I am leaving NYC tomorrow for the first time in January. I honestly am the most excited about any vacation I have ever been on despite the fact that I am not really taking a vacation from anything but sitting on my couch watching 8 hours of Netflix a day. I am just kinda losing my mind. Because of this trip I have been quarantining so I can hide out in Delaware with some friends from childhood and see my parents who retired there. That’s why I spent last night watching the fucking Republican National Convention instead of out taking photos of the protests for the attempted execution of Jacob Blake. But watching the RNC gave me an idea for an update before I left town that has (almost) no nudity in it.

When quarantine first happened I had this idea of being productive and trying to better my life, which I obviously gave up on, but one of the things I did was buy a negative scanner and start scanning a bunch of old 35mm negatives I found in a box. It was a range of eras of photos, but pretty much high school and college. I think the earliest stuff is from the mid 90’s and the latest stuff is photos from the 2004 RNC when it was in New York. I wouldn’t move to the city for two more years but I was managing a band at the time and we booked a show in New York so we could join the protests. The photos aren’t very good, and the scans are worse, but it is very cool to see photos of Union Square before I even knew what Union Square was. 

After a couple of hours of scanning I realized that the scans were pretty garbage and gave up. I probably shouldn’t have bought a negative scanner for $100. I posted a few of the images to Twitter and then moved on with my life. But the RNC reminded me I had this folder on my desktop and I figured this would be a good post before I skipped town for a week. So let’s break down what you are looking at… 

The first group of photos I didn’t even actually take. I started a punk record label when I was in high school and our first, and by far most successful release was a 7″ compilation of DC punk bands called Raise The Flag harDCore Volume 1. Someone actually uploaded it to YouTube if you want to hear it. I was only 15 when we put the record together. Raise The Flag 2 was in the production stages when my business partner’s car broke down. Without telling me he spent all the money we had for the record on fixing his car. That ended the label and our friendship. (We did actually reconnect in college and are still close friends. Check out his new band!) These photos are from the Raise The Flag 2 cover art photo shoot. I am not sure who took these photos or why I didn’t do it. The whole reason I picked up a camera in the first place was to shoot DC punk bands but I guess I wanted to be in it. The actual label of the record was going to be a photo of me wearing only a DC flag so I sort of spun around while you listened to the album. Oh, all these photos were taken at the very steep stairs made famous by the movie the Exorcist! 

Up next in the gallery is the RNC protest photos, the only stuff color in the group, followed by some of the earliest nudes I ever shot. I had an assignment in college to shoot something with infrared film. For some reason it makes veins look really pronounced so I shot some nudes of a friend of mine and I think somewhere I still have the prints of these that I made for the assignment and they actually look pretty cool. An old Polaroid I took of her is actually on the inside cover my Instaxxx book and might actually predate these photos by a few months. 

The next photo is of this band the Infertil that were on that first Raise The Flag album. They ended up getting in a fight during their set and their drummer jumped over his drum set and into the crowd. I didn’t want to stop taking photos, but obviously I wasn’t gonna let fellow AV PUNX crew members get fucked with, so I am actually kicking someone at the same exact time as I am taking this photo. It was the first, but not the last time I had to fight with a camera in my hand. Twenty years later that same drummer actually ended up playing drums for my old band Fucking Bullshit. After that we have some photos from the Rolling Thunder bike rally in DC. I believe these photos are from the 2000 rally. And then there is a single photo from a WWF Monday Night Raw taping I went to in college.

From there there is a mix of band photos and protest photos (Edit: I realized after I posted this that there’s only one protest shot here. There were more scans but I guess I didn’t include them in the gallery) which is pretty much 99% of what I shot in high school. We  got a Leonard Peltier protest, photos of Rancid, Motörhead and Nashville Pussy, plus some shots of my friend Crazy Willy and a single self portrait! Check 16 year old me out! The gallery ends with some photos from Warped Tour 2002. These photos were actually on a CD I found in the box with the negatives. I covered Warped Tour ’98 for the zine I ran in high school and I think I went in ’97 too, but I got invited in 2002 by a girl I worked with at Ben & Jerry’s. I didn’t really want to go, but I did want to hang out with her so I requested a press pass so that I could at least shoot some bands at the same time. The CD had shots of the Casualties, Bad Religion and NOFX, but the BR & NOFX photos sucked, probably because I don’t like pop punk. I shot digital photos of these too and some of those are better but the camera was such garbage that they aren’t really worth looking at.

Okay, this is a weirdly long post for some shitty scans of some decades old photos. I still need to plug the shit that is paying my rent right now. If you like 35mm work you can check out my latest gallery on Girls of DBB which is all the NSFW 35mm stuff I have shot since February. I also uploaded a 3 minute compilation of old Vines from when nudity was allowed on Vine. You can buy that whole clip for $5, or you can see the three parts that make up that longer video on my OnlyFans. You can get access to everything on my OnlyFans for $5 so that seems like the better value, but you gotta make your own decisions. Oh, and speaking of OnlyFans I queued up posts for the next week so while I am on vacation you will continue to get content. Gonna try to find a gallery for Girls of DBB to upload when I am gone as well.

Now, if you wanna see all the old 35mm photos, click here!

 

Comments (0)