Ozzfest: Portraits and Figures
By Max Cooper
30 Jan 2008
We went to Ozzfest because, like Everest, it was there. It's a struggle to explain the draw of big open fields where the music makes your ears bleed and the fans are scarier than the ghouls on stage, but my metalhead friends and I explain ourselves to no one. Ozzfest, named for heavy metal's paternal Ozzy Osbourne, was the Mecca of the darker side of the concert culture.
I could claim innocence, and say that I was a simple photographer sucked in by the documentary urge, but that would be a lie. I love this stuff, the nose-bleeding vitality of it all, the fists swinging in the mosh pit, the beauty that is silent only because it can't be heard above the music.
We left Asheville for Charlotte that morning, five days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, and just a few shows after Iron Maiden was kicked off the tour for questioning Ozzy's prominence. I had a tiny Minox 35mm I'd bought at the corner camera store. It looked like your grandma's camera, small and black, with a little fold-open cover and a fixed 35mm lens. It fit in the palm of your hand, or in other unmentionable places when you're trying to sneak it through security.
And sneak it through I did, with a bulk-loaded roll of HP5+ in the tip of each steel-toed boot. I planned to run the aesthetic like a Mesa Boogie amplifier, pushing the film to ISO 800, developing it in XTOL with too much agitation, and printing on condenser enlargers. I wanted graphic contrast and grain so rough it made your eyes water, the visual equivalent of the scene itself.
As we walked through the gate, I realized the scene was more than I bargained for. Girls wearing only body paint glided by, while men wearing black lipstick and plastic marijuana leaves lined up for alcohol wristbands. Clean-cut Marines courted potential recruits from their booth, not far away from a guy selling stickers that said "F--- Bush." Piercing booths lined the paths to the side stages, people were passed out in the grass. The place reeked of cheap bourbon and sweat, and it was only noon.
I had three rolls, counting the one in the camera. One hundred and eight exposures, or so I thought at the time. I started shooting the moment we got through the gates, trying to take in the whole scene while rationing my film for the rest of the day's light.
We were herded like cattle into the side stage. And there in the midst of it, as Rob Zombie launched into "Superbeast," I saw it. The image that captured the entire day, all of its contradictions and hedonism and burning spirit. We hadn't been there fifteen minutes.
A few feet in front of me, framed by the scaffolding of the lighting rig, was a girl. An incredibly gorgeous girl, with a studded belt laced through the loops of her skin-tight jeans, a dragon tattooed around her hips, and long hair blacker than the heart of Ozzy himself. She was perched on some guy's shoulders, and she was screaming.
I dove through the crowd and lined up the shot, rolling through six or seven precious frames. By the end of Zombie's set, I had finished the first roll, and the day wore quickly on. Black Label Society, Velvet Revolver, Mudvayne, Mastodon. It was easy shooting. The light was good, and I knew that I already had what I came for. The image of the dragon girl in the brightlines of the viewfinder swam in front of my eyes.
As the sun began to drop, I set out to finish the last roll. All day I had photographed obliquely, with subtlety, trying to capture without disrupting. But the sun was beginning to dip, and I knew it was time to bloody my knuckles. I set out to make portraits.
This was different. Now I was actually engaging the topless girls and their intimidating boyfriends, the skinheads with white supremacist ink, the acid-tripping goths wearing head-to-toe black leather in the late-summer heat. And there I was, a straight-edge guy with my natural hair color, wearing a t-shirt with no profanity, asking to photograph these people. Some said yes, some said no, some I plied with $8 beer.
And there among all the ink and skin was something familiar—the dragon girl! She was waiting in line at the concessions stand, right there in front of me. Should I approach her? Should I ask for a picture? Should I tell her that the roll of film in my pocket was pregnant with images of her that capture the essence of Ozzfest, or even the metal culture itself? The light was fading fast.
"Excuse me, ma'am," I said, trying to sound respectful. "May I take your picture?"
She laughed and immediately said no. I was crushed, but tried to smile. As I was turning away, a girl standing with her in line said, "Wait, no, it's okay!" She grabbed the dragon girl, who was not looking pleased, and wheeled her around to pose for me. Dragon girl looked uncomfortably resigned, the way beautiful women often look at people taking their picture. But then, at the last second, she laughed and threw the devil horns, that ancient and vulgar gesture now synonymous with heavy metal.
After that, the rest of the day was inconsequential. Ozzy appeared that night, and we all paid homage to the godfather himself, but even as "Warpig" crashed to a close, I was practically twitching to get to the darkroom.
The next morning, with my head pounding and ears ringing, watching the three rolls come off the reel, I was nauseous with failure. A weak link in my tiny camera had leaked light indiscriminately across my film. Some frames had blurred and faded from a sticky shutter. The entire second roll was useless. A few images from the other two were fine, but some were entirely fogged, and many had ghost images of the sprocket holes lining the edges.
I printed some, but they were too dense, too fogged, to ever exhibit.
Two years later, I've unearthed these negatives with a new philosophy. Metal is an imperfect artform, whether from its inception or its gentrification. Photography, also, is imperfect, an incomplete rendering of the world we see. If nothing else, the light leaks are genuine, like scars won in the mosh pit, or feedback resonating between songs. Photography and heavy metal have in common a brutal authenticity, and a commitment to an uncommon vision of the world.
So here are these portraits and figures, and pictures of the girl who was so beautiful she gave my camera light leaks. As the almighty James Hetfield once screamed: Honesty is my only excuse.
