The news of the sudden death of Jennifer Finch from brain cancer in July was such a gut-punch of devastation. She was an absolute spark of joy in a world that more and more seems joyless. Less than a month shy of her sixtieth birthday when she passed, a lifetime of creativity ended. Her musical immortality, chiefly as the bassist for the legendary LA quartet L7, is assured. But she was a voraciously creative visual artist as well, primarily as a photographer.
At her house on the Westside she had photographs tacked to the wall. They were ambient shots of urban landscapes out of focus, giving a real feel for what the sense of dusk delivers in the city rather than a sense of place. “Downtown L.A.?” I asked. “Paris,” she said. If you’ve seen the work of 20,000 aritsts like I have you will have encountered the phenomena of the point and shoot tourist turning exotica into art simply by printing snapshots on funky paper and professionally framing them. But these showed an artist behind the lens, not a tourist. There was no Eiffel Tower but there was romance oozing out. It was a capturing of essence, of timelessness.
I curated a show of her and Kirk Dominguez at Red Pipe Gallery in October of 2017. She got a massive wall and went to work, puzzle-piece installing thirty years of photographs of live music, bands onstage and audience members drinking in the magic of what transpired. She dug through a vast archive of material to find images that blurred the line between fame and form. Again, it was a capturing of essence, of timelessness.
She loved that fact that I saw her as an artist whose day job as a rock star was a mere matter of fact, no different than if she had been a really successful accountant. She inspired hundreds of thousands of people with her music and her performances and the people who met her knew they were in the presence of force for raging good in the world..
And yet, years from now, those photos will greatly add to her legacy. So much photography is documentation. She was determined to capture the human experience in the costume of punk, of rock, of stage performance and concertgoer, of outcasts that could be making the scene on the Sunset Strip or in a Medieval revolution, all too human and familiar and snapped as such with that magic we called Precious, Jennifer Finch
