into scenery surrounding an artist’s reputation.
Pure repeatedly chooses the second kind, then dares the reader to call the choice criticism.
That dare is why the zine remains controversial.
It is also why the dare should not be mistaken for an answer.
