Teen spirits

On photographer Jason Lazarus’s website, there’s  a shot of a guy holding a flower by its stem in his mouth. The anonymous caption reads: “Dave introduced me to Nirvana, mushrooms and butterfly stickers. He carved my name into his arm with a razor blade…”  The caption for a Polaroid showing a guy with his fists raised, at the party he threw when he turned 21—where he played only grunge music—reads: “I had never listened to Nirvana until then. That was the turning point. I woke up in a 2-foot-wide alley outside.”

Lazarus, a 31-year-old photographer instructor at Columbia College who shows with Bucket Rider Gallery, has been seeking out people who would like to share their photos and stories with him, many of which are posted on his blog and website. When I ran into him at an art opening, he handed me a business card that had a portrait of a kid wearing a black T-shirt and a “fuck it” expression on one side, and do you remember who introduced you to the band nirvana?  on the other. I thought about it, and I wasn’t sure if it was Quentin or Matt—they were in a band back in high school, and Matt would sing “Territorial Pissings” and get all crazy and…

But the project isn’t just about stories—or Nirvana. Lazarus doesn’t even have a Nirvana story. He first caught the wave when Kurt Cobain and Nirvana exploded onto MTV while he was in high school in Kansas (though he included a story and photo of the friend who introduced him to Sonic Youth and Pavement; the friend, incidentally, got her Cobain addiction from her dad).

It all started with a photo, the one I saw on the card. Lazarus first saw the snapshot at his friend’s house. The guy was a pal of Lazarus’s friend’s older brother, and she had a huge crush on him. “He started turning her on to things he thought were cool—and Nirvana was one of those things.” Lazarus asked if he could keep it for a while. He realized the Nirvana element could lure similarly compelling snapshots, so he asked friends for submissions, the first handful of which ended up on his blog, where he experiments with ideas. When he got a handful of strong entries, he posted them on his more formal website.

“There’s something else going on—completely not about Nirvana—about people and who influences them as teenagers,” Lazarus says, “About what it’s like to be in high school or junior high and have something pass your way—music, clothes, carnal knowledge—like an older brother explaining to his younger brother about a girl.”

He’s seeking out entries from the early ’90s, when Nirvana was just getting big, photos that “usher in the viewer at a weird distance.” One photo showing the kid’s stepdad who had Nevermind in his collection standing in front of his gleaming red Camaro “speaks volumes.” Another shows three guys on a couch with an old-school Flaming Lips poster on the wall.  

Like one of his projects “Recordings,” in which he documents how people use the back of photos to archive and identify them, Lazarus is interested in that look into a time and a place, someone’s psyche. And after one close missed connection, he found that passing out cards, like the one I received, helped turn chance encounters into real submissions. “There was one guy whose info I lost…but I found him again six months later,” Lazarus says. “His friend had died of a drug overdose—that’s not in the story. But it meant a lot to him to have him included.” 

Lazarus is still looking for people who have a photo and a story “because there’s more work to do.”

Visit jasonlazarus.com (see Images, Nirvana) or jasonlazarus.blogspot.com.