No One Is a Spectator in Murray Bowles’ Punk Photography

Stand at the back of a punk club like Berkeley’s 924 Gilman nowadays, and the entire crowd will invariably be lit up with a hundred little screens, all recording a moment in time to share online later. But at the primordial 924 Gilman of yesteryear, there was often just a single camera in the crowd, held in Murray Bowles’ hand flicking out far above his head, followed by a quick flash.

Hail Murray!: The Bay Area Punk Photography of Murray Bowles, 1982–1995 (Last Gasp; $39.95) is a sprawling, 270-page monograph of black and white photos representing a wildly creative and supercharged era of local underground music. If you attended any Bay Area punk shows from the 1980s through the 1990s, you likely crossed paths with Murray, its de facto chronicler. Wrapped in a decidedly civilian package — an older man with floppy brown hair, bearded, and bespectacled — he looked more like a computer programmer than a punk (and, unbeknownst to many, he actually was a programmer of note in early Silicon Valley). At first glance, one might be surprised to learn that this understated character was an essential contributor to the chaotic music scene that birthed bands like Operation Ivy, Blatz and Green Day.

After the show had ended, while everyone else slept off their hangovers or rotted all night at the 24-hour donut shop, Murray would be hunkered down in the makeshift darkroom set up in his kitchen, spending hours developing pictures of bands. He would later gather up all of the prints and shove them into a shoebox to bring to shows to share and sell for 15¢ a piece, the cost of the paper. (This was later raised to a quarter. Inflation, y’all.) While rifling through Murray’s shoebox, eager eyeballs went on the lookout for pictures of favorite bands or secret crushes, but more than anything else, people were hoping to find a photo of themselves. Being captured in a Murray picture was a stamp of approval. It was a confirmation that you had indeed been there. That you belonged.

That manifestation of belonging takes on various forms in the punk scene. It doesn’t matter how shy a person is, or how lacking in musical ability. Everyone has a role. And while bands have always enjoyed the spotlight, they’re just one part of a complex ecosystem. There are zine editors, promoters, the people who feed and house the touring bands, Steve List, the volunteers who sweep the floors and clean the toilets. These often unsung community heroes are the reason the punk scene has been able to function and evolve.

Why do this work that is neither glamorous nor rewarded? Sometimes community service is a calling. As Murray famously said, “I wanted to be more than just a spectator.” There are those people who see something that needs to be done and are compelled to do it. Surely no one embodies this more than Anna Brown, teacher, longtime East Bay punk, and Murray’s most bulldogged advocate, the person who consented to take on the monumental task of compiling, designing, and editing Hail Murray!

Anna first met Murray at a show in 1987; the next thing she knew, she was a regular passenger in his Rabbit Cabriolet, on the way to film screenings, art openings, punk shows and hikes. Murray was notoriously inscrutable, and didn’t often talk about himself. Anna, on the other hand, was articulate, outgoing and tough. Their personalities complementing each other, they became lifelong friends.

When I ask Anna how long she’s been working on this book, she gets a faraway look in her eye. “I’d always wanted to make this book, ever since I was a teenager,” she tells me. “Murray was into the idea but he was very passive in general.”

Around 2010, the two began to tackle the project, mind-boggling in its scope. Murray took dozens of photos, every single weekend, for almost 40 years. What would a body of work of that magnitude look like? How could you even begin to catalog and curate it? They caught a break in 2017 when the documentary team behind Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk digitized thousands of Murray’s photos, but that still left thousands more to sift through.

Then in 2019, Murray Bowles died unexpectedly.

“When he died, I felt super guilty because we had this whole plan,” Anna tells me. The two friends had planned to spend Murray’s retirement years going around the country doing book tours and gallery shows, the culmination of a life’s work.

“I felt really bad that he didn’t get a chance to do any of that stuff, or to see the book,” Anna says. “So I became extremely determined.”

Anna transcribed interviews, received feedback, taught herself Photoshop and InDesign, solicited funding and found a publisher. Along the way, she experimented with different layouts, and how to best encapsulate the life’s work of her friend.

“I felt a lot of anxiety about these pictures that are sacred to our people,” she explains. “They mean so much to everyone. It felt like I was handling an incredibly fragile, delicate thing. I knew that everyone was going to have their own ideas about how they wanted the book to be.”

In the end, Anna decided that Bowles’ aesthetic would be best captured as a monograph. Punk may be messy, but Hail Murray! is impeccably clean and gorgeous. Each 12” x 9” landscape page is devoted to a single black and white photograph, giving it ample space to breathe.

Though there’s a multitude of band photos in the book — from lesser-known entities like thrash band Sluglords to well-known groups like Rancid — many of its most compelling images are moments captured between friends. Young people sprawled on the hoods of cars, friends drinking beer on couches or hunkered down in a stairwell, girls carrying other girls through the pit, inexplicable configurations of body parts at a crowded house show where you’re not even sure where one person ends and the next person begins. There is an implied intimacy to the work, underscored by a minimalist approach to titles and descriptions.

In the absence of elaborate captions or other explicit context cues, one might ask how Hail Murray! will be perceived by those outside of the community it chronicles. For punks, part of the excitement was digging through Murray’s photo box, scanning the faces in the crowd and wondering: “Am I in here?” But outsiders to the punk scene may be surprised to see themselves here, too, reflected in the universal quest for fun and belonging.

“If Murray’s work is ‘about’ anything, it’s about the joy of punk,” Anna says. “Going through his archives, you come away feeling that Murray’s mission, in simplest terms, was to celebrate the feeling of being there on any given night or afternoon — the collective energy of a singular moment.”

‘Hail Murray!: The Bay Area Punk Photography of Murray Bowles 1982–1995’ is celebrated in a release party with live music by Smokers and Nasty World on Sunday, Dec. 8, at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. 4pm–9pm. Details here.