The good people at Blue Blood just dropped me a line and mentioned they are working on a press release about their launch party for the California Deathrock coffee table book and it reminded them to drop me a line about when I might be posting a book review. So I had them send over a few exclusive images from the book to share with APN readers. Blue Blood is the publisher of this huge coffee table book of gothic punk deathrock hotness. It is no secret that I love me some pale goth girls and nobody shoots gorgeous pale goth girls like Forrest Black and Amelia G. Although the book features only occasional boobs, it is still very sexy so, if you are a fan of GothicSluts, you will enjoy this book. I probably did not pick out everyone, but a few of the girls I recognized from Blue Blood and GothicSluts in the 172 colorful pages of this hardcover include Domiana, Dahlia Dark, Fetus de Milo, Darenzia, Dana Dark, Zille, Agent Aeon, Secret Sin, and, of course, the notorious Malice McMunn on the cover and inside. I think Beda backed the Kickstarter for this book, so she might weigh in later. For now, you can check out Amazon or CaliforniaDeathrock.com for up to the minute news about the book or to get your very own copy.
Gorgeous hardcover coffee table book. A whopping 172 pages of deathrock gothic punk portraits with intense personality and viscerally saturated colors.
From the introduction: “Since the mid-1990’s, Forrest and I have been setting up full blown location studios in all sorts of unlikely and underground places. We’ve set up lights and backdrops in wind-blown theater parking lots in the middle of the night, while bands played their shows, in co-ed strip clubs, and crammed behind the pool table in the back of noisy dive bars. Sometimes it’s a real challenge, but this is how we shoot our personal work. We like to capture the moments in their real environments. For this compendium, we chose only images which were actually shot in California. Some of the deathrockers in this volume grew up here and some are transplants and some were just passing through. Forrest and I had a lot of debates, while hunched over a contact sheet with loupes in hand, over whether a particular photo was really more deathrock or more Gothic, as we needed a methodology for honing down what to share. When we started shooting, there were very few photographers who would ever shoot anyone gothic or punk or tattooed or pierced or fetish and the few who did approached the subject matter in a gritty unattractive purely anthropological manner, like they were going to the zoo. We wanted to create respectful and celebratory work. We wanted to capture the joy and tribal sense of community which we experienced in the various subterranean worlds we documented. We wanted the flamboyant beauty we saw to resonate with other people the way it did for us. We wanted the people we photographed to look the way they looked in our minds’ eyes when we recalled the excitement of nightlife at midnight.”
