In 2012 James Schneider got in touch to ask if he could use some of my photos in a documentary he and filmmaker Paul Bishoff were making about the early DC punk scene. Every few years I’ll get a flurry of these requests, but this one ended up being more impactful than most. James wanted to get scans of negatives so he could have the option of using details from shots. He arranged with Ian Mackaye at Dischord to get the first couple of years of my negatives scanned. I’d thought I’d already printed all the good shots, but after seeing the digital scans I realized there was a lot more to be done with that material. This has set me on a larger project (which I need to write about more here).
When Punk the Capital premiered at the American Film Institute in June I got to see the film and reconnect w/ some of the people I knew back then. Now James is taking his film on the road. He’ll do a screening and discussion in Pittsburgh on October 8 at the Union Project with special guest Jeff Nelson (Minor Threat drummer, record label owner and graphics whiz extraordinaire).