Photographer Julia Gorton’s New Book Is An Essential Document Of No Wave

Growing up in Delaware during the 1960s and the mid-1970s, Julia Gorton got a sampling of New York City through television sitcoms like Family Affair, The Odd Couple and Green Acres, and magazines such as Interview and Rock Scene. It was from the latter publication that she heard about the punk scene taking place in the downtown part of the city. While Gorton was finishing high school, her boyfriend Rick Brown was already in New York City attending NYU. “He was a real music guy,” she recalls today. “He would send me these dispatches from downtown on gallery postcards that would be about going to see Patti Smith and different kinds of gigs.”

When she did arrive in New York City in 1976 to study at Parsons School of Design, Gorton found herself immersed in a vibrant musical and artistic period—specifically a downtown scene that was rooted in punk but also embraced avant-garde experimentation, jazz, disco, funk noise rock and art rock. Armed with her camera, Gorton extensively photographed the key players and places of this scene known as No Wave. By the end of the ‘70s, the photographer/illustrator had amassed a body of work that was a document of a vital era in New York City culture.

More than 40 years later, Gorton’s images from that period have now been collected in her new book Nowhere New York: Dark, Insulting+Unmelodic. A project about a decade in the making, Nowhere New York captures the height of the No Wave scene and its superstars in noir-ish black and white imagery—among them musical acts such as DNA, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, James Chance and the Contortions, Theoretical Girls, and Mars; and important figureheads such as Lydia Lunch (the singer of Teenage Jesus) and Anya Phillips. The book also feaures Gorton’s images of punk-era acts like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Billy Idol, Blondie’s Debbie Harry and members of the band Television.

The idea for Nowhere New York came from Thurston Moore and Byron Coley’s 2008 book No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York 1976-1980, which used several of Gorton’s photographs. “I just thought if I don’t do this and I don’t create a context for this work,” she explains, “nobody else will be able to do it from my archive. And so I better really get on this and get this done…I wanted to have my work be part of the narrative of the time.”

She also says: “My idea for the book was not really a star-studded kind of narrative. It was the scene that that stuff came out of, that it was everybody else at all those gigs and playing on those off-nights, renting rehearsal rooms, and developing film and printing in closets. That really to me was what that time was about.”

Nowhere New York features guest commentary and essays by those who were part of or witnesses to the No Wave scene—including Rick Brown, Lucy Sante, Robert Sietsema, Kristian Hoffman, Amy Rigby and Lydia Lunch. Their writings perfectly complement Gorton’s photographs, providing historical context. Gorton says that the book was essentially a collaborative effort.

“I knew other people had stories to tell. Many of them would never have the opportunity to share them with an audience outside of a blog post or a comment on Facebook. And so I started to think of the people I knew. I would just say, ‘Hey I’m working on this book. I wonder if you would be interested in writing something?’ And that was it. So I let people write what they thought was the right essay for my book. And so I feel like my book became our book.”

Gorton’s No Wave-era photographs convey a sense of glamour, danger and creativity during a time when New York City was economically depressed, decades before it became a now-expensive place to live in. “New York was a lot of fun to explore,” she recalls of her initial impressions of the city. “And we did most of it on foot. I don’t think I was shocked by it [when I first arrived], but I was just so excited to be there.”

Her music fandom is obvious as a substantial portion of her portfolio consisted of musicians; viewers of her photographs in the book are transported venues that hosted No Wave performances such as Tier 3, Max’s Kansas City and CBGB. “I would have been at all of those gigs, regardless of whether I was a photographer,” Gorton says. “I was really lucky that Rick was out all the time. So we would go out together to see stuff. There were many different kinds of bands playing at the same time…It was just a really great time to have a camera and to know how to use it, and to be just brave enough and to be out and in that scene and documenting it.”

Gorton’s photography mirrored the spirit of punk rock and No Wave in terms of employing a do-it-yourself approach that bucked tradition. In describing her photographic style, she calls it “glam-meets-grit” embodying a number of retro and glamour influences. “It’s like that 1930s deco. The George Hurrell photos from Hollywood, the B-movies going into all the horror films that I watched on TV from the ’50s, and then glam with the platform shoes. It’s all part of Exhibit A. And then Exhibit B—which is the grit—is probably my father’s death, lack of money, dirty city, the difficulty of growing up, William Klein, Diane Arbus. So there’s that kind of stuff balanced with movie star stuff–as well as Helmut Newton and Chris Von Wagenheim. There were certain things I liked and saw, but I didn’t obsess about any of them.”

Today, Gorton, whose photography has graced publications and shown at museums and galleries, is an emeritus professor at Parsons. She recalls a conversation she had with her son, who’s in his early 30s, after he surveyed her book. “I was really glad that he was able to get a real sense of the time by reading the essays without knowing who wrote the essays or who really was in the pictures. He got it. He said, ‘This is a culture book,’ and it’s a culture book upon which so many things have sprung up from—things that we are looking at today and influenced so much, and it’s all gone.

“And so there was a bit of sadness that things over the past 40 years moved so much out of the hands of individuals into the marketing of corporations. So there is that sense of: ‘This was a really great time. How do we get something back? How do we make something happen? And is it even possible now?’

“I like to think it’s still possible. ‘I got a camera. I took the pictures. I went to the gigs. I talked to people. I made a zine.’ And this is with people helping me, of course. ‘I got my archive together. I started to make a book. I published the book. This is DIY.’ I couldn’t wait for someone to do this for me, because no one was going to do this for me.”

Julia Gorton on Some of the Subjects Featured in ‘Nowhere New York’

1. Anya Phillips (fashion designer and entrepreneur who is featured on the cover of the book)

Julia Gorton: “She was like glam and grit together. It’s funny because I don’t remember specifically how I first met her. I remember seeing her out and about and sort of noting her. It’s hard to pull out specifically when we started working together, but I remember working with her really clearly. I loved her. I didn’t really know her, but I adored and admired her. And at the same time, I was afraid of her a little bit, because she was very self-possessed and quite mature to me. She wasn’t that much older than me, but she seemed like she really had it together. She was somebody that embodied a lot of the spirit of that time without being necessarily someone people would have recognized. I thought I can also give her a place on the cover of my book because she just left this world way too soon. So it’s really a form of respect to place her there.”

2. James Chance (singer, the Contortions)

Gorton: “He was great. That’s the band [the Contortions] I probably saw the most. He’s just a wild, agitated rubber band of a person. I’ve never seen anybody fight, I’ve never seen a fight in my life—like ‘What is this? I better get my camera out and document this.’ I’m not surprised he ended up bruised quite a bit.”

3. Lydia Lunch (singer, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks)

Gorton: It’s really funny because she was photographed by a lot of people. You don’t really know what people are doing when they’re not with you. And so I’ll see other pictures of her, and I thought it’s so interesting the way other people see her. I know how I see her and saw her. And she was younger but way fiercer than me. She was really easy to work with and very accommodating and flexible. She would know how to pose. I would suggest things and we would try different things. So when I go through a contact sheet, I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I can see that wasn’t really working there,’ and so then we moved to this kind of pose and we tried this. It’s like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari —she’s like she stepped out of some weird fabulous horror film.”

4. DNA (No Wave band featuring Arto Lindsay, Ikue Mori and Robin Crutchfield)

Gorton: “I photographed Arto quite a few times and the band…I have a couple of different iterations of the band. But that first picture where they’re with Robin Crutchfield and they’re backstage or at a green room or hallway corner. It’s hard taking pictures of people in bands because they’re really different personalities.”

Tom Verlaine (singer and guitarist, Television)

Gorton: “Television was absolutely my favorite band from back then. There are a number of different reasons–one is they were really excellent and so unique and so evocative of something that I couldn’t even really pinpoint what it was. But when you heard the music, you knew, ‘This is it.’

“I would see Tom and I have a few pictures of him that I shot on Polaroid. And the one you’re talking about was under-exposed. I’d look at it and go, ‘Why didn’t I just open up the aperture just a little bit more?’ But I kept it. When I finally got a computer and Photoshop, I thought for a bit: “I wonder if I could bring something up out of that?” So I scanned it and I just brightened it, and there he was. That picture in particular is very evocative. I’m not sure of what, but that picture seems to hearken back to some previous time–when I think about the kinds of overcoats we were wearing that came from Canal Jean, these big tweed ’40s coats. He looks like somebody huddled against the cold at the edge of the Bowery, he looks like somebody from a Steichen photograph. When I was able to brighten it, I felt I discovered the image. I just couldn’t believe what it actually looked like.”

Amy Rigby (singer-songwriter)

Gorton: “She was my roommate in the elevator dorm on 10th Street. She was my roommate the second year…she came into our quad, and I knew her from then. She really was more friends with my other roommate than she was with me, but she and I really loved working together. She would pose for me for all kinds of freelance jobs—I had to shoot a roll for photo class and she was game. I loved photographing her. When I go back [and ask,] ‘Who did I shoot the most?’ – well, I shot Anya a lot, I shot Lydia a lot, and I shot Amy a lot.”

Julia Gorton will be making appearances at the 309 Punk Project Artists in Residence show at the Pensacola Museum of Art on March 10, and Versofest 2023 at the Westport Library on April 1. For more information on Gorton and Nowhere New York, visit her website.