1 Punk House (Abrams Image); Photo: Abby Banks
You can’t take the punk out of the house
In Punk House: Interiors in Anarchy, Abby Banks uses a digital camera and rudimentary flash to photograph other communal living spaces
By Leah DeVun
Published: November 26th, 2007 | 3:14pm
Years ago, I traveled across the country by train and met punks who fed me dumpster-dived veggie burgers and let me crash on their floors. It’s comforting to know that punk houses are still alive and well, as can be seen from Abby Banks’ raucous collection of photographs in Punk House.
Banks visited 65 punk houses across the U.S. in 2004, documenting the interiors of feminist collectives, cooperative farms, hobo squats, and all manner of communal living spaces. The more than 300 resulting photographs capture the special combination of artistic genius and plain old filth that constitute punk house aesthetics. Banks finds a worn, silk-screened t-shirt thumbtacked to the wall: “My Other Shirt is Clean,” it says. Other photographs show graffitied stairwells and fliered walls, massive piles of mixtapes and vinyl records, jumbles of bike tires, band practice spaces, and some dubiously constructed bedroom lofts.
The punks who live or pass through the houses appear in the photos as well. A pair of crusty punks, with their requisite dreadlocks and pet dog, are on the side of the road, hitchhiking to Seattle. Other punks pose in the rooms they’ve created — sleeping, drinking, playing guitar. They’re participants in the ultimate punk leisure experiment: cram enough people into a house and your own rent fast approaches zero. I’m not sure that these interiors are exactly anarchic — collective living requires a fair amount of order and compromise — but they’re sublimely and stylishly messy.
One punk backyard features an abandoned washing machine spray-painted with the words “Sonic Youth” in purple. Fittingly, veteran punk rocker and Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore writes the introduction to the book, which he also edited. Although he confesses that he doesn’t know much about punk houses and has never lived in one, he expresses his admiration for the “crusty utopianism” and energy that fuels the formation of these households.
For Banks, the book is obviously a labor of love. She first became interested in alternative economies more than ten years ago when she met a group of squatters in Berlin, and she is now a member of the Tinder Box, an artists’ collective in Brattleboro, Vermont. In Punk House, Banks used a digital camera and rudimentary flash to photograph other communal living spaces. Sometimes her method results in rough-and-tumble, oversaturated images that convey the character and immediacy of her subjects. Sometimes the images are just blurry and indistinct.
One wishes that Banks had brought more technical photographic skills to her project, which might have allowed her to filter the scenes through her own artistic viewpoint. But Banks’ goal seems to be mainly documentary. Her photographs are compatible with the DIY principles so important to the people and places of Punk House. Banks makes good use of those principles to document the excitement of cooperative living, as well as the beauty of the spaces that result from it.
Issue #35
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