HR of the Bad Brains at 930 club, April 1982.
This was such an amazing show. I got a series of close-up shots of HR; this one with the power stance was the strongest. Of all of my photos in BiDC, this is the one I get the most requests for. It was in Spin in 2003, in Afropunk and other documentary projects and in an academic book earlier this year.
The Hirshhorn talk was an interesting experience, although we might not have answered everyone’s questions satisfactorily. Punk is endlessly variable, depending on context, which is one of its strengths as a subculture. That can make it hard to talk about, though; everyone has their own entry point and personal associations. And so many things have changed — how do you explain how deeply uncool it was in the early 80s for a punk to be seen posing for photos, now that people are happily, constantly posing? Or, now that it’s cheap and easy now to take any image you want, how expensive and time-consuming it could be to take and develop pictures from film?
Ultimately, I had more questions for the audience than they had for us. I wanted to talk more with the people who had us sign books, to ask what they were working on. I wanted to ask the person standing up in the back of the auditorium, carefully framing my slideshow on their smartphone, what are you going to do with those photos, many of which have never been published before? It’s a question I’m asking myself, too.