Forgotten Photographsby Jennifer Finch
What if you moved recently and unearthed a box of old photos you always knew existed, yet somehow forgot about? That’s exactly what happened to me about six years ago. I found a beat-up box filled with photography negatives—9,000 of them.
When I started sorting through them and scanning a few, I realized many were from my earliest years behind a camera, roughly 1979 to 1985. These were the first images I ever made, back when I shot for no other reason than curiosity, obsession, and the comfort of watching life through a lens.
An Unexpected Path to the LA Weekly
The more I looked, the more surprised I became. I had spent years shooting film, getting it processed, and tossing it straight into the box without much thought. I never intended to release any of these into the world. Photography was always something private for me—a way to observe without intruding, especially during shows or inside the messy, electric pockets of early Los Angeles punk.
When I revisited the images as a whole, I noticed something I had never seen before: a thread connecting friends, fans, places, drugs, sex, music, and the city itself. It wasn’t just, “Here’s Henry from Black Flag,” or “Here’s Courtney Love when she was sixteen.” It was the world around them. The atmosphere. The lives we were living. The chaos and the strange intimacy of it all.
That perspective became the basis for an LA Weekly article. Suddenly, something I had always kept private was on its way to being public.
Releasing the Work Into the World
Today is the day the LA Weekly article comes out. I still haven’t looked at it. We’re having a party and opening in two days, and I’ve spent the last five weeks working nearly a hundred hours a week to get everything ready.
Press still feels strange to me. Letting people look at the work feels even stranger. My phone hasn’t stopped ringing, and I’m still trying to take in the reality that these once-forgotten negatives are now becoming something that belongs to the world too.
The official press release for the show:
LA Weekly Photo Show “Jennifer Finch: 14 and SHOOTING”
w/ Live music by: Black Fag, Gabba Gabba Heys, the Shocker
1639 Vine Street
Hollywood, CA 90046 USA
FREE !!!!!
Description: A Free Show featuring Photography by Jennifer Precious Finch.
FREE BAR Get there early.
Doors are at some weird early hour, like 6 pm.
Bands at 8 pm.
14 and SHOOTING: Photographs by Jennifer Precious Finch images from 1979 – 1986.
On November 4th, LA WEEKLY will present an exclusive photo exhibition of photographs from the early eighties Los Angeles punk scene.
The exhibition takes place at the Aidan Ryley Taylor Gallery and will feature never-before-seen photos of Black Flag, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Social Distortion, Christian Death, The Gun Club, The Circle Jerks, 45 Grave, Minutemen, and Courtney Love, as well as some of the private moments experienced by these musicians and the kids that listened to them.
The photographer, Jennifer Precious Finch, has been a fixture in the Los Angeles rock scene since she was a precocious twelve-year-old punk rocker at the beginning of the eighties.
She went on to be part of the raucous and revolutionary all-girl band L7, touring the world, making headlines, and playing sold-out shows.
Finch has been shooting everything around for over two decades, and this exhibit is the result of narrowing down images from 1979 to 1985.
Of the 4,567 negatives from this period, over 100 will be displayed.
The exhibit will coincide with a special issue of the LA WEEKLY featuring the photographs with accompanying editorial by John Albert (award-winning writer, co-founder of Christian Death, and author of “Wrecking Crew”).
The issue will be published on November 2nd.
Aidan Ryley Taylor Gallery is located at 1639 Vine Street, 90028 (1 block south of Hollywood Boulevard) in Hollywood.
