Spot is a man of many talents. Besides serving as the album producer and sound engineer for punk bands like the Misfits and Black Flag, the photographer, who goes only by Spot, also snapped a treasure trove of photos that perfectly captured SoCal beach and punk rock life during the late 1960s to the early 1980s.
He started taking photography seriously in 1969. Spot grew up with magazines like LIFE and was inspired by the black and white journalistic photos he saw, and when he got a Pentax, he was inseparable with his camera. He started writing music articles for a local newspaper, the Easy Reader, and began taking photos for the outlet as well.
In 1982, Spot lost access to the darkroom he had been using to develop his pictures, and along with being so busy recording at the time, he gave up photography.
“I started taking photos in 1969,” Spot told in an interview. “My first camera got stolen in ’72 and I didn’t get another one til ’76 when I was living in Hermosa and writing for the Easy Reader. Then it became photo-journalism. I lost my darkroom in 1981 when Media Art closed down. But all that damn musical punkin’, rockin’ and sockin’ had happened and I didn’t have time or facilities for photography anymore.”
