Beyond The Streets recently reprinted the legendary DC hardcore book Banned in DC. Published in hardcover for the first time it features new photo scans, color flyers and an afterword from the books main editor Cynthia Connolly. This book was so influential for me that I don’t think I would be a photographer today if it weren’t for the book. I thought the reissue would be a good excuse to write about what it meant to me, but I didn’t realize at the time that it would be nearly 2000 words long when I was done with it.
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The year is 1995 and I am an angry young punk kid living in the DC suburbs. Two things happened that year that changed my life forever. The first thing was that I had to take an art elective in high school. I didn’t have any particular aptitude for art but I had access to my mom’s cameras so I took photography. The second, nearly as impactful thing, was that a book called Banned In DC was reprinted.
I was bad at photography when I first started. It’s not that my composition was terrible or my photos were out of focus or anything, it was that I had no fucking patience. The darkroom was so tedious to me and our Photo 101 assignments were so boring. I enjoyed taking photos, but I probably never would have taken a second photo class if it weren’t for punk rock. 
My buddy Tom and I had started a zine the year before and by 1995 we had started a small record label and were working on our first 7″ record, a compilation of local DC hardcore bands called Raise The Flag. The name was a reference to the X’d out DC flag on the cover of the classic Dischord Records comp Flex Your Head. We were so in love with the early DC hardcore bands like Minor Threat, The Teen Idles, and SOA and wanted to promote bands in our own mid-90s DC punk scene.
So when Tom came home from Smash! Records with a copy of the 4th printing of Banned In DC, a book documenting that early DC punk scene though photos, ephemera and stories, I was instantly obsessed. Not only did it have photos and stories from this world that I was in love with, but it introduced me to so many bands. It also gave us a real connection to that scene because Tom’s brother Charlie was in the book! I knew he had been part of that world, but it was so cool to see him there scowling, fronting his band Trenchmouth, on one of the first pages of the book.
For some reason I didn’t even own a copy of Banned in DC until it was reprinted again in 1999, but I knew as soon as I had seen it that I was taking another photography class. I started shooting local punk bands and I was hooked. Even my photography teacher loved my work. With everyone in class taking self portraits and pictures of their classmates, I was shooting punk shows in Baltimore squat houses and stage diving, camera in hand, off speakers at the 9:30 Club. I was hooked. This was my life now.
A few years later when I was in college I started collecting photography. I wasn’t a drinker and I didn’t spent much money on anything and I decided that photography would be the thing. I started doing print trades with photographer friends of mine but I really wanted to own work that meant something to me and so I sent Cynthia Connolly an email.
Cynthia worked for Dischord and she was our contact person back when they advertised in our zine. She also happened to be the editor of Banned in DC. I saw that she sold her photography on her website, but she didn’t have any of her old punk stuff on there so I reached out and asked her if she had any of the prints from Banned In DC for sale. She didn’t but she sent me the email of a few of the photographers in the book and one of them was Glen E. Friedman.
If you aren’t aware, Glen Friedman is one of the most important music photographers in history. Real quick: He had a front row seat to the early skate, punk and hip hop movements and his photos had a huge impact on all of those cultures. He also happened to be the first music photographer I knew by name. When I was a kid he was who I wanted to be. He had such a recognizable style and I remember looking at photo credits in Banned in DC and Henry Rollins’ book Get In The Van and realizing he had taken almost all of my favorite photos.
So yeah, it’s 2002 and Glen Friedman responds to my email and gives me the prices for his photographs. At the time I didn’t even own a camera that expensive, but I was determined to own one of his photos. I pitched him on this idea of me coming up to NYC and just paying him cash under the table and he knocked a couple hundred bucks off the price. I am sure the trip to NY cost more than I saved but I was going to get to meet my idol. It was a great decision.
I purchased a print of Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat singing on top of the crowd at the 9:30 Club which is probably my favorite photo in all of Banned in DC. He hadn’t printed it in decades and there were so many new details in it that didn’t show up in the book. It was such a beautiful print and it’s been on my wall ever since, but owning that pales in comparison with meeting Glen. He hung out in my hotel room for a couple of hours and just told me stories of the early punk scene, it was such a cool moment for me that I will never forget and at the end he told me I could email him anytime.
For years I would send Glen my work and he would rip it to shreds. Every time I sent it, he would just tell me why I sucked as as photographer, but he was right and him yelling at me made me such a better photographer. He thought digital photography looked like shit (He was absolutely right back then), he thought my band photos were boring (they were) and he suggested I get a 20mm lens. I hated shooting bands with it but for some reason I loved shooting portraits with it. I started shooting less and less bands and more and more people. I kept shooting digital, but I started shooting film again too and never stopped.
By 2009 I was a full time professional photographer and for the first time since high school, I actually liked my photography. I stopped showing Glen my work because I knew he would still hate it and I didn’t care. I still kept in touch with him still buy his books whenever a new one comes out, but I didn’t need him as a mentor anymore, although, maybe I need to reach out again to get some advice on how to navigate this late stage in my career.
Years after I bought that photo from Glen I saw a Kickstarter for another DC punk photo book called ‘Hard Art DC 1979’. Hard Art was a book by legendary Washington Post photojournalist Lucian Perkins and the way it came to be is a story worth telling, despite this article being far too long already.
Lely Constantinople was working for Lucian Perkins organizing his photo archive when she stumbled across some negatives he took for a story in the Post about the early DC punk scene in 1979. The photos featured iconic photos of Bad Brains that graced the inside and back cover of Banned in DC (The name of the book comes from the Bad Brains album of the same name). As she looked through the negatives she saw her husband staring back at her. He was just a kid in the photo, being hugged by a shirtless man holding a mic. She couldn’t believe it. Her husband happened to be Alec McKaye (Ian’s brother and The Faith frontman) and the shirtless man hugging him? Tom’s brother Charlie.
When I saw the Kickstarter I immediately backed it, sent it over to Tom and reached out to Jayme McLellan who ran an art gallery in DC and was publishing the book. When the book launched Jayme showed the photos and we were able to track down Charlie and get him to the gallery. Alec was there and they restaged the iconic photo that Lely found in a pile of negatives many years earlier.
That night we all went out together and I don’t know if it was the help getting Charlie to the gallery or the drinks but Jayme ended up giving me a great deal on three of Lucian’s photos and I now own the Bad Brains photo that’s on the back cover of Banned in DC, one of the only photos ever taken of the Teen Idles and of course that photo of Charlie and Alec.
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I guess that’s the end of the story but I am now inspired to try and track down a few more Banned in DC photographers and see if maybe I can collect a few more photos from the book. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate all those people who documented that magical time that I completely missed out on. Thank you so much to Cynthia Connolly and her fellow editors Leslie Clague and Sharon Cheslow. I hope one day I can put out a photo book that impacts someone as much as your book has for me. Thank you Glen for always responding to my emails, keeping it 100 with me and giving me some of the best criticism I have ever received. Shout out Tom, who I just saw for the first time in way too long, for being my partner in crime back in the day and so glad we got that afternoon with your brother. RIP Charlie
And finally, just for fun I thought I would upload a bunch of my old high school punk photos. Some of them are pretty fucking terrible but some of this work still holds up decades later. I had no plans on posting these when I started this post but scanned a bunch of my old negatives over the last couple of years and it’s a good excuse to share.
