The first time Glen E. Friedman listened to a Minor Threat record—the band’s 1981 self-titled debut—he wasn’t particularly impressed. 

“There was something about the production and the [eight] songs being on the seven-inch, it was really cool,” Friedman recalls. “But I just didn’t get it. It just didn’t click with me.”

Months later, when Friedman listened to the band’s subsequent release, In My Eyes, he changed his mind. “The second record … actually made a profound impression on me, and it forced me to go back and listen to the first one. And I was like, ‘Wow, I’m really an idiot. I missed this the first time for some reason. It’s so cool, and it’s so good and melodic,’” he recalls. “It’s just, like, really great, unique punk rock.”

At the time, Friedman was in his late teens and had already made a name for himself in skateboarding circles by becoming, at age 14, the youngest contributing staff photographer for SkateBoarder magazine. In the decades that followed, he would become a renowned photographer admired for his iconic images from the holy trinity of outsider cultures: skateboarding, punk rock, and early hip-hop. Now his photographs are in the collections of multiple museums, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. He has also published between eight and 12 books, depending on how you count various editions, including Fuck You Heroes, consisting of photographs from 1976 to 1991, and Fuck You Too: Extras + More Scrapbook, with additional music and skating photographs through 2004. In 2019, Friedman published Together Forever, pairing images of Run–D.M.C. with the Beastie Boys. His other books include the career-spanning My Rules collection published by Rizzoli International, and a book of Fugazi photographs. His new collection, Just a Minor Threat: The Minor Threat Photographs of Glen E. Friedman, from Brooklyn-based independent publisher Akashic Books, came out Oct. 3.

The new collection features 140 images shot over the course of 13 months, a significant portion of Minor Threat’s two brief incarnations. Soon after the band debuted in 1980, it became one of the most popular acts in the local “harDCore” scene. For Friedman and countless young people in and around D.C.—and across the country—vocalist Ian MacKaye and the rest of Minor Threat would be elevated to punk demigods. In his introduction to Just a Minor Threat, Friedman describes the band’s records as “important, life-affirming, authentic, and inspiring.” Of the band’s live shows, Friedman says that they were “a hydrogen bomb of excitement on the stage and in the crowd.” He writes: “I wanted to be a part of what they were doing. I wanted to help spread the word.”

Friedman began working on this new book in the fall of 2022 at the urging of Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha. A longtime Minor Threat fan, de la Rocha contributed a heartfelt essay to the book that connects the dots between his love of both Minor Threat and Friedman’s artistry. Of Freidman, de la Rocha writes: “Calling him a photographer or simply a documentarian doesn’t encompass what’s involved here. The line between witness and participant isn’t just blurred, it’s burned and left in ruins.” Friedman returns the adulation, telling City Paper, “Here’s a guy who sells out Madison Square Garden five nights in a row and is a wonderful political activist. And a man of integrity has written these words about how Minor Threat and my work has affected him.”

As Friedman sifted through the decades-old photographs, he found that the passage of time had altered how he perceived their purpose. When he originally shot the images in the early ’80s, he was very intentional about how he wanted to portray the band. “As years go on, there’s a greater understanding of the culture on many levels, so you don’t have to be the punch in the face; you don’t have to have the perfect image to tell the story,” he says. “I am now sharing more culturally interesting aspects of those moments and maybe not the perfect compositions. But there’s still interesting shit going on, and why should those images that I made back then just sit in a folder and not be seen if they’re presentable?”

In our current smartphone era, anyone who owns one can easily take hundreds of photographs in a day. “You could walk around the city and take 200 pictures on your phone,” says Friedman. “I only pressed the shutter 200 times with Minor Threat in front of it.”

Of those 200 images, 140 are included in the new book, and most of them have not previously appeared elsewhere. All of them capture an era when, explains Friedman, time simultaneously moved quickly and slowly. “In all three things that I covered—in punk rock, skateboarding, and hip-hop—those golden eras, it’s like a week was a month, a month was a year, two months was like five years,” he says. “So much evolution happened in the creativity … all of these records came out, and those are all the foundation.”

Friedman first shot Minor Threat performing live at The Barn at Alpine Village in Torrance, California, on July 3, 1982. The final time was on Aug. 2, 1983, at Dischord House in Arlington. That day yielded the famous front porch photograph that would serve as the cover for Minor Threat’s 1985 7-inch EP, Salad Days, which was released two years after the band broke up. Since then, that image has become a celebrated distillation of the band’s everypunk ethos. 

“I don’t even know why that picture became the iconic punk rock picture that it seems to be now,” says Friedman, though he concedes that “it’s a beautiful composition.”

The new book includes every shot from the half roll that Friedman took on the front porch, yard, and inside the house that day. Some of them feature a lawn mower and a skateboard with an image of Cynthia Connolly’s black sheep from Minor Threat’s seminal 1983 song “Out of Step.” “I just wanted to make a cool picture on the porch because I loved hanging out there,” Friedman says. For him, the one that became famous was the perfect image. Friedman has always considered Minor Threat to be different from Black Flag’s Henry Rollins and all of the other “Fuck You” heroes that he celebrated in his photographs. “Minor Threat were like—they were us. They were our friends. They were approachable,” he says. “They were the everyman group.” 

In recent years, people have doctored that photograph for comic effect, sharing new images on social media that substitute the seated members of Minor Threat with characters from The Simpsons, as well as the Beatles and Black Sabbath. “I love them all. I think they’re all hilarious and great, and it’s an honor,” says Friedman. “But some of them don’t really speak to me.” Unsurprisingly, he is less enthralled with the one depicting television’s Golden Girls on the Dischord House front porch.

***

Friedman, 61, spent his childhood in New Jersey, New York City, and California. He acquired his first skateboard, the old-fashioned type with clay wheels, when he first moved to California with his mother in the early 1970s. His interest in baseball was soon replaced by skateboarding. His peers were into motocross, Evel Knievel, and other daredevil pursuits. 

“Skateboarding was the next step in that,” he says. “It was thrilling. And it was something you did on your own without any parents involved, something that we had to discover and figure out on our own. When you’re doing Little League, or football, or soccer, parents have to drive you to the field or sign you up. Skateboarding and punk rock, there was no signing up, you just did it yourself.”

Like most American kids during the ’70s, Friedman was not closely supervised by his parents. “I think that’s kind of what made these things happen for me,” he says.

Other life experiences, including the bicoastal upbringing that resulted from his parents’ divorce, may have shaped Friedman’s affinity for outsider cultures. “I was a bit of an outsider, because I didn’t grow up where I was living … A bit of a loner, or not super social. I never fit in perfectly in either place,” he says.

Another distinctive aspect of his work is the masculinity of his subjects. “Skateboarding and punk rock, they were both very aggressive. And I was a male teenager at the time, and that’s kind of what you do: aggressive, rowdy things,” he says. “You do what the fuck you want. And you don’t care [about] the ramifications.”

In his early teens, Friedman received a “D” in a photography class because he didn’t follow the assignments and eschewed the required 35mm camera for a plastic pocket Instamatic, a more practical choice for an active skateboarder. He first visited the area during the late 1970s for a skateboarding photo session. Later, when he first met MacKaye and his brother Alec, the three bonded over their shared love for skateboarding, and he was struck by the friendliness of the local punk scene. “They actually recognized me from SkateBoarder magazine, and my photographs inspired them in different ways before they were punks,” Friedman says. “We all loved the same music. We were listening to Black Flag and we were at a Bad Brains show. And it was just great that this brotherhood of skateboarding and skateboarders could extend to a new brotherhood of punk rock.”

The friendship quickly deepened through shared musical passions and idealism. “We all had very high ideals on making culture and society better. And if you listen to lyrics that 18, 19-year-old Ian MacKaye wrote, he’s talking about personal problems, serious issues in his life [that] so much of us could relate to.” Friedman continues, “There were other bands that had talked about social issues that were very valid and great and psychological, personal issues. But the music that Minor Threat created was really fantastic.”

Friedman returned to D.C. in August 1982 to shoot a Minor Threat performance at 9:30 Club; later that year, he shot the band live at New York’s CBGB. When photographing skateboarders, Friedman often used wide angle lenses. “You’d like to get as close to the action as possible, the intensity of the moment while still showing the environment that it’s happening in,” he explains. When he was shooting the chaos of Minor Threat and other punk bands on stage, his skateboarding background was invaluable. “My sense of timing coming from skateboarding was able to capture those peak moments, and be really close to stuff without being scared and being right in the mix,” he says. “Because I was a skateboarder, I took great skateboard photos. Because I was a punk rocker. I took good punk photos … Both of those things meant everything to me, helping me survive [my] teenage years.”

The progressivism and activism he picked up along the way shaped his understanding of what makes a contemporary hero, as evidenced by his 1994 Fuck You Heroes collection. “It wasn’t saying ‘fuck you’ to heroes. These people were heroes because they said ‘fuck you’ … to common bullshit, to everyday society, to everything that was going on around them and made their own existence powerful and inspiring,” Friedman says. 

His current heroes include anti-gun activist X González, as well as U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez. Friedman has been trying to photograph AOC for four years, but despite his considerable efforts and celebrity, he has so far been unsuccessful. “She’s just next-level amazing,” he says. “She speaks truth to power every fucking day.”

Along with de la Rocha and other musicians, Just a Minor Threat also includes texts by local music heroes Alec MacKaye, Guy Picciotto, and Ian Svenonius. All of them help put Friedman’s photographs—and everything that Minor Threat meant to its fans—in perspective. 

For Friedman, Minor Threat and all of his other “Fuck You” heroes made an indelible mark on American culture. “They set a fucking foundation in place for progressive ideas and ideals in youth to understand that there’s really a different way of thinking than what your parents are telling you … Some people had great parents, of course, and they were progressive; they were radical too. But these foundations gave you the confidence to think that your own ideals were good enough. And that’s what makes you a Minor Threat.”

Just a Minor Threat: The Minor Threat Photographs of Glen E. Friedman is out now; Friedman will discuss the book with Ian MacKaye at 2 p.m. on Oct. 8 at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. dclibrary.org. Free; registration required.

This article has been updated.