There can be few people better qualified to document California’s Deathrock scene than Amelia G and her partner Forrest Black. Lifelong devotees of the dark side, Amelia and Forrest’s long association with the West Coast’s most ghoulishly glamorous subculture has recently borne fruitin the shape of an arresting, new full-colour photobook. Unlike many such publications, California Deathrock is an insider’s guide, and is all the better for it, treating its subjects as unique, stylish, often sexy individuals (some of the shots are NSFW) rather than anthropological specimens for dissection under clinical lighting.

But, just what is Deathrock? Some simply think it’s the American name for Goth, before Goth become more universally acknowledged, but Amelia thinks it has characteristics that differentiate it from the European Goth scenes, or even those from the US East Coast. ‘I think of Deathrock in general, and California Deathrock in particular, as a delightful mid-point between punk and gothic, with just a dab of horror and wackadoodle mixed in,’ explains Amelia. ‘Deathrock is like a very pretty form of punk or a very badass form of Gothic.’

I wondered how she’d first become involved in the scene? ‘I’m not sure I could precisely put a start date on it overall, but I do recall how I started shooting specifically the California Deathrock scene,’ she said. ‘I started publishing the glossy dark Blue Blood magazine in print in 1992. I’d been doing a punk rock humour zine called BLT before that. Plus I did a lot of music journalism and was a DJ in my teens. I later wrote my thesis on vampire lore as a paradigm for aggressive human sexuality.

‘Blue Blood used to trade issues with a dark magazine called Ghastly, which also came up during the zine revolution’, added Amelia. ‘When Forrest Black and I got out to Los Angeles, Ghastly’s editor Jeremy invited us out to a Deathrock club he was involved with called Release the Bats. Forrest and I already knew a lot of the people who hung out there from corresponding about our various creative projects. We liked the scene and the aesthetics, so Forrest and I set about immortalizing the community.’

For the California Deathrock book, Amelia and Forrest took the position of trying to create a visual documentation of the scene it depicts. It makes it hard for Amelia to pick out one image that really stands out or captures the movement: ‘Some photographers shoot to create a single standalone image, but Forrest Black and I tend to shoot with a more project-based orientation. I love so many of the images in the California Deathrock book, but, on some level, I feel like a person almost needs to see the whole work to fully see what we are expressing with it. Contextually, the work is intended to be viewed as a whole.’

You can order the book from the usual outlets, or direct from the website at http://californiadeathrock.com/

Meanwhile, if all of these Californian Deathrockers have made you feel a little dowdy, why not check out our Alchemy Gothic range of elegant jewellery and ephemera , or, if you lean more towards Deathrock’s punk roots, our UL13 range should have just the attitudinal accessory to fit your style.

by Gavin Baddeley http://www.gavinbaddeley.com/

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2015 in Uncategorized.