Sat 4/12 @ 3-7:30PM
When you walk into Hingetown’s Sixty Bowls Gallery to check out the new photo show Fans and Cameras by Cleveland artist Jim Lanza, what you won’t see is a carefully organized group of pristine images. Not only do the sizes and presentations vary but the photos themselves are replete with stains, rips, scratches and dust marks. Some are blurry. “I’m not one to go into photoshop and manipulate the hell out of a photo,” he says. But they accurately capture the subject of the show: Lanza’s adventures in punk rock as a fan with a camera.
The show includes more than 150 pieces, a couple of dozen framed, others just hung on the wall with wires, still others in bins for browsing. Most have never been seen before, because Lanza himself had never seen them until last year — most have never been printed before.
Many people know Lanza from the business he and his wife Rose have had for years, printing his own photos of Cleveland, as well as historic Cleveland images, on wood, selling them at art fairs and maker markets. In 2015 he had a show across from the West Side Market with his images of the Guardians of Transportation on eight huge statues. His rock & roll past wasn’t a part of that.
A few months ago, Lanza rediscovered a treasure trove negatives in his basement that he hadn’t thought about in decades and became curious to see what they held. He began the process of printing some (like many of us, he hadn’t set foot in a darkroom in 35 years) and scanning others to make digital prints. They tell the story of Lanza’s past life in rock & roll.
It began in the early 80s when he started hanging out with musicians. He was living downtown and working for Daffy Dan, the rock & roll t-shirt maven and began to meet musicians, hanging out at underground venues such as the Pop Shop (underneath the old Agora on East 24th Street) and the Lakefront. He often took along what he calls “a small dinky camera” and had 3 x 5 prints made. He met scene catalyst Chris Andrews and went on tour with his band Shadow of Fear, along with the Reactions and Death of Samanatha — “15 guys in a van that kept breaking down.” He brought his camera along and took photos for his own amusement.
But that was just prelude to his later work in the 90s. His friend Mark O’Shea was tour manager for Nine Inch Nails, who were just breaking out of Cleveland with their first album Pretty Hate Machine. He asked if Jim would like to be the band’s merch person. He took the job and initially wasn’t too keen on the band but he says, “After seeing show after show after show I started to kind of like it. It reminded me of early Bowie. I liked the chaos at their shows.”
He spent a year and a half on the road with NIN and then took over the whole merchandise wing, hiring other guys and freeing him up to take some photos. When he got back to Cleveland, another friend of his had started managing Canton’s Marilyn Manson and tapped Jim to go on the road and document the shows, both with 35mm cameras and film.
“They borrowed cameras from MTV and turned it into a documentary,” he recalls. “A lot of the footage was my stuff, interviews with fans, backstage interviews. My main thing was to film the shows. I forgot I took 35 mm. About a year and a half ago, I found these found these negatives in my basement, about a year and half ago, finding all these Manson negatives. I started to post them on Facebook. My friend Gary Thomas from Ohio City Pasta owns the Sixty Bowls space and we decided to do this show.”
While Manson and Nine Inch Nails are a part of the show, most of the images reflect the punk and underground scenes and college radio favorites Lanza loved: Black Flag, the Cocteau Twins, New Order, Alien Sex Fiend, the Ramones, the Cramps and Cleveland’s Dead Boys. He’ll also have a selection of his other work including his travel photography.
The show opens with a reception on Saturday April 12 from 3-7:30pm. He’s also planned a series of events including a post-show concert at the Foundry headlined by Cheetah Chrome’s Dead Boys; a Guitar Riot pop-up at the gallery April 26 featuring equipment from the Ohio City guitar store; a performance by jazz trio Slow Burn at the Gallery May 3; and a closing party on May 10 @ 1-6:30pm at the gallery with Detroit band Bat Hearse, followed by an afterparty at the Treelawn in the Waterloo Arts District with Akron’s Missile Toe and Detroit’s Ruiners.
They will also be taking donations at the gallery for the Waterloo Alley Cat Project which has provided the Lanzas with cats.
Get more info here.
