Pushdot Studio welcomes JJ Gonson’s “Photographs of the Northwest Music Scene circa, 1980s and 90s” through Friday, January 27. The Boston-based photographer has been obsessed with music since the time she was a small girl. In the mid-1980s, Gonson discovered it was possible to get access to musicians and bands by signing on to shoot live and posed photos for magazines and newspapers. She started by shooting hardcore and punk bands around the Boston area; when she moved to Portland in 1990, she continued to work with both live music shots and portraits.
The exhibit is the result of her decades of work and the collection combines intimate portraits of musicians, friends and fans live on stage and candid moments off stage. The archive includes pictures of Kurt Cobain, Elliot Smith, Jane’s Addiction, Black Flag and hundreds of other punk and independent bands. Gonson’s work has been published in books, fanzines and magazines and can now be seen at Pushdot Monday-Friday, 8:30 am-5 pm.
Pushdot, located at 2505 SE 11th Ave., Suite 104 (Ford Building), is an art gallery and a digital imaging resource for artists, graphic designers, photographers and companies that require archival printing services, high quality scanning, artwork capture, exhibition mounting services, prepress retouching, color work and proofing.