Minneapolis rock photographer Brian D. Garrity on his new book and gallery show
September 08, 2023
On a quiet summer afternoon, Brian D. Garrity walks into the Stray Dog on East Hennepin Avenue — his local. He’s quiet and thoughtful and apologizes in advance that he’s “not a very good interview.” He’s wrong — no one with his experience, and his stories, could not be.
Garrity is a writer — he has published three books of fiction — but today he’s discussing Pushed Beyond All Reasonable Limits: The Music Photography of Brian D. Garrity, published by DiWulf, a collection of images focusing heavily on ’90s alternative rock, with particular attention to Twin Cities bands. To commemorate it, Mpls Photo Center will be showing Garrity’s photos for six weeks; at the opening reception, on Friday, Sept. 8, he’ll be on hand to autograph copies of the book.
“Minneapolis in the early 1980s was a pretty good place to participate in a culture that wanted to create its own image,” writes Peter Davis, editor and publisher of the indie zine Your Flesh, where Garrity got his start. He adds: “I saw some of his pictures and knew I needed to see what else might come under his lens.”
As depicted here, that lens documented a fertile time in both photography and rock. The saturated reds and yellows of Marilyn Manson shot in Detroit in 1995 and the blue-green hues of a Linkin Park portrait from 2000 vividly recall their era. Definitive shots abound — Afghan Whigs in Loring Bar bathroom, Babes in Toyland playing outdoors in 1989 (drummer Lori Barbero blurbed this book), Beck, Ice Cube, Idlewild in the Spice Building, Luscious Jackson, Lush, Nirvana, Polara (featuring the late Ed Ackerson), Henry Rollins, and Thom Yorke among them. (Many of those photos were taken at First Avenue.) The book's best section is "Watching the Watchers," portraits of fans in venues across the U.S.: In repose or anticipation or the middle of the pit, their faces bring the feeling of being in the room alive.
You say that you’re not a very social creature. How did you wind up becoming a photographer?
Brian D. Garrity: Well, more or less of an accident. When my housemate, Peter Davis, published a fanzine back in the early ‘80s, called Your Flesh, he started hiring me to do that. It just snowballed from there. I don’t like to be intrusive. I love musicians. I usually like to just let them be themselves. They get comfortable with me in the room, and I just take what I take.
Are there any images that you no longer have that you might have wanted for the book?
I think I’ve pretty much got everything I haven’t actually destroyed while trying to develop it. I did all my own developing and processing. That was always kind of a questionable part of the process at that point, ‘cause I was developing in bathrooms—unconventional places. But I’ve got most of the Your Flesh stuff, surprisingly. Somehow, I was organized, even my youth.
You blame Charles Peterson for making in-camera effects into a live rock photo staple.
His work did run in Your Flesh magazine. That is where I’d seen it before. I have to admit that I’d been influenced by it.
What other photographers did you look up to when you began?
Obviously, [Annie] Liebowitz; and Michael Lavine out in New York did a lot of cross-processing, which I really liked and I got into a lot later on in my work. There was another girl at Alternative Press, Michelle Taylor. She was there very briefly before I was connected to the magazine. Her stuff was very primitive, but she was there all the time, capturing the bands that were the hottest in the underground at that point. I kind of took her place when she left.
You talk about Sonic Youth being one of the first bands you photographed.
Yeah, and before that I shot Hüsker Dü in my basement.
How did Hüsker Dü end up in your basement?
We had an infamous punk rock house called Last House on the Left. By the time we got ejected, evicted, I was in the attic, so I worked my way up to the apex.
How many rooms?
Five. It was a very, very cool place to hang out. One of my roommates, Sheila, was actually seeing Grant Hart at the time. They and Loud Fast Rules, later to become Soul Asylum, would often practice in my basement. Then we started having parties and they started dropping by and playing those parties. This was in ’84. It lasted about a year before we completely destroyed the house. The landlord was right across the street from us, observing the wanton destruction of his property, and promptly took us to court and got us kicked out. [laughs] If memory serves me, it was a little over a year.
It tells you something about the turnover that you had five different bedrooms in a year.
Yeah. A lot of lives were changed and then moved on.
In the book, you talk about graduating from black-and-white to color photography after national magazines come calling. Who called first?
That was Alternative Press. Their first assignment, if I recall, was My Bloody Valentine, which is my very favorite band. I was over the frickin’ moon on that one. That was 1991. They were playing First Avenue; Babes [in Toyland] were opening up. I had already shot the Babes a number of times, for a number of different publications. I remember being backstage with Bilinda [Butcher] and Kevin Shields [of MBV], taking a portrait, and the door opens, and Kat [Bjelland of Babes in Toyland] walks in. Belinda said, “Kat, you want to sit in with us here and Brian the photographer.” I hear from behind me, in a shrill voice: “The last time he shot me, I looked fat.” She turned around and slammed the door.
Was AP your primary national outlet for a while? Were other places coming calling soon after?
Yeah. I did seven or eight covers for AP. Almost every month, I had at least an assignment for a good five or six years. But during that time, I connected up with Spin magazine, Ray Gun magazine, Interview. I was also working locally for the bands themselves, and for some of the local distributors, local recording labels, such as Amphetamine Reptile Records and Twin/Tone.
How many nights a week are you out during this period?
For being an unsocial person, I was out pretty much every night. I lived at the CC Club, 7th Street Entry, and the Uptown Bar. They would allow me in; I didn’t really have to have a photo pass. They often wouldn’t charge me at the door. That was back in the era where, [when] you’d go to First Avenue, you’d get a handful of drink tickets, a handful of comps [complimentary tickets] to upcoming shows, and you’re comped in for the next week or two. I would just turn that around and around and around.
There are so many different venues in the book, many long gone: Garage D’or Records, Uptown Bar, Glam Slam. Was part of the decision-making process for this book to have a wide mix of venues and locations?
Yeah, because the work is so varied and covered so many different subjects and venues. I had live, portrait, and a lot of audience stuff. I wanted that all to be part of the book, part of the portraiture of that era. I wanted to hold it up as something that’s completely different [than is] happening today. Just by comparison, I wanted to show how differently it worked back then.
The group of audience shots, in particular, is wonderful. How much of that sort of thing did you know you were going to do?
I got lucky. An old friend of mine was watching my postings on Facebook, and people commented that they wanted to see a book. But I was too busy with my commercial photography career, making oodles of money I could not turn down. When the COVID thing happened, I lost my job, my career, lost everything. I didn’t really have much to do, so for the first time in 30 years, I actually took stock of what I have.
My old friend and jam buddy and housemate with Peter Davis, Mark Notermann, contacted me from Seattle: “You do know that I’m an art director, right?” I told him I wanted this to look like a Scorsese documentary, documenting our ’90s, the one that we witnessed. We developed a series of subjects — not to be labeled within the book, but as a background idea. That’s how those shots got grouped. We fought for two years over the sequencing, the way that they were to run together and everything. It was a bit of a compromise on both of our sides.
What would the fights be about?
In one, he prominently used a portrait of one of my old roommates that I shot on stage — I lived with a lot of musicians — who had subsequently stolen my girlfriend and ran to New York with her. I’m like, “I don’t want that prick in my f**king book.” [laughs] And he’s like, “But it’s a great shot!” Finally, at the end, I’m like, “OK, this is trees-for-the-forest time. I’ve seen this work too much. I’ve worked with these files for two-and-a-half years, my eyeballs are burned.” It is all film. Nothing is digital.
It doesn’t look digital at all.
Good. That’s what I wanted. When I talked to Mark, I’m like, “Don’t be afraid to show the grain. I want it to look like black smoke all over the page. I want to show that process.”
What was it about the Spice Building that you liked so much as a photo setting?
It was a gathering of eccentric artists, crazy people. It was [on] University Avenue North and 25th, over the tracks. It was a big building within the grain elevators. It was owned by a very eccentric person. He basically lived there himself. We all lived there illegally. He put up with us, we put up with him. A lot of hijinks going on there. But it was ideal, because it was centrally located, had great parking. Bands would come in — like Linkin Park, for example — I’d just tell them the location, and oftentimes, the bands parked in the parking lot to sleep there overnight. Then we’d do the shoot in the morning. I had a dressing room. I had a bathroom, I had a shower. I could let the bands use all those facilities. A lot of people I know, a lot of the artists that are still around today, remember that place and were residents there.
On what bus line was the Arcwelder photo taken?
I believe on First Avenue, whatever bus line that is. I did three different locations with that one. We shot over by the Colonial Building to begin with. We’d just hop on some buses, ride a few blocks, hop off, hop on another one, back and forth.
Was the bus shot just incidental to what you thought you were doing with the photo shoot?
I think it was just a whim. I’m like, “I really want to do a shot on the bus. Just natural light—let’s go for it.”
And it turns out that it’s definitive.
That almost didn’t make it into the book. I had to fight hard for that one. I’m like, “I love this shot.”
It’s totally Minneapolis.
Oh, yeah, I think Arcwelder is kind of iconic, at least in my eyes. I always really liked that shot.
My heart leapt when I turned to the Nirvana spread. Tell me everything you can remember about that show.
That was for Cake magazine. I’d never heard of Nirvana. Two weeks before the show, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came out over the house speakers at the First Avenue Mainroom. I turned to the sound guy: “Who’s this?” “Nirvana! And they’re going to be here two weeks.” I’m like, OK, I’ve got to see the show. A week later, Cake asked me if I wanted to shoot the show.
They had also arranged for me after the show to take Kurt Cobain’s portrait. I had money for one roll. That’s all I shot, one roll. And I shot that out. I’m like, Okay, for the portrait, I’ll do another roll. I went to the backstage door. And Conrad [Sverkerson, First Avenue stage manager] was sitting there and he’s like, “Kurt don’t want to see you right now. He’s not feeling good.” He called it off. Thirty years later, I’m still kicking myself.
PUSHED: Rock & Roll Photographs by Brian D. Garrity opens at Mpls Photo Center, 1400 Van Buren St. NE, suite 710, on Friday, Sept. 8, 6:30 p.m. Free. More about the book here.
