Same attitude, different media

It WAS fast, it was furious and it was over in a blink. But photographer Edward Colver's shutter blinked a fraction faster. If not for his poking in and out of hot, dank punk clubs across the Southland, a whole big chunk of L.A.'s early hardcore scene of the '70s and early '80s would have hurtled -- visually -- out of memory.

If you were there, you remember him. He was everywhere -- Hong Kong Cafe, the Cuckoo's Nest, Perkins Palace -- impossible to miss: The tall guy smack in the middle of the churning mosh pit, towering over the melee ("When they push it, I tell 'em I'm 5-17."); the one with the thrashed Pentax with the strobe duct-taped to the hot shoe, the one you might have seen later rolling off into the night in a powder-blue hearse.

Most likely, it's the name you've seen, in tiny Courier font, crawling along the edge of a "you kinda had to be there" sort of print, or an album cover for the Circle Jerks, X, Wasted Youth, Fear, Red Hot Chili Peppers. Colver's images added the visual contact-rush to fanzines like Flipside and NO MAG, live photos that seemed to capture the implausible -- bodies flying, eyes blazing, mouths agape. They verified that a "still" could be anything but. "While other photographers also documented the L.A. punk scene," writes Larry Reid, of Fantagraphics Books, in his introduction to "Blight at the End of the Funnel," a retrospective of Colver's work published in 2006, "from the outset Colver aspired to art."

But when that first wave bowed off, so did he. Or so people seemed to think.

He and his subject slipped out of the frame. The images, however, continued to swirl round and round, many without Colver's knowledge. Just as Colver had once been, they were now ubiquitous. Not just on punk rock websites or lending a visual foundation for documentaries like “American Hardcore,” but on T-shirts and other paradoxically ready-made anarchy gear lining the walls of mall stores. If that weren't unsettling enough, Colver and his wife, Lani, a make-up artist, recently discovered that one of his most famous shots, the photo from the Circle Jerks’ “Group Sex” album, had ended up on a line of Vans sports shoes. "It's kind of turned into this detrimental thing because everybody remembers my photos, but they forgot I took 'em. . . . And it's kinda weird," Colver says with a "whatever" shrug.