I know there is a clock running on this.

I’m 54. I’m a big guy. My knees have opinions now. My back has opinions. And standing three feet from a PA while bodies are flying over my head and someone is using my shoulder as a launching pad probably isn’t going to get easier over the next ten years. There will eventually be a night when my body tells me that shooting hardcore shows this way is over.

I’m just not ready to hear it yet.

Because as much as photographing hardcore beats the hell out of me physically, it does something completely different to my brain. It quiets it.

For thirty minutes, an hour, sometimes a few hours, there really isn’t anything else. I’m not thinking about work. I’m not thinking about tomorrow. I’m not thinking about the flight I have to catch, an email I forgot to answer, what hurts, what needs fixing, or any of the million little things normally competing for space in my head.

There are just words being screamed, riffs being played, drums being absolutely murdered, bodies moving, and a crowd that is every bit as important to the photographs as the people standing on the stage.

That is probably the part of hardcore photography I love most. The best shows aren’t performances you simply watch. There isn’t really a stage and an audience anymore. There is a room, and everybody in that room has a job.

The band gives everything. The crowd gives it back.

Bane has always understood that.

That makes them almost ridiculously easy to photograph.

Not easy technically. Hardcore clubs are still dark. Lights change constantly. People move unpredictably. Microphone stands appear directly in front of the perfect frame because apparently they were invented specifically to irritate photographers.

But photographically, Bane gives you everything you could ever ask for.

Movement. Emotion. Connection. Chaos.

Aaron Bedard leaning into the room and making the crowd part of every song. Zach throwing himself around the stage with no concern for gravity. Dalbec driving the whole thing with that relentless guitar presence. James holding everything together with the kind of force that makes the songs feel bigger live than they do anywhere else. Bobby pounding away behind all of it and making sure the entire room has something to move to.

Nobody is standing around waiting for somebody else to create the moment.

That is the gift.

Every member of Bane plays like the show requires their whole body. Their whole attention. Their whole night.

And the crowd responds in kind.

You don’t have to manufacture anything.

You just have to be there.

That distinction matters to me.

There are bands that stand on a stage and perform their record exceptionally well. Nothing wrong with that. But it is a very different thing from a hardcore band that understands the record was only the beginning of the conversation.

Bane has never let me down in that regard.

Every time I photograph them, they play like this particular room matters. Like these particular people matter. Like none of this is guaranteed to happen again.

And the crowd responds accordingly.

That is where the photographs live. Not simply in the singer. Not simply in the guitar player jumping through the air. They live in the half second where somebody in the front row is screaming exactly the same words back at the band. In the pile of arms around a microphone. In the person climbing over three other people because for some reason getting six inches closer to the stage suddenly feels absolutely necessary.

The photographs happen when those two energies collide.

At that point my job becomes remarkably simple: stay close, keep looking, don’t get kicked in the face, press the button.

For this Washington, DC show I was carrying the Sony A1 II and using a Westcott FJ100 Strobe for some of the frames. It is almost the perfect little light for this kind of work because it gives me enough flash to change the photograph without requiring me to drag a giant lighting kit through a hardcore show.

But the camera and flash are really footnotes to this story.

The important equipment is being willing to stand in the middle of it.

Sometimes I want the flash to completely freeze somebody in midair. Sometimes I want the stage lights to burn through the photograph. Sometimes I drag the shutter and let the room smear around one sharp moment. Sometimes the picture is technically ugly and emotionally perfect.

I have become increasingly comfortable with that. Especially with hardcore.

Because hardcore was never supposed to be particularly clean. Neither is the experience of photographing it.

You get shoved. You sweat. Your ears ring. Someone lands on you. You discover bruises the following morning with absolutely no memory of acquiring them.

And somehow I leave feeling better.

That is the contradiction I keep coming back to.

Physically, these nights take something out of me. Mentally, they put something back.

Maybe that is why the idea behind Bane’s “My Therapy” has stayed with me for so long. There are places we go because something about being there makes the rest of life temporarily make sense. For some people that place is quiet.

Mine apparently involves Marshall stacks, stage dives and several hundred people shouting the same words.

I’m aware I can’t do it forever. Maybe that awareness actually makes these nights more important now.

I photograph differently than I did twenty years ago because I know there is no guarantee I’ll always be physically capable of crawling to the edge of a stage, getting low while somebody jumps over me, standing back up and doing it again thirty seconds later.

So when Bane comes through a room like this, I want to be there.

Camera in my hand. Too close to the speakers. Watching for the next collision.

Because for however long the set lasts, the noise somehow becomes silence.

And for a little while, there is nothing else.

Just the band, the crowd, the songs, and the photographs waiting somewhere between them.