Body Rock

Charles Peterson happened to be the right photographer at the right
time. There were other photographers in Seattle in the late ’80s and
early ’90s, but we have forgotten almost all of them because they were
the wrong photographers for that time and place. What made Peterson
right and so many others wrong? This question cannot be answered by
looking over his photographs of life in postcommunist Vietnam or in
post-Thatcherite England, or of UNICEF workers in the Dominican
Republic. Those foreign images, though not bad (and often striking),
are missing that special something we find in the black-and-white
photos he took of a scene on the verge of international recognition and
commercialization.

Peterson still lives in Seattle and still exhibits his grunge
pictures around the world. In fact, not too long ago, I ran into him a
day before he flew to Paris for a show dedicated to his famous body of
work, collected in the book Touch Me I’m Sick. We were in a
cafe: He was standing; I was sitting. He pulled out of his bag a
handsome book and said, “Please check it out. It’s called
Cypher…. The reception for it has been a little odd. It has
confused both my traditional clients [of the rock world] and those in
the breakdancing scene.” That was his reading of the situation. But a
quick look at the black-and-white images of young and fit breakers in
Seattle, Saigon, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and New York City instantly
establishes a connection to Touch Me I’m Sick.

First a little background on breakdancing. One of the four founding
components of hiphop culture, breakdancing (along with DJing, MCing,
and graffiti) emerged in the late ’70s in New York City, was
commercialized in the mid ’80s, and, as with DJing and graffiti, was
eclipsed in the ’90s by the spectacular rise of the rapper. Over the
last two decades, breakdancing has developed into a global art form
that has at once a very strong sense of its origins in
hiphop—Rock Steady Crew, New York City Breakers—and of its
independence from hiphop. Indeed, the local dancer Orb, who with the
hiphop historian Jeff Chang writes one of the two introductions in
Cypher, does not even call himself a breaker. He calls himself a
“freestyle expressionist.”

And now for the connection. What Peterson documents in Touch Me
I’m Sick is a cultural movement that’s fueled by a new energy. It’s
not about money or record deals but the sheer opening of something
that’s not yet grasped or understood. Alain Badiou calls this
situation/sequence the “void.” What grunge is in the late ’80s is the
void of Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, Def Leppard, and
Whitesnake. Grunge’s break voids the glam-rock establishment, and in
this open space bodies are free to fly and float.

In 1990, Peterson captures a Nirvana fan flying over the audience in
the UW Ballroom. In 2007, Peterson captures a Massive Monkees breaker
flying over the floor of the UW HUB. In another image, Frankie of the
Supreme Beings NYC Crew flies across the basketball court at Kennedy
High School in the Bronx. In another image, a dancer helicopters up
from the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. This is the cultural zone of zero
gravity. “Now I’m dancing through space and time easily,” rapped
Keymatic moments before breakdancing went pop in 1984. “Breaking in
space is the thing in the ’80s/Catch the next ride and join me in the
galaxies.” (Cypher also has images of dancers on the ground and
relaxing, just as in the Touch Me I’m Sick series there are
images of Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder recuperating from playing and
soaring.)

How is this new race of multiracial, second-generation, global
bodies still flying through the void 20 years after hiphop was closed
and stabilized? And why is it that Peterson sees in their dedication,
their raw energy, their light-streaked bodies, and their sweat-soaked
clothes (there is even a pair of vibrant crutches) the same kind of
enthusiasm that animates his images of the emerging music scene in
Seattle?

What Peterson captures in the pages of Cypher is the
contemporary breaker’s ethic of what Badiou would call “fidelity to the
event,” to the initial sequence of truth, to the moment when breakers
were in space. Cypher is the same book as Touch Me I’m
Sick, in reverse. We can conclude with this: To remain true to the
event, one must commit suicide or be committed to the void.