Stagediver at Rock Against Racism, Lincoln Memorial, July 3 1982
Twenty of my DC punk photos are on exhibit at Spring/Break Art Show in LA, February 16-20, in a show presented by DC’s Transformer Gallery called harDCcore: past/present/punk. This is the first time I’ve exhibited my DC punk photos and the first prints available for sale since the early 80s. These framed prints remain available through Transformer.
Please note that unframed versions of these prints (including prints noted as being sold out) are also available and can also be purchased through Transformer.
Guy Picciotto (back), Brendan Canty (jumping), Mike Fellows, Ian MacKaye, (unknown), Tomas Squip (jumping), (unknown girl) at the Punk Percussion Protest against apartheid, September 6, 1985.Mike Ryan with John Stabb from Government Issue at Wilson Center, June 25 1982
The other two photographers in harDCore: past/present/punk were Cynthia Connolly and Farrah Skeiky; please do check out their work.
Faith’s last show, Space II Arcade, August 2, 1983
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).
This past week I’ve been in residence at Dischord house in Arlington, VA., spending about 12 hours a day scanning my old negatives.
I could’ve found a suitable scanner in Pittsburgh, but it seemed more fitting to go back here, to the source, or one of them. Unlike so many DC punk landmarks, Dischord house is still there, looking much the same as when I first saw it in 1981 or 2. There’s something really wonderful about that.
I won’t finish scanning all my negatives on this trip; I’ve got one more notebook to do, plus some odds and ends that didn’t scan well.
It’s really nice when some of the old cohort send a text out of the blue: “we’re playing in Pittsburgh tonight and you’re on the guest list”. This is the second time the Messthetics have played here, both times at Spirit in Lawrenceville.
Amazing musicians, amazing show. Thanks guys, it’s always so good to see you.
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.
