OPINION: Chris Cuffaro, Pearl Jam And The Last Gasp Of Analog Glory
In our current age, that sense of analog authenticity, both in Chris’ photos and in grunge music, has an extra potency.
Pearl Jam (Courtesy of Chris Cuffaro)
They‘re grainy, they’re blurry, and they are just so alive.
I was born in the 90s. Pearl Jam, for me, have always been there. They were cool, and they were rock before I knew what either of those things were. But they were also a promise of a world I never really got to inhabit. So much of being a part of my generation has been experiencing a rug pull as the world I was promised as a child failed to materialise.
The housing market. Climate change. A return of the far right. These are the headline issues. But there’s also the little stuff. Outgoing messages on answering machines. P.O. Boxes. Faxes. Having your own chequebook.
These are signifiers of adulthood that once seemed so vital but failed to materialise in part because of the digital revolution. Partly, we discarded them because convenience overrode our desire for tactile experiences, and partly because of our current form of runaway capitalism—or maybe techno-feudalism—that gifted us Elon Musk and Donald Trump, but that’s a different article. The question is, what the fuck does any of this have to do with Chris Cuffaro and Pearl Jam??
Well, as I write this, I’m half-cut, typing on my phone at a Chris Cuffaro exhibition in Darlinghurst. This exhibition focuses on his work for Pearl Jam across ‘91-‘92. If you haven’t heard of Chris, don’t worry; he doesn’t expect you to have either, but you’ve seen his work. He’s shot everyone. In an interview from a few years back, he mentioned that he had only ever photographed one wedding, Tom Hanks, and then decided to quit while he was ahead. But he made his name with Seattle bands and what would become known as the Seattle Sound or—grunge.
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He shot in the days before Photoshop and digital. All analog grain and slightly soft focus at moments when now, you’d expect everything to be sharp. The photos are amazing. It’s shocking how many of them are part of my primordial memory. Eddie Vedder flipping the bird, crowd surfing, grinning goofily at the camera. There are cliches that weren’t yet cliches, the band in the field, the band under the bridge. And everyone is sweating and what I can only call heroin skinny.
But none of that is what I notice. It’s the crowds in the live shots. No phones. Often, there are no shirts. And so damn alive.
This was the promise of rock when I was growing up. Raw youth, unmediated by technology, just enjoying life. In the words of Pearl Jam—so alive.
There’s a dark side too. The crowds are almost uniform in their masculinity. Even as the DJ in the gallery spins up Malibu by Hole, it’s hard not to notice the maleness of it all—and then thinking about Courtney Love—there’s definitely a dark side here. And that’s without mentioning the uniform whiteness.
But there’s something else, the last gasp of something we didn’t know was dying. An analog world I’m not quite sure we’ve mourned properly. There’s the desperate nostalgia, of course. An endless industry that pumps out Stranger Things and biopics of 80s brands, amongst other nostalgic things and fuels YouTube channels—cough Rick Beato cough—of old, usually white, usually men, people decrying how crap everything now is. I don’t want to do that. Music now is still vibrant and edgy and all those things, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t lose… something.
I think about the threat of AI to the music industry and creative industries in general, and even writing jobs like this one, and I find something comforting about Chris’ photos. They are so delightfully analog, so real. And that sense of realness is so important to the storytelling at this exhibition.
That’s what grunge was all about: it was a rebuke to the era of ‘80s excess. Suddenly, acts like Pearl Jam were wearing ‘90s street clothes instead of outrageous pop fashions; they were relaxed and unpretentious. Of course, all of this was itself a deliberate construction of the artists—and unpicking all of that is half the fun of the exhibition—but in our current age, that sense of analog authenticity, both in Chris’ photos and in the music of grunge, has an extra potency.
I’m not sure what the future will bring, and I don’t think we should respond to digital dislocation by retreating into nostalgia.
However, there are lessons to be learned from Chris’ work and grunge; maybe we need a little bit of performative authenticity right now. It needs to be modern, and it needs to be different—but we could all do with a little more grain and soft focus. Digital technology has allowed everything to be too perfect, too real—maybe its time to blur the edges again. Or maybe I’m just half-cut at a Chris Cuffaro exhibition.
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