Punk Rock Museum photo historian, curator, and executive team member Alison Braun brings what might be called an unparalleled first-person perspective to the project which opens March 10 in Las Vegas. As one of the main photographers at the forefront of the burgeoning late-’70s/early-’80s punk and hardcore scene in Los Angeles, she documented it all starting at an early age—when she was in junior high, actually. Read on for some details about her involvement with the museum as well as a look at her distinguished career.
I really wanted to talk to you about your work with the Punk Rock Museum and your history and everything. First of all, how did you get involved with (the museum)?
I had known one of the founders of the museum Mike Burkett, Fat Mike, for many years. And he got me involved with the museum a couple of years ago when it was just an idea. He wanted me to reach out to photographers, and his mandate to me was find me 10 of the best photographers that you know and let’s get them involved in the museum, and that was how it started.
It’s such a big undertaking. Regular music lovers can submit items?
Anybody can submit something to the Punk Rock Museum. We’ve had an open call for artifacts, so you could have flyers or any ephemera from your life. I donated old backstage passes; they have the archive of my photographs. But anybody that has something of interest, it could be a ticket stub, a photo from your personal collection. Anything. They had an open call, and people from all over the world have been submitting artifacts and ephemera to the museum.
When did you move to Seattle?
I moved to Seattle in September 1990.
I guess you loved it, since you stayed.
Yeah, I bought a house, set down roots. I’m not going anywhere.
When it comes to your start in photography, I saw on your site that you said you were at a Kiss concert and saw the photographers and got inspired.
I did. I saw the photographers in front of the stage—It wasn’t called the pit then, in 1977. I was there with my dad and had his camera. And we had a few decent loge seats and I took some pictures and in the foreground of some of the pictures I can see some of those photographers and I thought, “I wanna be those guys one day. I wanna do that.” I was about I think 11. (Laughs)
And you came up at such a great time with the burgeoning punk and hardcore scene. Amazing.
It was definitely a good time to be a teenager.It can’t be emphasized enough that when I started going to punk shows, there was no internet; there was no social media. The way we promoted shows, the way we went to shows, the venues that we had, the promotion was all do it yourself. If you lived in a city that had something like the LA Weekly, you could put an ad; Whisky a Go-Go had their listings of bands playing. But if you had a hall or you rented a VFW hall or you rented some warehouse space somewhere in Eagle Rock, you’d have to do it yourself, promote it yourself, make flyers, pass them out, literally staple them to telephone poles, and call your friends. That’s how we did it.
And the same things with bands—There wasn’t SoundCloud, and there wasn’t social sharing of their music; the way that we gave people music they never heard of was, we traded cassette tapes. It was a completely different world. We were on our own to build something that would last.
Most of these rental halls, the stages were meant for someone’s wedding or their Quinceanera. They weren’t made to have rock concerts. And that’s what made the time special because the band and the crowd, the fans, were all one organism. We all moved together. We had access to each other, and the crowd was as much part of the show as was the band. And some of those early shots, not just of mine, but of other photographers in other cities, you see there’s very little distance between the music and the people who enjoy it. And that is what drove me to continue to photograph punk rock shows and stay in that genre because that intimacy between the artist and their fans was really important.
What about finding punk in the first place? Did you know the U.K. or the New York stuff, or what?
I lived in Los Angeles at the time, and arguably, that was probably a ground zero for clubs and upcoming music. Like a lot of people my age, we learned from our older friends. Before I was into punk rock, I was into Black Sabbath and certainly Kiss, Judas Priest, a lot of the metal bands or really hard bands, and I liked that sound. And when I was introduced to punk rock, I found my noise. I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t know if it was the tone of the lyrics or the energy; I was exposed to it. I was enthralled and basically made it a lifestyle.
Being in Southern California, you had good record stores, and you could get records from all over.
Oh yeah, totally. I grew up in Studio City, CA, which is in the (San Fernando) Valley, a stone’s throw away from the Sunset Strip. It was a luxury. It was Melrose, there were record stores, places to buy clothing; the Whisky, the Starwood, the Troubadour, all these historic venues where bands would play, were available to us without an age restriction. It made going to see bands much easier than if I lived in another state that didn’t have the music infrastructure that Hollywood had.
So, you were still in high school?
I was in junior high when I started. Then high school. I was a schoolgirl.
Did you take any photography courses? Or like you said your father…
It was all my dad. He got me my first camera. He was a serious amateur photographer and photography is what we’d do as a father-daughter activity. He was a good guy and he got me my camera and he also helped me grow up. He got me running, he got me into being comfortable with myself and was an excellent mentor and eventually a co-pilot with me at some of these shows.
That’s great. So, he was into the music too?
No, he couldn’t stand the music. No, no, no. Absolutely not. My dad for as much as I love him was a conservative republican guy. He came to shows with me on a dare. I was going to a part of Los Angeles that was unsavory and my mother said the only way I was going to go to the show was if I took my dad with me, and that was a dare to a teenager who, at my age, I barely admitted I had parents. But I really wanted to go to the show. So, for me it was more of a pragmatic answer, where I just said, “Get in the car. Let’s go.” And I think he flashed my mom a dirty look, and off we went to a show together. And, of course, there was a riot. (Laughter) It just kinda happened that way.
What a story.
Yeah, he was not a fan. I considered him more of a good sport.
So even what got you into rock ‘n’ roll?
What gets kids into rock ‘n’ roll in any generation?
Rebellion?
It was rebellion but also the sound. I liked the lyrics; I liked the message, I liked the sound; I liked the guitars. Like people before me, the Woodstock generation, the message and what young people had to say about the times. It was basically a rebellion to previous generations, and the messaging of the politics of the day, rebellion against whatever the establishment was. I’m laughing saying this now because I grew up in a middle class house in Studio City, and my dad would always remind me, “What have you got to rebel against?” And as a teenager, “You don’t understand me!”
But for me, it was a rebellion against the mores of what being a girl was supposed to be. I had parents that were older. My father was 45 when I was born; my mother was in her mid 30s, which made them a little bit older than some of the other friends of mine that had much younger parents. And there was always a subtext in my house of what’s appropriate for a young lady to do or what was appropriate vocation or what was appropriate dress and doing your hair. These are ideas and tropes that I found distasteful even as a kid. I didn’t like to be told what to do, what to wear, how to talk. And the idea of going to college wasn’t about to get an education but to meet what’s supposed to be your husband. And to me, that was just retrograde, distasteful. It was not something I was interested in doing. I wanted to make my own way. I wanted to do my own thing, create my own art, and what was important to generations before me was not important to me. I wanted my voice to be heard. As sort of positive as that is, I’m only one kid, but a lot of kids get that bug of rebellion, and wanting to be heard and being part of something that helps you be heard was what was important to me.
And being in the punk scene, for girls, it wasn’t the typical role…
And before I was even into punk, I wasn’t a girly girl. The slang of the day, this would be ridiculous today, they’d refer to you as a tomboy. I liked to wear jeans. I didn’t like to wear makeup. I didn’t have fancy dresses. This isn’t something that interested me. I just wanted to do what I was going to do. And I’m happy and thankful that my parents, as long as I got good grades, didn’t mind that I wore my dad’s dress shirts instead of fancy dresses.
And then there’s certain things you read in books, and you don’t know people’s own experiences, but I think of like ‘77, ‘78, that Hollywood scene, and then, obviously when hardcore came around, it got a little more physical and some people in the older bands were like, OK, we don’t like this. How did you feel about the changes?
Well, I went along with the hardcore. D.O.A. had an album come out in ‘81 called Hardcore ‘81, and at the beginning, when I’d go to shows, bands like Oingo Boingo and Devo and X, important bands, don’t get me wrong, Go-Go’s. Important bands. But when I saw bands like Black Flag, D.O.A., the Weirdos, that was what resonated with me. I liked the first generation of punk rock, but hardcore was the next level for me.
Right. And it’s just so interesting. California and then just Southern California, so many great and different-sounding bands came out.
Yeah, it’s a large geographic area. From Ventura down to the Mexican border, there’s a lot of people and there’s a lot of music to be had, even from up and down the entire West Coast at the time—San Francisco, Portland, even Seattle had a pretty decent punk scene that nobody ever talks about. But there was just so much to be had, and the way we got that out was cars, we traveled to other cities. We’d make our own fanzines, do scene reports in the fanzines that were out there so people would know what was going on in other cities. It was definitely a connected group of do-it-yourself aficionados.
It’s probably so hard, but are there any particular bands that you had an affinity for shooting?
Oh yeah. Definitely. My favorite band to photograph was a band from Santa Cruz called BL’AST! I shot them 15 times. I actually counted. I did a poll on social media asking people what the band they think I shot the most of, and it actually surprised me. BL’AST! was the band I shot the most and that I enjoyed photographing the most. My favorite band to see and to photograph was Dead Kennedys. I loved when they played and the music and the message. I enjoyed photographing them. And the hardest band I ever shot was Bad Brains. I had my projects. I had bands whenever they played, I just knew that there would be good images to be had. And I also shot the opening bands, too. I shot everybody. I didn’t know. If this is someone playing, I’ll take their picture. I wasn’t picky, which was really good because I ended up getting people early on in their careers.
Definitely true. Then you had your book out (In the Pit: Punk Rock Photos 1981-1991). I can’t imagine how hard that was to pare down.
Oh my god. It was super hard because I have 10s of 1000s of images, and to put it in a book that people can afford, I mean, I could’ve put out a Taschen coffee-table volume, and it would be hundreds of dollars. But I wanted something that would be relatively affordable and high-quality so people would pay for it, and it would be a nice book; it wouldn’t look like a fanzine or a textbook. I wanted it to represent my portfolio in a way that was something meaningful for people.
Just even going back to when you went to Seattle, what were the first rumblings you were hearing, like, OK, this is something I have to do?
Before I went to Seattle, Seattle bands still played L.A. One of the last shows I shot of a Seattle band in L.A. was Soundgarden in July before I moved to Seattle in September. So going back and forth especially with the metal scene, I was doing some stuff for Metal Blade Records. And there’s some metal bands from Seattle that I became friendly with and I learned about the Seattle scene from people that would play shows in L.A. And when I went to Seattle, I found this thriving scene with clubs and bars and bands and a connection of people that I think at the time there wasn’t a lot of cross promotion, I guess, except some scene reports in Flipside Magazine about Portland or Seattle every once in a while, but it really wasn’t newsworthy. Seattle’s on the map. Seattle, no one heard of until suddenly it exploded. It wasn’t watched. It was, boom, here’s Seattle.
There’s a lot of good stuff. There were good venues in Portland. I had friends that would play at, I think one was the Satyricon that a lot of bands would play at. They’d go to Portland and they’d come back and you’d learn about what goes on in other cities when your friends came back from tour because there was no Internet. They’d have to call or send you a postcard. I learned about Pantera when a friend’s band of mine was on tour and they played with Pantera and he called me on the phone and he held up the phone and he goes, “You gotta hear this!” during sound check. That’s how I heard about Pantera.
And going back to the Sunset Strip, like you mentioned about shooting opening bands, you never know what you’re gonna get. Wow.
No. And the Sunset Strip was this weird—there’s these clubs that had these reputations of what type of music they’d play and I’d see the strangest line-ups of bands on shows because either it’d be an early show and a late show. There’d be Motley Crue and the Dickies. They played at different times. Or Social Distortion and WASP, that was a good one. At the Troubadour. A true story. I took my mom. These strange bills with these strange bands that you’d never think they’d share the same club at the same time, and I just loved that.
Do you have any advice for upcoming photographers?
That’s a hard one because the medium has changed so much. I stopped shooting shows around 1994 because things started changing. And I’ve talked about this in other interviews, of the fans being separated from the bands, the idea of having this pit in front where you could be physically against the stage. Rules that started to come into place about, you can only shoot three songs and then you’d have to leave or you can only shoot one band and not another band. I didn’t play that game ever, and as soon as that came on the scene, I stopped because it wasn’t fun anymore. It just became a chore. And I was really kind of deflated by how undervalued photographers were.
The promoters at bigger rock venues treated us like shit. It was as if we were paparazzi. They were just not very kind to us and devalued our art. And I would say to people, “You’re going to thank me in a few years because I’m taking pictures of you in your prime, and one day you’re going to thank me.” And that’s exactly what happened. I would say to young people that want to shoot concerts, just be persistent, make connections. Your best connections you can make are your friends in the band or promoters of the show. Be persistent.
Getting your images out now is much more easy than it was when I was a kid because of social media. You can take a picture at a show and if you’re good post it on your Instagram feed or do a TikTok video. You can get your work out there a lot easier than me who would be mailing photos out to magazines, hoping I would see them one day. That’s literally what I did. But it’s hard. Just be persistent. Promote yourself and don’t be discouraged easily because it’s hard. When everyone’s at a show and the newest version of an iPhone takes really good pictures in low light…
Yup. Isn’t that the truth?
Yeah. I go back and forth when I shoot shows now, I started shooting again limited. I’ll take some with my expensive DSLR and then I’ll take out my iPhone and take some pictures, to do social sharing really fast, and every once in a while, I’m like, Oh my god. This is from my phone?! I’m depressed. [Laughs]
One other thing, it might’ve been on your Instagram, but I saw you say something like, “OK, if you’re going to share my photos, please get in touch.” Do you get that at all where you see your images, and they’re not credited?
I reach out to people if it’s on Instagram and it’s not credited, I’ll reach out and gently suggest that they credit me. Places that you can edit a post, Twitter you can’t, but Instagram you can edit and people will share it with my name. I’ve only had, and this is true, I’ve only had two or three people go, “It’s on the Internet; I can do what I want with it.” I’m like, “No, you can’t. I still own the copyright, and I’m letting you do this with my permission.” Twenty-six thousand trolls swarming on a person who steals my work isn’t a good look.
I interviewed Edward Colver about a year ago (for a piece about Christian Death), and he kind of said a lot of people just take his photos from Christian Death and don’t give any credit, and it just sounded like a horror story.
It happens all the time. It happens to mine, too. There’s a certain amount of battles you can fight, and you can’t fight the internet. I try to be positive and have an image out there as someone who’s approachable and easy to get a hold of. I respond to online inquiries; I respond to people’s comments. I try to make myself available for people for questions, and people every day DM me and ask, “Can I use your picture?” And I say, “Yes, you can. Thank you for asking.” Of course there’s trolls. There’s people who’ve pirated my work on merchandise. I try to take it with a grain of salt because it would probably cost me more money to go after them than what it’s worth. I pick my battles.
My goal is to share my work around the world and have people enjoy my photos whether they purchase them or see them online or they buy them online. And have my archive available for people to enjoy long after I’m gone. And if I fight everybody over exclusivity, no one’s ever going to see the work. So with that, there’s good and there’s bad. There’s people that share responsibly and there’s assholes. But either way the work gets seen and that’s one of the reasons I’m working with the Punk Rock Museum is they have access to my complete digital archive and they can use it for items and displays in the museum. That’s one of the ways I want people to experience my work and if I was hoarding it and not making it available for people to see, then I’ll be gone one day and unless I take active measures to put it out in the world no one’s going to see it and it’ll probably end up in a thrift store. Well, no it won’t. The negatives are going to go to a museum. But you know what I’m saying.
Well, that’s a good way to look at it. It’s just such a great historical perspective that you have.
Yeah, I try to keep it positive and approachable. Positive and approachable, that’s my thing. I want to meet the people and interact with the people who like my work.
Photo courtesy of Alison Braun
