The Beatles crossing Abbey Road. Jimi Hendrix kneeling over a burning guitar. Bo Diddley’s horn-rim glasses and square Gretsch. Elvis Presley’s pompadour. Rock ‘n’ roll has been defined by images as much as by power chords and amps that go to 11.

But as many people know, there’s a thriving global punk scene with its own images that has been largely invisible to the mainstream since its inception in the ’70s. And one of the most popular icons of this underground is Maximum Rocknroll magazine.

“I think of that picture of Robert Plant with his arm in the air, with the mic and the light shining behind him, bare-chested with the vest thing on,” said Paul Curran, longtime volunteer with Maximum Rocknroll . “We’re the opposite of that.”

Maximum Rocknroll has been a beloved indie music publication for more than a quarter-century. The monthly magazine survives on a shoestring budget and an army of volunteers, whom it lovingly calls “shitworkers.”

This year MRR released its first photography issue in quite some time, interviewing punk shooters and showcasing contributions from MRR‘s global readership.

Punk’s in-your-face aesthetic is as different from detached rock stars as Maximum‘s anti-commercial stance is from corporate magazines. Despite the dire financial straights of many media outlets, including MRR, the photo issue has sold out, proving there’s still life underground.

Read on to see photos from the issue and take a look inside a world of cramped basements and distorted guitars.

Update: This is not MRR‘s first photography issue, as the post originally stated, but it has been a while since their last one.

Photo: The Mummies at Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, Halloween 2009, by Mark Murrmann.

Bay Area garage kings The Mummies ruled the low-fi roost for the late ’80s and early ’90s, touring around in a derelict ambulance and leaving a trail of rags in their wake.

In addition to curating MRR‘s weekly photo blog, Murrmann is photo editor for Mother Jones and contributes to San Francisco photo collective Hamburger Eyes.

Magazine spreads and album jackets have boasted many celebrated names, but MRR intentionally approached lesser-known contemporary shooters for its photography issue.

“We try and get across the idea that you could be on stage, you could be writing the scene report, you could be taking the photo,” said English transplant Layla Gibbons, one of two magazine coordinators at MRR. “The reader is the person that creates punk.”

Former coordinator Mark Murrman nurtured the issue from a desire to interview Bay Area shooter Chris “Canderson” Anderson (not Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson).

“The intention was just that there’s a lot of great punk photographers out here,” he said, speaking on the phone from his desk at Mother Jones . “Not only whose work should be seen but it would be interesting to know more about them.”

Maximum has a long-standing policy of not accepting advertisements, reviewing albums or interviewing bands on major labels or labels distributed by majors. Regardless of the draw bigger acts may have had for newsstand sales, no photographs were run of anyone who had left the underground.

Photo: The band Crime, Feb. 23, 2008, by Lily Chou.

One of San Francisco’s first punk bands, Crime’s greatest moment of notoriety was playing San Quentin Penitentiary while wearing police uniforms.

Lily Chou is a traveling photographer who runs the website Jetlag Rocknroll.

Maximum Rocknroll began as a Bay Area radio show in the late ’70s. The loudest voice and driving force behind the microphone was Tim Yohannan. Alongside other future luminaries Jello Biafra, Jeff Bale and Ruth Schwartz, the staff pushed politics and activism on listeners in between spinning the latest punk records.

In 1982 the radio show staff conspired with Biafra’s upstart Alternative Tentacles record label to release the double-LP compilation Not So Quiet on the Western Front . The project intentionally focused on lesser-known bands from places not affiliated with a nationally known scene, and the MRR founders included politicized essays and a newsprint booklet designed by participants. Thus Maximum Rocknroll was born.

The magazine quickly became recognized as an authoritative voice propelled by Yohannan’s hardline ethics and a transient crew of volunteers. Readers were invited to contribute, creating a diverse and international dialogue through letters, scene reports and interviews. Other articles railed against the empty commodification of culture politics.

MRR was never a profit-seeking endeavor, and extra cash flow is routinely donated to smaller fanzines, labels and special projects. Volunteers were received with open arms –- mohawks not required.

Along with stature came criticism. Maximum is often pegged as a monolithic entity espousing the one true philosophy of punk. Derided as politically correct scene police, malcontents and former columnists have started alternative rags to circumvent the perceived ethics or aesthetics.

“We cover DIY, underground punk rock,” said Curran, who has been with the magazine since 1983. “I guess some people will get all uppity about it, ‘Oh why won’t you take this, or this, or that?’. To us it’s because that’s not what we want. Go start your own magazine.”

Photo: 9 Shocks Terror, by Jason Penner.

9 Shocks Terror was a Cleveland hardcore band that toured and recorded for more than years.

Canadian photographer Jason Penner shoots for fun, plays bass in bands and runs Primitive Air-Raid Records.

MRR has been there through every stage of punk’s anti-style and documented each one in its pages. The genre’s visual language has always been an international collaboration, starting with the Ramones’ debut platter in 1976, which effectively deflated the then-rampant deification of musicians. Roberta Bayley’s shot of the band standing before a brick wall was as shocking as the record’s shorter, louder, faster songs.

The vanguard of this style bounced back and forth between New York and London. English bands took the confrontational look of their peers and contorted it by shredding their clothes and coloring their hair. When records landed from abroad, American bands took this new image and appropriated the style once more.

The visual cliches of punk revolve around the postcard pastiche of England’s 1977 or American hardcore’s watershed 1982 scene. Historical reverence has become a unifying thread that ties disparate communities together, making widespread scenes instantly recognizable while adding their own embellishments.

“The Indonesian scene is more crusty, whereas the Russian scene is more ’90s emo and hardcore and youth crew. Everyone has a different perspective on what punk or what hardcore is but then there are definitely connections,” said coordinator Gibbon. “Making things happen in different ways because of where they live, but doing it because they have to do it.”

Photo: Warkrime, by Larry Wolfley.

Bay Area band Warkrime has riled audiences with its confrontational attitude toward political ideologies and flippant use of derogatory terms.

Larry Wolfley was recently asked by producers of American Idiot: The Musical to provide photographs from Gilman Street to be projected during the show.



The media often stereotype punk as being violent, drug-fueled and nihilistic. And sometimes rightly so. Places and periods — early ’80s East Coast hardcore and Orange County, California — have deservedly bad reputations for violence. London, New York and San Francisco have always been rife with drugs. But while celebrities of the scene are capitalizing on former notoriety in recent books and movies, MRR has always supported a more politicized form of anarchy.

“Rather than the fucking American Hardcore movie where people were like, ‘Dude, everything was so crazy back then,'” Curran said. “Yeah, there was crazy stuff too but there was also stuff like a cool teenage band that plays bicycles. There was all kinds of things going on.”

The early ’90s saw the advent of a musical movement dubbed Riot Grrrl. This aggressively feminist movement abandoned punk’s traditionally secretive stance and worked to subvert the media spotlight.

“I came up in that era where it was sort of a weird thing of using the media to get women into punk,” said Gibbon, who was in the early-90s English band Skinned Teen. “Bikini Kill had this thing where they were like, ‘Girls should rule towns,’ so they wanted to appeal to every girl.”

Efforts to engage the media in a constructive manner resulted in misunderstanding, misrepresentation and eventually a backlash. Magazines focused on bands’ confrontational dismantling of sexuality to discuss femininity, abuse and rape. MRR interviewed the contentious band Bikini Kill and ran the complete transcript.

“The way that that was projected, it just sort of becomes another aesthetic, another image,” Gibbon said. “Especially with the way that [Bikini Kill frontwoman] Kathleen Hannah was depicted in the media, as ‘She’s an angry stripper.’ It just kind of reduces a complicated subject to a cypher rather than a complete person. You just become a cartoon.”

Photo: Gruel, by Ricky Adam.

Photographer Ricky Adam is from Northern Ireland and shoots for Dig BMX Magazine.

Cheap cameras and an endless amount of exposures are fueling a flood of new images from around the world. The idea of community running through punk invites novices to the table while also informing the style of shots.

“They’re all from the crowd. They’re all fucking coming at you. I also love the ones that aren’t bands, too,” Curran, who also contributed a couple pictures, said. “Two kids sitting at the door of Gilman. Just looking snotty.”

Photo: Sguardo Realta, by Daigo Oliva.

Both Sguardo Realta and Daigo Oliva hail from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Oliva is one half of Fodido e Xerocado photozine.

For the photography issue, Murrman put a call out over the internet asking people to submit shots of scenes from around the world. More than a thousand images came in response, from places as remote as Indonesia, Poland and Taiwan. A dream list of interviewees was drafted and requests sent across the States, South America and Europe.

One common snipe at punk is that it’s white, male-dominated, and middle class. Prior to taking over as coordinator, Gibbon interviewed women for MRR who had been essentially written out of punk’s history. Similarly the magazine focuses on the contributions of gay people and racial minorities to the scene.

“I see a lot of races, I see a lot of women –- not saying that was all affirmative action, either. Right now especially there is a lot of that in the scene,” said Curran. “But I’m sure that on Mark’s part he looked at this pile and thought, ‘Are there enough women represented?'”

Photo: Human Eye, by Chris Anderson

Detroit band Human Eye has a penchant for constructing its own sci-fi masks and throwing fish heads around during shows.

Chicago-born Chris “Canderson” Anderson regularly contributes photos to the website Victim of Time.

Participants, from interviewees to the people who submitted images, are from the scene. None are being paid for the time they spend at shows or editing their shots. Murrman, who pursued journalism prior to becoming photo editor, started shooting as a hobby.

“I think that the community aspect comes out the most in the interviews,” said volunteer Curran. “You see that these aren’t people who are photographers at shows; these are punks at the shows who are good at taking pictures. They’re not there as photographers. And that probably is a uniquely punk thing.”

Photo: The Feelers, by Mateus Mondini.

Columbus, Ohio’s The Feelers raged around the world before crashing and burning at the end of the decade.

Brazilian Mateus Mondini makes up one-half of photozine Fodido e Xerocado.

The volume of content pouring in killed the idea of running large-format pictures, and instead, three-page variations for pictures were created by the zine’s layout designer. Contributors with several shots would have dedicated space with the rest of the pages creating an international hodgepodge.

Photo: Career Suicide, by Patrick Baclet.

Toronto’s Career Suicide has been touring the globe on the strength of its blistering hardcore assault.

German shooter Patrick Baclet just published a collection, Out of Vogue.

Maximum has amassed an impressive collection of photographs over its long existence. Reader-contributed scene reports are responsible for the bulk of the archive, but because of the magazine’s focus on contemporary bands, the organization of the photos leaves much to be desired.

“It’s five boxes of photos from fucking 25 years ago. That’s it, that’s the filing system,” said Curran. “[Yohannan] was not an archivist, and I’m really amazed he even kept these photos. He just kind of threw things away willy-nilly.”

Despite talk of publishing a proper photo book or making images available online, progress has stopped at a Monday photo blog. An archival site, Operation Phoenix, has made the magazine’s first 50 issues available as PDFs.

Carrying on in print will require careful steps. Most major competitors of MRR have disappeared, but the empty playing field has not made life easier for the struggling magazine. Higher-quality covers to appeal to more retailers, pushing merchandise and accepting advertisements from corporations are current arguments to decide the fate of an enduring institution.

“I think that when the magazine has to compromise its values significantly it shouldn’t exist,” said Gibbon. “We have talked about the end times, but I’m optimistic and I think that we have a few more years of fraught existence before that’s a reality.”

Photo: Skitkids, by Will Kinser.

Swedish band Skitkids come from the far northern city of Malmö.

Will Kinser has been on both sides of the lens in bands such as Born/Dead and The Red Dons.