“Sue Rynski – she’s a girl but you can talk to her”
Sue Rynski is exactly the sort of punkgirl that we love and admire because she was there in the ’70s and she’s still active musically and artistically in 2020. If you look on Sue’s facebook page, she posts links to the current Paris punk scene and gigs you can go to right now with real young punk musicians and others from first and second time around. Sue has become a French punk scholar with academic publications to her name and she continues to be an important photographer of bands, subcultures and urban underground life.
Quite rightly, her website warns copyists and protects her brilliant photographic work. We won’t steal those images here, but do go and look: http://www.suerynski.com/ where you can see bar life, close ups and the Detroit Underground Scene. And that also means Iggy Pop, who has written the foreward to Rynski’s limited edition portfolio ‘End of the Night’. This site has more Rynski photos of Stooges, Monsters, Cramps, Dead Boys and a 2007 prose poem by Iggy: https://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/detroit-punk-photographs-sue-rynski-iggy-pop/
Sue Rynski says on her website that emerging from art school in Detroit in 1977, she ‘entered the movement’ that was punk. The local scene with Destroy All Monsters, The Mutants The Stooges and MC5 sounds like it was vibrant and Sue rapidly got in there, initially with her camera:
“They liked that not only was I up there photographing them but they liked the fact that I would put down the camera and I would dance, too.”
Sue Rynski’s interviews and website chronicle the important bands that formed, the touring bands that made an impact and the whole complicated interrelatedness of the emerging scene:
“Dozens of new bands formed. The Dead Boys and Pere Ubu came to town often. Johnny Thunders moved to Detroit. Patti Smith fell in love with MC5 guitarist Fred Sonic Smith and married him. In 1982, I briefly took the stage myself as lead singer in the band Batteur Attaqué”
We don’t think that Batteur Attaqué made or released any studio recordings, but we could be wrong – please let us know! Here’s a very good quality live video:
We’d like to find out much more about Sue Rynski. If we get permission, we’d be delighted to share and credit her photos on punkgirldiaries.com. As you can see from this recent film, Sue is still guesting at gigs in Paris and living life to the full. We salute you, Sue Rynski, and would very much like to meet you!
“My philosophy of life is …to be as free as possible and to create all the time. The rule is that you have to be 100% authentic. It has to come from your gut.”