Govinda's Hardcore 'Punk Love'
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 9, 2007; Page WE49
At first glance, there's something about Susie J. Horgan's photograph -- the one identified simply as "Getting Into the Shows" and, like the others at Govinda Gallery, stuck to the wall with masking tape -- that looks like it might be a scene from a 1950s teenage sock hop. The sweaty, transgressive energy, the flashes of greaser leather in the flashbulb-lit hall, the hair piled high and tight.
But take a closer look. The kid in the foreground's studded wristband, the Doc Martens on another nearby dancer, the almost total absence of girls, the spiky hair -- held up by gel or Elmer's Glue? Who knows? All those clues jog you out of your anachronistic reverie to the shot's true provenance: the early 1980s punk music scene.
Photos
Punk Love In the early '80s, when punk music was just grabing a toe-hold in Washington, then-college student Susie J. Horgan applied for a job at the Georgetown Haagen-Dazs. It was here that she met Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye -- musicians at the forefront of the punk scene. In her book "Punk Love," Horgan brings together photographs she took of the budding culture. |
Timed to coincide with the publication of a book of Horgan's photographs under the same name, Govinda's "Punk Love" exhibition is a raw yet loving tribute to the emergence of Washington's punk subculture in the early 1980s, when the artist was a fresh-faced college student working part time at the Georgetown Haagen-Dazs, hired by then-manager Henry Rollins (known today as a singer for such bands as S.O.A., Black Flag and the Rollins Band and as a writer, actor and spoken-word artist).
The still-baby-faced Rollins looms large in many of the pictures -- both figuratively, as a punk progenitor, and literally, with his incipient bull neck -- as does Ian MacKaye, Horgan's ice cream shop co-worker (known mainly today as the co-founder of Dischord Records, frontman of the band Fugazi and member of the Evens). Other than the presence of Horgan herself and a few other female fans and band members (e.g., Red C bassist Toni Young and an anonymous, platinum-haired "Punk Rock Girl" caught at a dance at H.B. Woodlawn school), the subjects of these photos are almost all male. It's a world that seems almost frighteningly testosterone-fueled. The pictures feel, for the most part, loud and aggressive, driven by the roiling, swirling boy-energy of the mosh pit -- all knees and elbows raised in the signature dance style of the time, which was not the pogo, but the half-crouching, marionette-like stomp demonstrated by MacKaye in one shot of MacKaye's band, Minor Threat.
But Horgan is equally adept at capturing quieter moments, as with her picture of a sleeping Alec MacKaye, Ian's younger brother, shaved head resting in his arms as he nods off on the steps outside some show. That image would find its way onto the cover of the first Minor Threat record.
Other images, if less iconic, are even more capable of bringing back memories to those who lived through the time and places Horgan documents. I defy anyone who spent any time at all at the original 9:30 club to look at her photograph of music fans congregating in the hallway of the old F Street NW location and not have Proustian memories of its smell -- stale beer, cleaning fluid and clove cigarettes -- come rushing back. Horgan's pictures of the crowd at the old Wilson Center, a music venue at 15th and Irving streets NW in Columbia Heights, are particularly poignant for me, especially because the building has been converted into a public charter school attended by my 7-year-old son.
Govinda Gallery's owner, Chris Murray, compares the energy of Horgan's pictures to that of Astrid Kirchherr's shots of the Beatles in 1960 Hamburg and Al Wertheimer's photos of a 21-year-old Elvis Presley in 1956, taken, as Murray writes, "just before that moment when they became icons." They are, he writes, "that good" -- and he isn't wrong.
There's something else Horgan's pictures share with those of Kirchherr and Wertheimer (both of whose work Murray has also shown). As in the pictures of the Beatles and Elvis, there's an underlying sadness to "Punk Love," a sadness that lies just below the surface of the smooth, unwrinkled skin of its subjects. Ian MacKaye and Rollins are still with us -- don't get me wrong -- but they aren't spring chickens anymore.
Neither are you, if you were around when they were taken, Horgan's photos seem to say, as any glance in the mirror will tell you.
PUNK LOVE Through March 3. Govinda Gallery, 1227 34th St. NW. 202-333-1180. http:/
