And the Sex Pistols and the advent of punk rock — for a certain public, at least — restored that sense of art as urgent social commentary, but in a very new way. Could you talk about that a bit, and how it was reflected in the documentation of music? It seems at that point there a premium was placed on gritty, live photography (as underground zines sprouted).
This is a complicated matter. Early punk performance in the UK, LA, and San Francisco especially was extreme, unpredictable, and sometimes aggressively or accidentally violent. People tried to capture that on film, or even provoke or demand extreme physical action in order to document it — and performers and especially audiences tried to live up to what photographers wanted and, more to the point, what they felt was expected or demanded of them. Finding real moments in such situations — and documenting them — was not easy. And sometimes, of course, a photo of an attitudinal construction — i.e., the adoption of a pose — could seem more real, more putatively authentic, than a photo of an event — a gesture, a physical action, the interaction between performer and audience member, say.
What's most crucial and valuable to me in punk photography are the capture of moments of event, whether staged or not — image where the viewer can say, something was actually happening here, no one knew how it was going to turn out, everything seems to be at stake, that's what's dangerous, people putting everything on the line. That there was not a lot of photography that actually captured this is perhaps shown by the endless reuse of a very few images of the Sex Pistols, X-ray Spex, and the Clash, and by the work of Bruce Conner, who in 1978 and 1979 photographed punk bands at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco — and felt that if he didn't get a band their first or second night in the place he'd miss them, that everything would harden into clichû, that expectations would determine performance rather than the other way around, that the sense of contingency, which is what defines an event, would be lost. Conner, who as a photographer was perhaps most conscious of this problem, perhaps not coincidentally got the most event pictures of all.
It's these pictures above all that carry a sense of social transformation, of remaking the world outside of the club where the performance is taking place — when a performance puts the element of contingency in play, or if and when that element is captured in a photograph, then the suggestion is made that just as the outcome of a performative act may be in doubt, what we do in our own lives, and what happens in the lives we share with others — our social life, in the broadest sense — may also be in doubt. In other words, when social reality, political reality, seems fixed or drastically limited, art suggests that in truth anything is possible. And some punk photos capture that energy.
