California Deathrock - Subculture Portraits By Forrest Black And Amelia G [Hardcover]

Gorgeous coffee table book of gothic punk portraits with intense personality and viscerally saturated colors.

From the introduction to California Deathrock - Subculture Portraits by Forrest Black and Amelia G:

Since the mid-1990's, Forrest and I have been setting up full blown location studios in all sorts of unlikely and underground places. We've set up lights and backdrops in wind-blown theater parking lots in the middle of the night, while bands played their shows, in co-ed strip clubs, and crammed behind the pool table in the back of noisy dive bars. Sometimes it's a real challenge, but this is how we shoot our personal work. We like to capture the moments in their real environments. For this compendium, we chose only images which were actually shot in California. Some of the deathrockers in this volume grew up here and some are transplants and some were just passing through. Forrest and I had a lot of debates, while hunched over a contact sheet with loupes in hand, over whether a particular photo was really more deathrock or more Gothic, as we needed a methodology for honing down what to share. When we started shooting, there were very few photographers who would ever shoot anyone gothic or punk or tattooed or pierced or fetish and the few who did approached the subject matter in a gritty unattractive purely anthropological manner, like they were going to the zoo. We wanted to create respectful and celebratory work. We wanted to capture the joy and tribal sense of community which we experienced in the various subterranean worlds we documented. We wanted the flamboyant beauty we saw to resonate with other people the way it did for us. We wanted the people we photographed to look the way they looked in our minds' eyes when we recalled the excitement of nightlife at midnight.

For nearly a quarter of a century, Amelia G and Forrest Black have been documenting subculture in America. Their work has been published by everyone from Rolling StlC