Alison Braun | Photographer, Author and Archivist
Alison photographed punk, hardcore, metal, and grunge from inside the rooms where those scenes took shape. She started in Los Angeles in 1981, still a teenager, with a Pentax K1000 her father gave her — shooting Black Flag, Bad Brains, Social Distortion, the Circle Jerks, and Wasted Youth in small clubs, years before any of that work was treated as history. She was a participant, not an assigned photographer: writing interviews and scene reports for Flipside, Maximum Rock'n'roll, and We Got Power, and working with Mystic Records, one of the Los Angeles labels at the center of the hardcore underground. Braun did not arrive after punk had a visual language. Her photographs are part of where that language came from. Her move north carried the work into a second scene before grunge became a category, and across both cities the pictures hold the same qualities: direct, close, alert to the exchange between performer and crowd. Trained by her father and later a master photographic printer in Los Angeles and Seattle, she brings a printer's command of contrast and available light to rooms that offered very little of either. Her books In the Pit and Shot in the Dark draw on an archive of more than 200 bands. Braun is cofounder, photo historian, and curator at the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas.