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.