Fans & Cameras: Jim Lanza – 45 Years of Taking Photos of Unpopular Bands and Weird People

For his first photography show in over 25 years, Cleveland artist Jim Lanza dusted off dozens of recently rediscovered negatives of alternative rock bands and fans he shot in the ‘80s and ‘90s. More than 150 photographs make up Fans & Cameras: Jim Lanza – 45 Years of Taking Photos of Unpopular Bands and Weird People, on view at Sixty Bowls Gallery from April 12 through May 10.

Lanza, accompanying his older brother to local punk clubs and armed with a fake ID, began photographing the scene around 1982. “On any given weekend, kids with pink mohawks would mingle with bikers and transvestites,” he recalls. “I wanted to capture it all.

“Around this time, commercial radio was only playing middle-of-the-road, arena rock bands like Journey and Aerosmith. We yearned for something different that spoke to us, and we found that at these small punk clubs and DIY art events.”

Fans & Cameras features many of the artists Lanza shot during the scene’s burgeoning era: Black Flag, Nick Cave, the Cramps, Dead Boys, New Order, and Ramones, among them. It also includes photos of the fans who attended the shows. “I have always enjoyed photographing [subjects] that don’t quite fit in everyday life,” he says.

Lanza first shot a music performance at July 1979’s daylong World Series of Rock at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium when he was 13. He found his way to the front of the stage for Thin Lizzy’s set with his “cheap Instamatic camera” and snapped away. “I still have a few blurry photos from that show,” he says.

Since then, he’s spent time in the trenches of local clubs and as part of huge concert tours, documenting Nine Inch Nail’s 1995 road trip, including dates with David Bowie, and Marilyn Manson’s headline-making Dead to the World Tour in 1997, where he received an unwanted lesson about getting too close to your subject.

“[Manson] told me that he did not care if I stood right next to him onstage, he just wanted quality footage,” Lanza recalls. “One night in Madrid, I stood two feet from him filming. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that [during a] particular song, he would spit at the crowd and dared them to spit back. A tidal wave of foul-smelling spit soon covered both of us.”

Fans & Cameras also includes some of Lanza’s travel photography that has occupied him since the ‘90s. But it’s digging up the old photos from the alternative rock scene, many of them never seen before, that’s at the exhibit’s heart. “My photos are not pretty to some,” says Lanza. “I have never been a technical photographer. I have always liked the scratches, dust spots, and blurs in my photos.

“To me, my images needed to appear just as how I shot them. I hated spending extra time cleaning up the image – you either like it or don’t. I was not a portrait photographer. I was more worried about getting kicked in the head by people jumping off stages. My early band photography was from a fan perspective and capturing a moment in time.”

Fans & Cameras: Jim Lanza – 45 Years of Taking Photos of Unpopular Bands and Weird People is on view at Sixty Bowls Gallery from April 12 through May 10, including an opening reception on April 12 from 3 to 7:30 p.m.