The last two years have brought a huge resurgence of interest in the scene’s bygone days, exemplified by the “Pump Me Up” exhibit at the Corcoran last year, Lucian Perkins’ Hard Art DC 1979 book, the fanzine archive at University of Maryland, two recently launched punk-rock archives at George Washington University and D.C. Public Library, the D.C.-themed episode of Dave Grohl’s Sonic Highways HBO series and a whopping five documentaries—one of them still in the works—related to D.C. punk music. (And I admit that Bandwidth has been a gushing faucet of D.C. punk coverage lately, so as the website’s editor, I play a role in this, too.)

But why is all of this reflection happening now?

Today’s Kojo guests—Positive Force co-founder Mark Andersen, Priests singer Katie Alice Greer, the GWU music archive’s Tina Plottel and myself—grappled with that. Andersen rejected that nostalgia alone is driving the deluge. (Because punk isn’t about nostalgia; it’s about the present, he said.) But the activist couldn’t explain why the recent past has been such a fertile period for, well, the past. Cynthia Connolly—the Banned In D.C. co-creator who called into the show—didn’t seem to think this moment bears special significance. She said it seemed like a coincidence, because many of the aforementioned projects took shape years ago and happen to be wrapping up now.

But here’s a theory I neglected to bring up on the air today: In an interview back in July, Punk the Capital filmmaker James Schneider told me that folks should try to preserve the past now because redevelopment is erasing D.C.’s cultural history. “With the city changing so fast, on so many fronts, it’s more important than ever now to ensure that the city’s identity is firmly anchored before a remodeled city takes over,” he said. When these films, archives and other projects began coming together, was it because their creators saw gentrification beginning to erase history? Or is the barrage, like Connolly said, coincidental?

In the hourlong segment, Andersen also made key points about punk rock’s relationship with activism and gentrification’s impact on the very poor (versus the less-urgent effect it’s had on middle-class artists), and we mulled over whether D.C.’s current scene has maintained the sense of social responsibility that’s depicted in the forthcoming documentary Positive Force: More Than A Witness.

Ultimately, today’s show wasn’t all about nostalgia, even though that’s what we set out to discuss. But like many of the ideas revived in these allegedly nostalgic films and archives, we found that talking about the past brought up issues musicians and activists are still wrestling with today.

Listen to the segment over on the Kojo Nnamdi Show website.

Image by Flickr user rockcreek used under a Creative Commons license.

“When I first started [shooting], I had the cheapest camera,” he says—a Canon 60D that he used with a “bootleg flash” and a battery pack. Shooting five shows a week with his heavy equipment, the 26-year-old photographer began to feel pain in his right arm. It got scary a few months ago when Andrade was traveling back home from a show at Tenleytown’s Casa Fiesta. “My whole body started shaking,” he says. “I thought I was going to die.”

Andrade sought medical help and physical therapy. “I had to take a lot of medicine,” he says. Eventually, the pain receded. He soon invested in a lighter, more expensive camera.

Now, Andrade gets to show off the work that almost put him out of commission: Tonight the photographer opens “IN MY EYES,” an exhibit of his concert photography, at The Coupe in Columbia Heights. It’s his first solo show.

The exhibit features a few dozen images of 11 D.C.-area bands, including Chain & the Gang, Dudes (shown above), Olivia Neutron-John, Warchild, Give and Baby Bry Bry and the Apologists.

“I fell in love with hardcore music when I was 17 years old,” says the Alexandria native. “Bad Brains’ Pay To Cum changed my life.” Later on, the photography coming out of D.C.’s hardcore scene didn’t impress him. He felt more drawn to the work of photographers like Pulitzer winner Lucian Perkins—particularly his visceral images of a young D.C. punk scene, like the ones published in the 2013 book Hard Art DC 1979. “I decided to take it upon myself” to start shooting hardcore shows, Andrade says, aiming for a similar look and feel as Perkins achieved in his work.

Andrade has been shooting punk shows for two years—still a newbie by most standards, but his work stands out as some of the best in the scene. He’s now a familiar face at shows. Though, it helps that he doesn’t have a lot of competition at the tiny events he chooses to capture.

“When I go to these house shows, it’s like, two photographers,” Andrade says. When he recently shot a show at Rock & Roll Hotel, there were too many photographers there for his taste. He prefers the little gigs—where he can get right in the pit and shoot the kids. That’s where he says he finds the best shots.

“Lucian did a great job of documenting not just the band but the crowd,” Andrade says. In Perkins’ photos, you don’t just see the band—you see people in the audience, like Alec MacKaye, who would go on to become influential in their own right. “The crowd for me is half of the battle because they’re just as important as the band.”

Even after a couple of years—and who knows how many shows—the photographer says he still gets antsy before a shoot. “I always get super nervous,” he says. Why? 

“I don’t know—I’ve done this a million times,” Andrade says. “I guess it means I’m still enjoying it.”

“IN MY EYES” opens at 6 p.m. tonight at The Coupe. The show is on view to Sept. 1.