We Are the One: San Francisco Punk, 1970s and 1980s
by Mark Van Proyen
Haight Street Art Center, San Francisco, California
Exhibition continues through September 22, 2024
September 14, 2024
Richard Alden Peterson, “Bruce Conner in San Francisco,” 1979, photograph. © Courtesy of Richard Alden Peterson.
In November of 1974, just as the psychedelia of the Summer of Love started to dissolve into corporate disco, Patti Smith came to San Francisco to perform at a North Beach club called Bimbos. With her came a fresh, post-Warholian energy that registered with elder Beatniks who never had kind words for hippies. Her songs also struck a chord of righteous self-pity with younger art students at the San Francisco Art Institute because they were perfect anthems for the post-Vietnam malaise and a new pessimism about the failing prospects of the American dream. When I first came to study at that school in January of 1975, some of those students were still talking about Smith’s performance. Barely a few years later, the ebullient cheerfulness of Haight-era Fog City finally dissolved into a cloud of high anxiety prompted by the People’s Temple suicides, the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, and the ensuing riots that took place when the assassin was acquitted in a sham trial featuring the infamous “Twinkie Defense.” The following decade saw the rise of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and the election of Ronald Reagan in the U.S. What was then called “The Manhattanization of San Francisco” was already well underway. (Remember, this was before the emergence of Silicon Valley.) Yuppies proliferated.
Richard Alden Peterson, “Penelope Houston,” 1978. © Courtesy of Richard Alden Peterson and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.
“We Are the One: San Francisco Punk —1970s and 1980s” recalls that era with over 180 photographs taken by more than a dozen photographers. Organized by Ben Marks and Michael Goldberg, who also includes his own work, the exhibition also features a generous selection of archival ephemera. But the photographs are the main event. These break down into three subcategories: head-shots and full-body portraits, group photos, and situation shots of various bands performing loud and fast on shabby stages. In all three cases, the quality of the photos varies, but any consideration of “quality” strays into irrelevance when matched against the era’s do-it-yourself spirit and manic disregard for authority.
Most of the headshots are standard music industry glam picks of the promotional kind, some more interesting than others, but most are too conventional to convey the spirit of reckless transgression that marked the punk moment. Among these are Goldberg’s full-face shots of Los Angeles musical iconoclasts Frank Zappa (1975) and Captain Beefheart (aka Don Van Vliet, 1977), although neither had anything to do with the San Francisco Punk scene. Richard Alden Peterson’s sharp focus full-face color photo of punk heartthrob Penelope Houston of the Avengers is a standout, revealing her wry smile and piercing blue eyes. Val Vale is the enigmatic subject of two of the best portrait shots, by Richard Alden Peterson and Ruby Ray. Vale was the publisher of a fanzine called “Search and Destroy” during the late 1970s and early 1980s. At the time he worked closely with the Mabuhay Gardens, the primary venue for punk music in San Francisco. In that role, Vale published the work of many of the photographers included in “We Are the One.” In one we see a close view of Vale’s face peeking through a coil of metal conduit to evoke old-timey Surrealist photography. A grainy and evocative rendition of Vale by Ray has him standing in the misty night at Ocean Beach, walking imaginary battlements on a forlorn landscape.
James Stark, “The Avengers.” © Courtesy of James Stark.
Bobby Castro provides the only image of Dirk Dirksen, a straightforward two-person snapshot of the “pope of punk” impresario at the Mabuhay. Fun fact: Dirksen was the black sheep nephew of Illinois Senator and Vietnam War hawk Everett Dirksen.
Also worthy of note is a grainy 1978 photo by Ray, a full body, three-quarter profile of Tina Weymouth, bass player extraordinaire for the Talking Heads. Weymouth stares at an ominous door to the left, not sure what lies on the other side. I have admired Ray’s photography from afar for many years. Her work in “We Are the One” stands out, exemplified by “Sally Webster of the Mutants, Girls Bathroom, Mabuhay” (1978), which captures the performer’s face in a crazed, demonic light. Even better is her color image of “Sid Vicious Cutting Himself on Mabuhay Stage,” (1978) taken right after the Sex Pistols broke up in San Francisco, and just a few weeks before Mr. V’s suspicious death by overdose. Chester Simpson contributes a stunning snap of a crazed Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious on stage at Winterland, with Vicious turning his back to the camera.
Ruby Ray, “Search & Destroy Editor Val Vale,” photograph. © Courtesy of Ruby Ray.
Many of the group shots show band members arrayed as if they were in a police line-up. A particularly strong example is Kamara Zie’s image of the Dead Kennedys lounging atop a quartet of gravestones. Among other images that capture the vibe is Bruce Conner’s color image, “Broken Wall, Mabuhay Dressing Room,” showing the decrepitude of the “Fab Mad” with a clutch of women looking down at the camera like wicked gargoyles.
The head shot that really brought the era back to me was Conner’s large color photograph of Booji Boy, the mongoloid mascot of the Ohio-based band Devo performed by lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh. In it, we see Booji Boy wearing headphones sitting at an electronic keyboard, looking ghastly and comic in equal measure. In the late 1970s, Conner was blackballed from the San Francisco art scene for demanding that the SFMOMA give him a cut of the admission price for an exhibition of his work. (Neither did it help that he also sued an influential gallery for breach of contract.) So, momentarily bloodied but unbowed, he inaugurated yet another phase of his long, multi-dimensional career by taking documentary photos of punk performances for “Search and Destroy.” A generous selection of those works was included in Conner’s 2015 SFMOMA retrospective, and another hefty sampling is presented here. It’s the crowning highlight of “We Are the One.”
Ruby Ray, “Sally Webster of the Mutants, Girls Bathroom, Mabuhay,” 1978, photograph. © Courtesy of Ruby Ray.
The shots of various bands in performance are also remarkable because they do the one thing that digital photography cannot do as well, capture the immediacy of a situation. In other words, they partake of the famous “shut up and shoot” school of photography made famous by Garry Winograd, seeking to extract “perfect moments” from piles of contact sheets born of rapid-fire shutter clicks. Often, the performance images reveal and emphasize the unruly grain of the photographic prints, which look effervescent and brash when compared to the tidy regiments of pixels that make digital photographs look brittle. It comes as no surprise that, given the cost of computers, digital cameras, and software, younger photographers are again working in this manner. Also, there is a simple trustworthiness associated with analog photography unadulterated by post-production artifice. In a world increasingly subject to the contrived manipulations of Artificial Intelligence, such photographic trustworthiness will become ever-more compelling rarity.
Half of the photographers presenting in “We Are the One” had some affiliation with the San Francisco Art Institute during the late 1970s and early 1980s. During those years, the practice of taking “band photographs” was frowned upon by the school’s photography department, which was dismissive of any approach that looked like commercial photography. But there was one photographer on that faculty who turned out to be particularly influential. For many years John Collier taught a class called “Visual Anthropology,” based on a book of the same title that he published in 1969. The attentive viewer can see how many of the Punk photographers shown here were operating as participant-observer ethnographers. They were surveying the mores of a hidden tribe of a newly emergent urban underclass and paid careful attention to distinctive details of dress and social ritual. This inquisitive attitude inflects the most compelling images in “We Are the One,” allowing it to transcend conventional documentation and to capture fully the delirious nihilism of what turned out to be a short-lived cultural moment, albeit one with quite a long tail. Now, over four decades later, it remains relevant, perhaps more so now than at any time since its heyday. For far too long the northern California art scene has been somnambulating, anesthetized by sociological caregivers and high-end interior decorators pretending to be art collectors. Offering a fresh breath of righteous outrage and an arrogant disregard for Pecksniffian niceties of “appropriate décor,” “We are The One” alerts us to other possibilities and more adventurous approaches to the ways that art can intersect with and transgress everyday life.
