2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange
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print this pageA Lens on the Underground: How the DIY Punk Community Self-Documented a History
John Rash & Ivette Spradlin: Abigail Cook, Dale Rio
Saturday, March 21 - 9:00AM to 11:00AM
Georgia 7
DIY punk culture has always thrived on ephemeral visual communication - handmade flyers, limited-run zines, and transient venues. Yet, amidst this impermanence, photography has played a vital role in capturing and communicating a punk ethos that has lasted for more than half a century. Far from slick, professional imagery, these photographs were often taken by scene kids using cheap cameras, often with little formal training but deep personal investment. As a result, punk photography serves not only as documentation but as an extension of the DIY ethic: immediate, unpolished, fiercely local, and often a rejection of the commercial or high art images seen in magazines and galleries. Drawing from a range of archival and contemporary sources, this session will argue that punk photography is inherently collaborative—frequently created, distributed, and preserved by the same community it represents. Far from passive images, punk photographs—often taken by community members themselves—offer insight into the grassroots ethics, improvisational creativity, and communal networks that have shaped this underground culture since the late 1970s. This panel seeks to examine archival photographs of DIY punk through multiple lenses—historical, sociological, artistic, and curatorial. We will consider how these images resist or reinforce traditional archival practices, what stories they tell about the communities that created them, and how their preservation raises questions of ownership, memory, and cultural value. The conversation will also address the ethics of displaying and interpreting images from marginalized or anti-mainstream cultures in institutional settings such as museums, libraries, and online archives.
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