nirvana project press

Looks Like Teen Spirit

Photographer Jason Lazarus wants to know who turned you on to Nirvana. Looks Like Teen Spirit

Jason Lazarus

Rob Warner

By Miles Raymer
July 27, 2007

FOR ME IT was Sara. She was the cool kid at oceanography camp, which I guess isn't a hard thing to be. She was from Boston and had a serious record collection at age 14. I was 13 and living in a small town in Michigan where people drove tractors to school. Our conversations during those two weeks in Maine in the summer of 1990, and the mix tapes she sent me after we went home, were the foundation of my indie-rock experience. One day, about a year later, she called me and said I had to buy the cassingle of a song called "Smells Like Teen Spirit" immediately. Like all her suggestions, I followed it without question. I went to Wherehouse and bought the tape. It just about ruined me on the first listen -- and for a couple hundred listens after that.

This is the kind of story local photographer Jason Lazarus is looking for. His own work has earned him a slot in the MCA's 12 x 12 series and has appeared in group shows in New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, but for around eight months he's been collecting people's photos of the person who turned them on to Nirvana. (My mom's looking through old pictures to see if she can find one of Sara.) It started when Lazarus and a friend were digging through her collection of snapshots and she pulled out a picture of a kid named Josh, a friend of her older stepbrother's. "He had this very 'I'm a tough kid, I could potentially kick your ass,' great look," says Lazarus. His friend explained that he'd been the first person to play Nirvana for her, and that it had started her listening to alt-rock and dressing weird -- baby steps on the path that would lead her to a career in art. Lazarus took the photo home. "I put it on my wall, really thinking, like, I don't know why I'm putting this on my wall. Nothing amazing is going to come of it. And I was thinking, maybe I can start asking people about who their culture maven was when they were that age," he says. "And it struck me that I could use Nirvana as the filter through which I accumulate these people."

Josh

That filter means Lazarus is mostly dealing with people in a narrow age range, from their late 20s to early 30s -- old enough to have cared about the alt-rock explosion, but young enough to have needed a gatekeeper to guide them through their first revelatory experiences of nonmainstream culture. His Nirvana Project focuses on that gatekeeper -- the boyfriend, the friend of an older sibling, whoever -- as a way of addressing the universal adolescent experience of developing an independent personal identity. Each piece is a blown-up print of the original photo of somebody's "culture maven," accompanied by Lazarus's handwritten version of the tale behind it. "Sometimes," he says, "there's these great stories that don't unfold unless I ask some question. Like, 'It just so happens that the cops, right after we were listening to this, chased us for skating and we ended up hiding in the YMCA bathroom.' You know, I'm like, 'Oh my god.' Because that's perfect."

In the past couple decades, the guide who leads a young person into the underground has become a postmodern suburban archetype. The Internet may end up usurping that role, but it hasn't yet: Lazarus teaches photography to undergrads at Columbia, Robert Morris College, and Saint Xavier University, and one of his better submissions came from a student. Her photo is of a band called Captain Eyeball, two of whose members she dated. "The picture is of them in what feels like a basement, sitting on a couch, with all of these rock 'n' roll posters," says Lazarus. "Two of the guys have sunglasses on and they look kind of Brit. And the third guy looks more like lumpy American, but he's holding this blow-up eyeball. It's so hilarious and wonderful. The more I ask, the more I find these great surprises really close to me."

Captain Eyeball

Lazarus hopes to accumulate 30 or so pieces. "I have about 15," he says. "Half of those I think are really strong. Half of them I could give or take if I get a better one." To that end, he carries around special business cards to hand out to potential contributors. He can't cheat by using his own story -- no one person introduced him to Nirvana. "For me," he says, "it was just MTV." He's not even particularly obsessed with the band. The best-of CD he burns for people who give him photos is fairly expert, but he admits, "I'm not the most fluent Nirvana audiophile. I've just always liked them."

In October Lazarus will be showing some work at the D3 Projects gallery in Santa Monica, and the unfinished Nirvana Project will be maybe half of it. In the meantime he's still collecting material. He can be contacted through jasonlazarus.com.