The Fodder

Sara D. Anderson

“I love Willie’s sense of humor,” Stephanie concludes, after finishing her story about Willie Nelson’s most recent pot bust while he was on tour in Louisiana. It was during the e-coli scare when the FDA ordered the recall of spinach back in 2006, and all Willie could tell the officer on board his tour bus was, “It’s a good thing it’s not spinach.”

All of Stephanie Chernikowski’s stories are colorful – my first instincts were that I got lucky hearing all of these light-hearted stories albeit the unforeseen short-lived punk rock era full of dark, raw lyrics, emblematic anthems of anger, and anti-authoritative point of views, while everyone is shooting heroin and snorting snow. But then I change my mind. As she and I chat at the table in the center of the room of her photo exhibit at the Morrison Hotel Gallery in Soho, I watch her interact with curious walk-ins as they seem to gravitate towards her buoyant presence.

“If you have any questions about any of the photographs, I’m the photographer. I’m happy to answer them,” Chernikowski kindly offers to the ambling customers. She has striking spiky gray hair, an exposed tan, and is wearing a fitted black tank and a casual warm smile. One guy asks her about the date of a photo of the Cramps performing at the CBGB venue. As they throw around possibilities (she will later tell me that she has a hard time remembering dates) he casually adds that he was in Shrapnel, a punk band with wild theatrics that opened for the Cramps that night. “I hitchhiked to New York, I got here 15 minutes before we were supposed to go on, and got into a huge fight with Legs McNeil; I was going to put his face through the wall, just like everyone else wanted to do.” Perched on the gallery wall, the photo of the Cramps is full of energy, a birds-eye view of a dense cluster of fans rocking out while Lux Interior is, in an un-mistakenly in a stripe suit, immersed in the audience, dancing and crawling over seat tops. Cherinkowski captures all this while perched up in the balcony boxes inside of the full-house theater.

Her exhibit – at the Morrison Hotel Gallery through the middle of May - is named “Images of the Blank Generation” after the Richard Hell song, and is enclosed in the same four walls as the original CBGB venue; this is where Punk Rock flourished in NYC and the Ramones got their record deal. (Richard Hell tells Lester Bangs in an interview that the lyrics are about trying to see clearly the "doubt and suspicion and despair" not as affirmation, but "taken there by reality" even though most misconstured it as nihilism.) The set up of the exhibit is simply in chronological order. But as she goes through the thought process of the layout, there’s more to it than just dates; she is also grouping artists based on relationships, which she knows better than most: “I just felt like the first thing people should see when they walked in was the Ramones because they are kind of synonymous with CBGB and I love those shots. And then from the Ramones I went figured we may as well put up the other really iconic figures in and so I put up Debbie, Patti, Richard Hell, Talking Heads, and Tom Verlaine (Tom and Richard worked together so I thought they should be together).” She proceeds to explain the rest of the layout, putting Elvis Costello next to Richard Hell since they performed together at CBGB when the St. Marks Poetry Project had to relocate their event due to a fire in 1978 that almost completely destroyed St. Marks Church. “Richard Hell and Patti Smith were [both] active in the Poetry Project; Patti reads there every New Year’s Day,” she adds. Farther down the wall are Velvet Underground band-mates Nico followed by John Cale.

Cherinkowski's photography career fittingly launched when she started attending concerts. The first concert Chernikowski attended in NYC was not at CBGBs, but at the Lincoln Center to see Patti Smith; she had heard about Smith before she moved out from Texas in 1975. Smith during that time just discovered CBGB and Television, and soon after Chernikowski was attending her first concert at CBGBs; Television was playing, Talking Heads were opening, and the show was being narrated by none other than Seymour Stein of Sire Records. Her first steps into the venue, and Splash 1 by the Austin group 13^th Floor Elevators came to mind. Maybe she felt a connection between two worlds, her life back in Texas and her new life in NYC. I’m “admitting my true sleaze,” she says with a chuckle.

I've seen your face before/I've known you all my life/And though it's new, your image cuts me like a knife/And now I'm home/And now I'm home/And now I'm home, to stay.

Chernikowski, “stumbled into photo,” as she modestly claims, when she shot photos of Tony Bird, a white South-African singer, whose music confined haunting lyrics and African Pop: “Bird’s music was very much a product of this environment where he grew up. He’s quite political and gorgeous, with nice bone structure.” She found out shortly after taking photos, the Village Voice was doing a story on him. So she casually brings the photographs in their office – walking out with a half-page on the back cover (when it used to be the arts cover) and another half-page spread inside. Since then her work has been featured in Rolling Stone and the New York Times, as well as two books, one of them with Henry Rollins called Dream Baby Dream Images from the Blank Generation.

Most of Chernikowski's photos are taken at the CBGB venue; and the venue's success is all credited to the owner Hilly Kristal. Hilly Kristal of CBGB was like the Bill Graham of the Filmore East. “So what was your relationship like with Hilly? What was he like?” I ask. “Paterfamilias. He was the punk grandpa - the great father. And he really treated everyone like his children. People will complain about what they were paid, but I don’t think anyone was bringing in that much money either.”

“So the inability to make ends meet and paying the rent on CBGB – is that the primary reason why it shut down?”

Stephanie pauses, “There’s debate. Have you seen the documentary? You should try to see it.” Just last Friday, Chernikowski accompanied Mandy Stein (Seymour Stein’s daughter and director of the film) at the screening of Burning Down the House: The Story of CBGB at the TriBeCa film festival. The film documents Kristal’s struggle to keep the venue open, and includes most of Chernikowski photos and any punk rock artist who stepped through that venue to get their 15 minutes of fame.

“33 years. The same age as Jesus. Goodnight everybody,” were Patti Smith’s last words on the CBGB stage before it closed its doors October 16, 2006.Patti Smith & Lenny Kaye, NYC 2006

“She [Patti Smith] is an amazing women and it was an amazing show. She walked out into the crowd before they had an event showing for the press. And when they did the show itself the only ones who were taking pictures were basically family. And I was with Lenny Kaye’s wife, Stephanie, whose camera was jammed. I was fixing it for her and she said, ‘well you know you can take picture with a point and shoot, you just can’t use a professional camera,’ and I went ‘oh great’ and I had a point and shoot and I had it loaded it with black and white film. And that’s how the picture came about. It was the actual show and not the press conference. And I only got a couple of shots that were good. That was the perfect shot. Yah know? I always wanted to get a perfect shot of Patty with Lenny because they started together, because it was just the two of them to begin with. So I am forever grateful for that shot."

Chernikowski had the ability to engage with the performer and as a result capture that perfect shot more than once. Punk Rock desperately wanted to be everything that 1970s rock was not - it wanted to be a new generation of music full of Patti Smith's free-flowing improvised poetic lyrics, Marianne Faithful's emotional out-cry, and the Ramones traditional 4/4 count and catchy choruses. Punk Rock wanted to be anything but Kiss; she knew this, and was able to depict the movement. “I love the shots best where I feel I capture something very personal about the person in the photograph. Iggy Pop always looks so pleased with himself. Marianne Faithfull looks appropriately tortured. Joey Ramone gave me a particularly sweet moment. And Debbie Harry just spontaneously blew a kiss. That’s why I say its luck: Somebody’s responds to you and it makes a gorgeous photograph. I consider photography very collaborate. I don’t like creating a fancy environment; I like to see people in their natural habitats. And I like seeing them be themselves, and not a star.”

Chernikowski could even capture an artist's emotions outside of the punk-rock stage performance. She agreed to take on a project where she photographed musicians in their own homes. Below is Richard Hell’s shot taken in this East Village home around 1980.Richard Hell NYC

“That was a totally spontaneous thing: I was doing a project [where] I had just gone to Nashville and seen tours of all the homes. It looked like they were Sears’ catalogues. And I came back to the city and said, ‘I have to do a lower east side version’. (I have a pretty perverse sense of humor) [This is taken of] Richard in his bedroom. I sat down on the bed to change my film and I looked up and I saw him looking at me, and I saw – which I refer to as a triptec because he’s in it three times. That’s his back on the far left. And the lower one was a little shard of a mirror that was standing against the wall at an angle. And the other one was on this chiffon robe that we had and we just caught each other’s eye and that was the photograph. So much is just being alert – very, very alert.”

I have the feeling Chernikowski has a blithe approach to life; she has a pulse of energy and the people around her positively react to it. Her approach is without distress, and during the process she finds the heart in every person she encounters and as a result finds the heart in every story. I was fortunate enough to meet her amid her artwork; her presence accessible and vulnerable at the same time.