I'm wanting to elaborate a little on some of the writing immediately below. If I'm rejecting the mallgoth culture, looking beyond the obvious commercialization of rebellion, why is that? What was different about the earlier experience?

The closest I can get quickly to explaining what we experienced in the post-punk years starts from the sublime. It's perhaps best known to us today from Edmund Burke's writings, but they're really quite tedious and he takes quite a long time to get to the point. Instead, I found the following: 

"Arthur Schopenhauer, in "The Will and the Representation" (1819), explored the fissure that lies at the heart of being, and envisaged a self that can in certain situations observe itself in the very act of confronting a fearful inner abyss, and by so doing attain a certain dark grandeur." 

The quote is from Simon Morley, editor of the book "The Sublime" and he's done us a favor because I can vouch that Schopenhauer isn't exactly a fast read, either.

In any case, that abyss is where we were perched in the early post-punk years, and it was a surprisingly wide-spread phenomenon among the folks I spent time with. We'd pretty much universally rejected middle class suburban values, torn the whole framework down, and in the process created our very own abyss. It took a little while to build a new framework. In my case, the void lasted from sometime in late 1978 into sometime in 1980, I think. For sure by April 1981 I'd pretty much worked through it, because by then I was helping a friend find the way. While there was not any one day that was before or after, a milestone was July 14, 1981. That night I met a young woman at Exit, I'm not really sure who picked up who, but we spent the night together and pretty much talked through the entire process of nihilist destruction followed by gradual rebuilding that we'd both been through. I only saw her once more after that plus a couple of phone conversations, but parts of that night are still very vivid memories. We shared a lot of interests, had read a lot of the same books, and it was very easy to talk about it.

That was four months after I'd seen Bauhaus play for the first time, and talked to Peter Murphy and Daniel Ash after the show. They had been, and continued to be, on the same trajectory, passing through a lot of the same interests as me... well documented in their lyrics. It was about a month before The Fall and the afterparty that went into the next morning, and for sure Mark E. Smith understood all this in his own irreverant way. It was more than three months before I met Siouxsie and drank beer with her, an hour or two isn't really enough to get to know someone but my sense is that she hadn't dived that deep into the abstract although I think a couple of others in the band had. Finally, it was a good two and a half years into listening to Joy Division and more than a year after Ian Curtis committed suicide, those songs were much more personal and emotional than they were about philosophical ideas and they never toured the US so I'll never know for sure. It certainly was a fitting soundtrack for the inner city experience of the time, and it appears that Manchester was in some ways like Chicago and other large cities.

The places are an important part of this narrative and possibly hard to comprehend for many today. These were still the cities of white flight, urban wastelands with numerous boarded up buildings and vacant lots and with gentrification barely started in a very few select neighborhoods. Violent crime rates were near all time highs, much higher than today. The US was deep in recession. We'd fled the suburbs, many of us, for bleak, gray but inexpensive inner city neighborhoods where most whites were afraid to go. Barely a week went by that we didn't hear of someone we knew being mugged, and most every month there was another overdose or suicide. The music, the writing, the art grew out of that chaos and anarchy. If some of that music wasn't very upbeat, that's because it reflected daily reality. Still, most were trying to find a way forward, not a way down. Many of us did find paths forward.

There were malls then, mostly in suburbia, but they had little or nothing that we wanted. It was essentially impossible to buy post-punk fashion there, mostly it was constructed by odds and ends, retro stuff from Goodwill stores or resale stores or scrounged and repurposed in some other way. A lot of us were very anti-materialist, and the concept of buying shiny new ready-made coffin shaped backpacks would have horrified us. It kind of still does.

It's been argued that goth goes back to the 60s or 70s, that the Velvet Underground and The Doors were precursers. There were references to "gothic" in a few places in the late 1970s. But it was probably 1982 or later before anything like what we now call goth began to come together in any organized way. Most of us, the first and second waves of post-punk, were gone by late '82 or early '83 and much larger, more mainstream crowds were beginning to descend on the clubs. Where post-punk was more often than not led by British bands, goth became much more American. The earliest examples maybe still had some things in common with us. Early Christian Death, at least through when I saw them (February 4, 1984, in San Francisco; with the classic Rozz Williams/Valor Kand/Gitane Demone/Constance Smith lineup), I'm pretty sure Rozz had read some of the same books that I had. After the surrealism of Catastrophe Ballet that began to drift. I didn't see 45 Grave til sometime later, and while they had a better sense of humor than they're often given credit for, that's about where my interest ends. After that it quickly seemed to become an angst-ridden fashion show. 

My goth experience was mostly later and as a photographer. I worked mostly with alternative models, and by 2003-2009 that often meant goth. Some of those young ladies were brilliant, a few of them understand much of what I've written above. I wasn't working with average people though. They poked fun at mallgoths more than I ever did. We sometimes wondered if it was possible to fake a counterculture look for the camera, and usually the consensus was no, putting on clothes and makeup did not equal authenticity and that it wasn't hard to tell.

That's enough for now. Perhaps I'll find a few photos to go with the stories.

 While on the goth theme: Acid PopTart, from the first of our two shoots so about 2005-ish, in Columbus Ohio. She was fashion editor of Gothic Beauty Magazine during this time. The shoot was done in a light drizzle, in the parking lot of a hotel while another model and photographer shot in one of the  rooms. I've published the whole story elsewhere, so won't go into detail here.

Goth

 

Today there was a local goth day. Photo op, right? Actually it was a bit of a challenge, as so often happens it was mostly mallgoths. Not a lot of authenticity, not surprising away from a major urban area. For at least some of these kids, their ideas come from the internet, not from personal experience. Most telling for me was that the one bookseller at the event had not a single serious work on the shelf, despite the fact that there's so much to work with in this genre it was all superficial fiction... and not even the best of that.

Perhaps I'm being too cynical, having been there at the beginning, before anyone beyond a very few journalists was calling it goth, and that only indirectly. Read the history, and I've seen most of the bands cited before they were popular. Later, I had opportunities to photograph several individuals central to the subculture. In many ways I was lucky. Now, so many years later, some of this feels disconnected from the earlier concepts. 

The images above: The first one, she was pretty much expressionless, vacant, sat in one place and hardly moved for 30 minutes while he did his best Rozz imitation (the real one was a whole lot more chrarismatic). So the image is of visual interest only, and the backlighting was tough. The second one is about the contrast; mom done up as goth, kid in Carhartt's. What will he be when he grows up?

Photographing the band was easy, having done so many of them it took only 8 or 10 images to call it done, and they were only marginally interesting. There was only one person on the floor right in front, everyone else was standing back; can't remember the last time that happened and it sure is easy to move that way. Some of the crafts on the tables offered interesting images, in some ways more interesting than most of the people. In this case the event served as useful practice, zone focusing and framing quickly, grabbing images before the subjects were fully aware... although no one seemed to object to being photographed, if I paused too long they over-posed so it worked way better to grab the images quickly.

Burlesque

 Earlier today, a friend told me she's in a new local burlesque troupe. From the couple of video clips and photos I've seen so far, it looks promising; that's a good thing. A couple months ago I went to see another local attempt and was sadly disappointed. There's a vacant niche here, for sure.

That got me thinking about the various interactions I've had with burlesque performers around the country, and the fascinating people I've met along the way. 

The first group I recall photographing was Hells Belles, in Detroit. That was in January 2005, it was 9 degrees F and we shot in an old restored downtown loft building near old Tiger Stadium in a half-abandoned neighborhood. It was part of a gothic-themed group shoot, organized by Racine Miller... then a law student, now a practicing attorney. She lined up the space, and recruited the majority of the models and did such a great job of it that I had to bring in three other photographers to help, we had over 20 models and three floors of space to work with.

Hells Belles were the first to arrive, all nine of them entering together. They dropped their things in the center of the large empty main room, and started to change and do makeup. One of the photographers tried to be polite and avert his eyes, and soon realized he was surrounded and there was no direction to look that didn't have a performer in some state of undress. It was obvious they'd been doing this for a while, they were soon ready and dispersing in small groups to create images. That was the day I met Sparkly Devil, who I'd shoot with twice more in Detroit after Hells Belles had long since broken up. We accidentally broke up a crack deal on the downtown streets, borrowed a shopping cart from a homeless guy, and made a mess in a clawfoot bathtub in a borrowed Victorian home in one of the then few gentrifying neighborhoods.

 Salome Slaughter was probably next, in Chicago. Again, we met at a larger shoot, this time with perhaps half a dozen people present; she was a friend of a friend. We turned her into a living statue, covered neck to toes in cling-wrap then gauze and plaster, in a duo with another model. The really amazing images happened when we cut her out, after 45 minutes of immobility the freedom resulted in a burst of enthusiastic and spontaneous movement and it was really easy to catch that energy. Again, that led to subsequent shoots. Salome has the distinction of being possibly the most extreme model I've worked with, as far as working conditions. Besides the plaster, we covered her in dried mud, worked in everything from 104 F and hot blowing wind in sand dunes to sub-freezing sleet and snow at Allerton Park, to wading a thigh deep marsh half a mile from the nearest trail. I was in hip boots, she was stark naked. It was actually a while til I got to see Salome perform on a burlesque stage, a few of us surprised her for a performance at Exit... which was outstanding. Considering her formal acting training, that didn't surprise me. That's her in the photo above, an evening shoot along the Chicago lakefront. In typical fashion, we walked under Lake Shore Drive from her nearby apartment and she wore only that one flimsy garment the entire time.

I met Michelle L'Amour in late spring 2010, when she performed (as Naked Girls Reading) at my exhibit opening at Gallery Provocateur in Chicago; her partner Franky Vivid was another of the artists exhibiting that night. It was pretty crowded, so a few of us went to see another performance a few weeks later when we didn't need to be "on" for the audience ourselves, when we could just enjoy. The photo above was taken after that performance, which was top-level. Two of her co-performers (Greta and Crimson) later participated in solo photo shoots. Take a look at https://michellelamour.com/about/ for more about Michelle; and that "The Most Naked Woman" video at the bottom of the page is a very worthwhile 11:54, I strongly encourage watching it.

Somewhere around that time, a little before or after, a group got together in Chicago and called themselves SS-XXX. I knew most of them long before then, had photographed several of them. The shows were OK the first time, repetitive after that. The attempt to be counterculture edgy turned out to be limiting. There's only so much one can do with fire dancing and a grinder on a metal plate throwing sparks. 

 Most of the performers were very good models though. I did a number of shoots with Natalya and they kept getting better. A shoot with Colleen in her apartment was very successful, quietly sophisticated. A shoot with Candy aka Alexandra on the streets and alleys around her Pilsen apartment covered a range of things, including a surpringly soft series against a fence with a Chicago PD car in the far distance, then finding recently expended 9mm casings in the alley right behind her place, then a slightly ominous looking set after nightfall on a bridge over the Chicago River, after a conversation best kept private. 

Curiously, another member of the group who I won't name booked a shoot, and then I turned her away after she tried to reschedule for the second time. I don't think she's accustomed to being told no, but I have a low tolerance for unreliability and in the end she took it well.

There were others, in some cases I don't recall any of the names. The shows themselves are challenging to photograph, rapid unpredictable movement best addressed with zone focusing, and poor or extreme lighting. When it works though it can result in strong images. Experience photographing dance and anticipating movement helps a lot. As a generality, the better performers are not only fun to watch on stage, they tend to make excellent creative collaborators in front of the camera. Movement can range from nuanced to assertive depending on the performers style, and communication is usually easy. So if this new local bunch does as well as I think they will, that's a positive thing.