In 1979, the photographer Lucian Perkins stumbled into a seminal moment in music history. He didn’t know it at the time, of course. He was 26, a photography intern at The Washington Post, when by chance he heard an emerging punk band, Bad Brains, playing above a Washington restaurant. Investigating, he found a roomful of teenagers dancing with sweaty abandon. “It was a cool scene that no one really knew about,” said Mr. Perkins, now a two-time Pulitzer winner, “and it piqued my interest to start documenting it.”
At makeshift clubs, his was habitually the only camera in the room. “He said, ‘Can I take your picture?,’ and I probably tried to look cool, as any 14-year-old would,” said Vivien Greene, whom Mr. Perkins captured in her bleached-blonde years. “But I was there for a show, not to be photographed.”
Those kinds of happenings — indie, cheap, frenetic — still take place today, at countless grungy spaces around the country, except there’s not one camera in the room but hundreds. Grotty basement shows, scavenged-art installations, far-flung site-specific performances: All are zoomed in on and shared, mapped and located, turning what were niche events into potential spectacles.
Word of mouth is instant, publicly broadcast over social media. The boundary around the mainstream is more porous now, changing the very definition of being underground.
“It really is an amazing transformation,” said Ross Haenfler, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Mississippi and the author of “Subcultures: The Basics,” published last month.
“You used to have to be really in the know,” he said. “If you’re at a certain punk show at CBGB’s, that had a certain cachet. If you had an original T-shirt from a first Metallica show, that is really something. You’d have to scour record bins to get an original pressing. Now all of that stuff is available via YouTube and eBay. It really changes the dynamic.”
By contrast, few of Mr. Perkins’s punk images were seen until decades later, when an assistant came across the unlabeled negatives in his archives. A book, “Hard Art, DC 1979,” published in June, reveals the origins of the movement that birthed the band Minor Threat and Dischord Records. If he had taken those same photos now, Mr. Perkins said, he would have posted them online right away. The underground culture that no one knew about, that had time to percolate and find its voice, might have instead been discovered tout de suite, with who knows what effect on its artistic output and reach.
Where once the counterculture prided itself on obscurity, now “the idea of being invisible is less seductive to people,” said Fred Ritchin, a professor of photography and imaging at New York University. “More and more things are done to be photographed. They don’t count unless they’re photographed.”
And it once took time for the mainstream to catch up to those images, “for Macy’s to carry a line of clothes that looked punk,” said Ms. Greene, the teenage D.C. punker, now a senior curator of early 19th- and 20th-century art at the Guggenheim Museum. “Now I think the cycles are much more abbreviated.”
Artists who transitioned from avant-garde to pop experienced the pressure of visibility firsthand.
“It was relatively easy,” said David Byrne, “back in the day, to work with only a smallish number of people watching, as we sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed.” In the mid-’70s, the early days of his band Talking Heads, “we felt comfortable trying out different things, songs that were quickly abandoned and stage wear that proved impractical,” he wrote in an email. “That’s all hugely important (the songs part anyway) as it allowed us to explore, refine our identity and go down those musical dead ends without the embarrassment of public scrutiny.”
Now, online exposure can make for an overnight viral sensation. But “it can also destroy and eliminate that crucial period of anonymity,” he said. “The Internet giveth, and the Internet taketh away.”
Artists who document life on the fringes have a bird’s-eye view of these changes. Tod Seelie, a Brooklyn photographer, has spent 15 years shooting in mosh pits and abandoned buildings, images collected in “Bright Nights: Photographs from Another New York,” published this month. It showcases a thriving outsiderness, which has lately become much less rarefied, in part because Mr. Seelie himself has been posting photos online since 2003.
Sidestepping the Digital Demimonde
No comments:
Post a Comment