Book Review - Photo and Destroy

This feels like a book that is part of a series. In 2003, MCR published Inferno Punx, which was a photo book capturing the Japanese scene. Inferno Punx captured bands from 1989 to 2003 and it was pretty incredible. Ten years on MCR is publishing this new book. This book contains photos by Fuyuki Kataoka. This book has no photo captions, no explanations, nor any diary outtakes. It is just photos. This has me looking at the pictures extra carefully looking for clues on who is in the photo. There is an index at the back of the book but I didn’t find this on the first few leaf throughs. Most of the photos are black and white shots, which adds a starkness to the shots that is well suited for punk. Some of these photos date back to 1999 at the earliest. Some of the bands captured in this book are FRAMTID, WARHEAD, PERSEVERE, LAUKAUS, REALITY CRISIS, FUCK GEEZ, POIKKEU, and countless others. There are a lot of close ups of singers in mid action so Fuyuki must have been in the pit when he was trying to capture these moments. They are incredibly animated. There are also lots of pictures that look like they are set up shots with bands and punks in street scapes that remind me of the classic shots of the SEX PISTOLS and the CLASH and the BUZZCOCKS in those professional glossy punk magazines that you find out before you find out about fanzines. What I am trying to say is that these look like classic shots of a more recent scene proving punk’s not dead. But we didn’t need the EXPLOITED to tell us that. Photo and Destroy is unrefutable evidence. (MCR Company – 157 Kamiago Maizuri / Kyoto 624-0913 / Japan / www.dance.ne.jp/~mcr/‎)