Thirty years on from Cobain’s death, photobook Charles Peterson’s Nirvana remembers the glory that was grunge.
“CHARLES WAS IN the trenches, always right down in front,” says Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic in his foreword to Charles Peterson’s Nirvana, which handsomely compiles the photographer’s images of the group from 1989 to 1993. Novoselic also reflects on Peterson’s black and white, long exposure style, as “the musical technique of dropping a guitar’s low E string down to the D note, while sending the signal through a vintage Fuzz box. That’s basic Grunge.”
There is something raw, immediate and, yes, amplified about Peterson’s photographs of Nirvana playing live, between gigs and doing magazine shoots. The book also contains 30 images never before seen, including the wild accompanying shot of the band at the Motorsports International Garage in Seattle on September 22, 1990.
“My informal title for this image is ‘the chaos of youth,’” Peterson tells MOJO. “I sometimes forget just how crazy and chaotic these shows could be… our switch was ‘on’ and for a lot of us we had no idea there was even an ‘off ’ setting. I want the images to evoke that time and energy and passion. It’s in the details – the crushed cans on-stage, the duct tape and ripped jeans and flannel shirts, hair and hands emerging from the blur of audience and light, and the youthful faces that are no longer.” He adds that the unseen images were awaiting digital scanning technology to bring them to fruition. “The band was amazingly photogenic and it was really easy, even within a single show, to make a lot of gre
