GLEN E. FRIEDMAN

“Glen, how come you never shot pictures of my band?” I was teenager when my older brother gifted me a copy of Glen E. Friedman’s then newly published ꜰᴜᴄᴋ ʏᴏᴜ ʜᴇʀᴏᴇꜱ. It was 1994, I was living in rural Michigan, my brother Addison in New York City. That volume of photography was suddenly an index of my favorite groups from Minor Threat to Public Enemy, all photographed by this guy who grew up living simultaneously on the East and West Coasts. The worlds he brought to life, many I had missed by a decade or more, deepened myriad connections I had already made with music. He seemed to have photographed the central protagonists of hardcore punk, hip hop, and skateboarding—the pillars of everything cool. Although I couldn’t quite wrap my head around how this was even possible for a single photographer, at a basic level it made so much sense to me—none of these subjects were compartmentalized, nor should they have been. But beyond the photographs, it was the ethos, that fuck you, which imbued every single grain of every last picture in that volume that really put the hook in me. This is part of what makes Glen’s work so enduring for me and is an influence I couldn’t shake if I tried. To celebrate the publication of Glen’s latest book, his tenth, What I see: The Black Flag Photographs of Glen E. Friedman, Rough Trade hosted a conversation between its author and editorial assistant Ian MacKaye. Before a capacity audience nestled in between rows of vinyl records, these old friends traded stories of the mighty Black Flag. There is little mystery why Glen hasn’t photographed all that many bands in the subsequent decades, few if any moved him like Black Flag did at such a formative moment in his life. This was confirmation of everything that I felt back in ’94 and now come to recognize as gospel today. Pictured Glen E. Friedman at Rough Trade New York City 1 April 2022.