CHRISTINA BIRRER

These portraits began as a document of the music coming out of England post 1976. The 'new music' bin at our local record shop on Melrose avenue in W Hollywood had these mysterious albums with austere and riveting covers- Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire, Magazine, Throbbing Gristle...the music was something else again- more like aural landscapes- not limited to the thrash of punk and also part of it. LA is a strange place, so large and a village. We first found some of these bands playing the Whiskey and dives in OC- we decided to go to the source- England. I remember the day we met up with Tony Wilson of Factory Records in Manchester- he was taking us around to see the lads from Joy Division, and suddenly he dropped us off at the tv station where he had a show- later we found out it was to get us out of some sort of drug related brush with the local law- Manchester and the estates that the musicians lived on were very much the wild north in those days. I worked either in large format or with a small minox 'spy camera' with no manual focus and very fast grainy film. I was introduced to Steven Morrissey as a writer who was writing a book on B-Movie queens, he introduced me to Linder and New Hormones...we moved to London in 1980 and I found out central heating was a luxury- more often than not controlled with a meter that you fed coins into. Transport was a bike or on a bus or the tube-writing included envelopes and a time gap- photos and drawings going back and forth. The stories are for another day-here is a small glimpse.Prints vary from silver bromide using agfa brovira, kentmere document paper, and lith chemistry on foma to hand made emulsions using platinum, kallitype, and cyanotype.