One Photographer’s Trip Into Punk History
Jim Saah’s “In My Eyes” features photos of artists ranging from Foo Fighters to Minor Threat
Nearly everyone with a foothold in punk rock has some sort of origin story. For photographer Jim Saah, his unlikely path to the music he loved involved a certain cult film. “I discovered punk rock at, of all places, The Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight showing at a theater in DC,” Saah tells InsideHook. “They had a DJ, and before the movie started, they played music.”
Young Saah found himself drawn to the music playing at the theater that night: “He was playing a lot of British stuff like The Stranglers and The Buzzcocks and maybe The Sex Pistols. And I thought, What’s this music?”
And so Saah did what countless people before him did: he sought out some local experts. “I went to the record store and asked, ‘Who are these bands?’ The old heads at the record store were great — they were turning me onto stuff and they told me, ‘You know, there’s local punk rock bands too,’” he says.
“My first show was a Minor Threat show,” he adds. “I really got into the scene — the punk scene and the hardcore punk scene.”