In GRUNGE Michael Lavine’s compelling black-and-white photographs, and a text by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore reveal a unique era in music and fashion with incomparable authority, intimacy and sensitivity.

During the grunge era, when Sub Pop records reigned, Michael Lavine was one of two primary photographers enlisted by the label to visually record the bands that defined the movement. He captured grunge’s genesis in the late eighties and nineties while living in Olympia, WA and then served as the label’s go-to photographer for shooting bands on the road after moving to NYC. His images depict not only the looks that would come to influence fashion around the world, but the spirit of the music, and the people who created it.

Bands featured in GRUNGE include Mudhoney, Beat Happening, Smashing Pumpkins, Boss Hog, and of course Nirvana. Given ample space too are the grunge “kids” who were arguably more important to the subculture than any platinum selling artist. Many of the photographs included in GRUNGE have never before been published. Thurston Moore (who introduced Kurt Cobain to David Geffen, resulting in the release of Nevermind) writes about Seattle punk youth, the seminal bands that defined the movement, as well as the death of his longtime friend, Kurt Cobain.

Michael Lavine is a New York-based photographer who spent years immersed in the music culture of the Pacific Northwest, capturing the “kids” that created grunge; his work has appeared widely in national magazines.

Thurston Moore is the co-author of No Wave, (Abrams Image), Punk House, (Abrams Image) and Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture. He is also a singer, songwriter and guitarist for Sonic Youth.

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GRUNGE
Photographs by Michael Lavine, Text by Thurston Moore
Abrams Image / October 15, 2009
$24.95 U.S. / $32.50 CAN.; ISBN: 978-0-8109-5317-8
180 black-and-white photographs; 160 pages

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