Murray Bowles’ photos chronicling California punk rock take center stage in Sacramento

Axis Gallery takes audiences into the fray of the mosh pit, with a collection of 16 photographs pulled from the extensive archives of Murray Bowles, who spent decades capturing the people and places forming California’s punk rock scene

Following Bowles’ death in December, curator Justin Marsh, who traces acquaintance with the late photographer through his niece, found himself perusing Bowles’ prodigious body of negatives and hard drives. Marsh estimated the number of photographs to be in the tens of thousands, reaching back to the 1980s and covering shows from the Bay Area to Sacramento.

“As an artist and as a museum professional, we come across archives and collections all the time, and I just thought, ‘This is important,’” Marsh said. “People knew about it. Most of those people were in the scene through the last several decades, and there was a big social media outpouring when he passed away,”

“Murray Bowles: Sixteen Frames” features the frenzy of raucous shows, with concert-goers sometimes being indecipherable from performers, the studded accessories and leather jacket-clad fashion trends, many of which are captured from the pit, hinting at the up close and personal nature of Bowles’ work.

While the collection had renowned bands like Green Day, Operation Ivy and the Circle Jerks, Marsh and co-curator Luke Turner decided to focus on the architectural aspects of Bowles’ work, rather than an homage to big-name bands.

Venues and spaces featured in the show range from bars, house shows, makeshift industrial spaces and iconic punk rock venues such as the Gilman in Berkeley.

“What we wanted to do was develop a criteria for what we were looking at for the show. We wanted people to respond to the punk scene, but more importantly, for the photographs to resonate with people from the position of photographic history,” Marsh said. “We were looking for communal spaces. How architecture is sort of co-opted and how architecture becomes sort of a haven for these events.”

The co-curators contributed text captions to accompany each of the 16 photographs, designed to reference art theory, the specific architecture of various venues and the genre itself, which took them to the Gilman, where members of the punk rock community turned out to pay tribute to the man responsible for its documentation.

“We talked to a lot of the people who were a part of the scene. We brought sample photographs to Gilman Street during Murray’s memorial, and we encouraged people to write on them,” Turner said. “People wrote their own messages to Murray, memories and graffiti. We looked through those for research. We had our own thoughts and asked people in the pictures what they thought when they saw the pictures. We sort of synthesized everything into the text that corresponds with each photo.”

Bowles himself has been immortalized on the Where’s Waldo-esque artwork of Green Day’s major label debut, “Dookie,” with his camera held above his head. But Marsh and Turner say the preservation of Bowles’ archives served as the impetus behind the exhibit.

“We’d love to have the full archive housed somewhere, and I feel like the more shows he has and the more people that see potential for his work, not just journalistically, that’s more opportunity for awareness. And maybe some cultural institution can steward the collection,” Turner said.

If You Go

Murray Bowles: Sixteen Frames

Where: Axis Gallery, 625 S Street

When: Through March 29. Noon to 5 p.m. Friday through Sunday; Second Saturday reception March 13. 6 to 8 p.m.

Cost: Free

More info: axisgallery.org

This story was originally published March 10, 2020 at 7:59 AM.