LA Weekly

The Invisible Lens

A few years ago a scientist claimed he could predict the future. His theory was based on the fact that most years, days and moments are not exceptional. Chances are this is not an unusual time, no matter how strange it may seem. And when you’ve been around for a while, you realize that to be true. All the seemingly dramatic peaks and valleys stretched out over the years suddenly look more like a slightly jagged straight line. And for that very same reason, there are certain moments in one’s history that resonate even more clearly as extraordinary. It’s that way in the lifetime of a person, and in the lifetime of a city.

I first met Jennifer “Precious” Finch back in 1980, long before she would go on to play bass in the infamous all-girl band L7, when the two of us were teenagers attending summer art classes at Otis Parsons across from MacArthur Park. I fancied myself an angry young artist, and she was studying photography. There weren’t many punk rockers around at the time, and we could easily recognize each other from afar. She had short spiky hair and was wearing a man’s blazer. I had short bleached hair and was wearing bright-red leather “creeper” shoes with huge rubber souls. She marched over and demanded to know who I was. Within a few weeks, our respective worlds collided as my friends met her friends and a complex chain reaction of sexual hookups, long-term romances, undying friendships and petty feuds followed in our wake. It’s been that way ever since.

Then last year — some 25 years later — I found myself writing an article about her (now ex) husband, who had built a robot car and was racing in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Jennifer had just returned from a European tour with her new band, the Shocker, and was rearranging the house as we talked. At some point, I noticed a row of photo albums haphazardly stacked against the wall, and I began to look through them. What I found were thousands of images composing a visual history of West Coast punk culture, starting with Jennifer’s teenage Hollywood years and proceeding through her time in Seattle for the birth of grunge, and then on tour with L7 for Lollapalooza and later on several Warped Tours with both L7 and the Shocker.

But what captured my attention beyond all the history and rock stars were her earlier pictures, from our teen years in the Los Angeles punk scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s. There was admittedly a wave of bittersweet nostalgia, seeing so many old friends looking young and unscathed, if not particularly innocent. But when I managed to step back, what resonated far more was the undeniably troubled quality of the subjects in her images. I had seen the energy and defiance captured by other photographers, but while many have been able to render the rebelliousness, none seemed to grasp the underlying discontent like Finch. And the truth is, as provocative and exciting as those years were, what attracted such a disparate cross section of kids to both the music and one another was that, more than anything, the scene gave purpose to the pain. Perhaps because Finch was a part of it, one of us, it’s there on display in her photos — the uncertainty, deep friendships, youthful sexuality and eyes-closed comfort of the heroin that would eventually destroy the scene and so many of us.


“Being a 14-year-old girl made me kind of invisible,” says Finch. “I don’t think anyone was even paying attention when I had my camera. A lot of the subjects were friends, some weren’t. I was always taking photography classes and so a lot of those early pictures are actually just lighting tests. It was just something I enjoyed, and it allowed me access. I would tell bands that I would take their pictures if they put me on the guest list so I could get in free. It was a way to meet people and be part of the scene.”

The majority of her pictures do not focus on the raucous musical performances or riots that occurred regularly, but instead examine the loose-knit social scene that existed amid all the chaos and upheaval of the drugs, violence and crash-pad living. These are images of kids caught in that uncertain time between childhood and the looming consequences of adulthood. Some are forging dramatic new identities, while others make potentially dooming choices. Most are at a juncture where the stakes seem preternaturally high, diverging between creativity and premature destruction. Many pictures feature Finch’s two young girlfriends Maggie and Yasmin. At times they appear quite childlike, young girls playing dress-up, while other times they indulge in far less innocent pursuits like intravenous drugs and a precocious sexuality. What for normal kids might have been a time of high school dances and college beer bashes is instead spent late into the night at Hollywood nightclubs and halls seeking an exotic sense of danger and decadence, all to a radically evolving soundtrack.

“It was a really amazing time,” Finch says. “You could go see some weird cabaret act one night and Black Flag the next, and it would be a lot of the same people. The whole thing attracted this incredibly diverse cross section — the privileged children of celebrities all the way down to kids from the slums and a criminal element. But it was also a more innocent time. There was still this sexual freedom right before AIDS was discovered. Drugs were a big part of the scene, but people were really young, so there was a lot of bounce-back.”

The milieu revealed in these photographs was a truly exceptional period in this city’s cultural history — a radical aesthetic shift, from an aimless, post-hippy hedonism to an explosive merging of stripped-down rock & roll with local skateboard/surf rebellion. The aftershocks still reverberate through popular culture like some lingering light beamed from deep in space. Yet the intent of these images is not to further mythologize that subculture. There has been plenty of that. Instead, they reflect the scene as viewed by a young girl of 14 to 16 who was just making the scene.