Since the distant years 80 and 90, to each many years I am surprised with some news in the printed media or television informing me that the "punk is back". I should already get used to, but I'm ingenuous (basically silly) and used to base my impressions on what alive daily. Than always seems to me a bit weird that something could return without going to somewhere.

The question is that, in this market of dry and wet that we call modern world, the things sell, then exists. Therefore, punk came back to the guideline of the day according to the great business which rediscovered it, redesigned the package and resold it.

But something didn't match. After all, this same news told me that punk was established on "Do it yourself": independence, irreverence to the pop icons and aversion to the industry rules. How he could return and exist through this proper industry, as label for new pop icons completely "dependents"? Going more beyond, what had happened between the end of the Sex Pistols and grunge? Apparently, mentioning the Olho Seco, a legendary brazillian punk band, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing!

So I realized that what me and my friends use to do, the places that we use to go and some situations that we created, inhabited some kind of parallel dimension. We were at the wrong age. All the weekends, we use to participate on something that simply didn´t exist. Fortunately, the majority hadn't been informed and continued there with their bands, fanzines, shows and rides.

We felt that at any time, half of our record collections would disintegrate as like the photos of the film "Back to the Future", in the scene where Marty McFly is about to kiss his mother. After all, were relics of something that didn't exist, the independent punk rock of years 80 and 90, the age where, in accordance to the news is completely old.

At the same time, we laugh to the irony to read at the great media the obituary and reborn certificate of something that, at least on the speech, was established exactly beside this informal information. Thus, simply keep making, doing, organizing and enjoying, trying to create our proper time and space, where the "official" was irrelevant. We weren't worried about to register anything formally, after all, our memory was already enough and who was not there, does not interest much and neither interest us.

Fortunately, the minority between the majority of musicians, fanzine makers and activists disagreed. Were the punk photographers, this category no much valued in our history of three chords. They had always been there, humble and quiet, apparently resigned to register something that the others made.

What nobody realized is that they were constructing more than us. While we produced decibels, they were creating a universe from something that was there, but was passing by us without our view. Exactly how it happen during the ages where the punk, officially, still "exist".

Something is now existing

In your principles, a fundamental point of punk was the celebration of the extravagant. It was the exploration of the queerness as thematic and method of the confrontation. The mainstream and the common man didn´t understand what was happening, they weren't capable to accept that and were felling insulted by the speech that, still only for little times articulated, theatrical and ingenuous, had the duty to offend the quiet majority.

In that year 70 of long hair and naturalness, where clothes, furniture and household-electric come in the color of the corporal fluid less celebrate, it spread for the world, images of creatures looking extraterrestrial, from a planet which commands the anti-natural, hairs challenging the physics law, clothes purposively uncomfortable and a clear intention to spread this discomfort for the incautious man. This was the punk.

These images succeed to arrive in Brazil, where they had found a land still more fertile, the despite of the mistaken nationalism that reduced the imitation out of context , everything that didn't incase in your simplicist agenda. As if wasn´t enough the aesthetic from 70's, this was, still superficially, a tropical country, hot, humid, even more authoritarian and with a musical scene still more conservative. And than something appears more weird (and a certain way, more punk): the Brazilian punk.

Five years after the British Boom of 77, São Paulo passed for its proper "jubilee" in 1982, on perfect syntony with the bloom of a new form punk, still more hard, dry and direct: the hardcore. Gangs, bands, festivals, everything on that year was registered by the press with variable honesty. But still thus, creating a mythology to be adore by the people that wasn't there, trough the photos, documentaries and tv news. The lens could see a reality probably little perceived by the participants, simply busy in being on what they were and make what needed o be made.

Than, 25 years later, in this proper jubilee of Brazilian punk, the thing is still working as never, by people which learned by the mythology created through the images of "heroic age" while, without perceiving we construct our proper one. We even knew that on these last years that those guys, omnipresent with their cameras, were opening doors to a parallel universe, where our moments will start to be belong.

We don't need nostalgia of an age which we didn't participate. We don't need to envy places that we never been. The photographic language helps us to see the beauty and the importance of what we are doing here and now. That we don't see at that time, because we are, and off course, too busy building ourselves. We don't owe anything to anyone and don't need anyone to inform us our proper relevance or existence. Is everything happening, new contradictions is appearing and new reasons of being. And the lens will continue clicking.

Prefácio por Pedro Carvalho
Tradução por Érica Harumi Eishima