Born in Detroit, Michigan, Sue Rynski lives and works in Paris, where she pursues her investigation of the underground music and performance scene, that no-limits arena for the electrified body. And in doing so, she gives concrete expression to what MC5 manager John Sinclair meant when he described rock as ‘one of the most alive and kicking revolutionary forces in the world, bringing people to their senses and making them feel good, as if they had come back to life in the middle of the monstrous morgue of Western civilisation’. A graduate of the University of Michigan School of Art, Rynski was grabbed by the joyous energy of the Detroit scene in the late 1960s and the 1970s, and started following the art collective/rock group Destroy All Monsters. At her HQ at Bookie’s Club 870, the epicentre of all the excitement, she hooked into all-night sessions where Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty got worked over in punk mode by Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Ron Asheton, Niagara, The Dead Boys and Johnny Thunders. Regularly published in magazines like Cream and New York Rocker, her photos were taken in flashes of energy that make palpable all the intensity of light and shade, all the savage beauty of bodies in motion—especially that of Iggy Pop with the Stooges, defying his public in a furious standoff combining the sonic violence and theatrical extremity of I Wanna Be Your Dog, Search And Destroy and Gimme Danger. It was Iggy himself who really caught onto their sombre, dreamlike poetry: ’These pics are horny and bad. Fuck, if you were a normal person from a normal place you would look at this shit and say what the fuck these people were trying to do. These people were seeking truth in a place where there is none. I fucking like it, beer bottles and all. Though it’s kind of sad to picture it passing into the dust of time and disappeared greasy hair and all down some black hole.’
