Americans fancy the role of survivor. Despite living in a time & place of unparalleled security & convenience, we love bragging of having survived psoriasis, a 90-minute de-icing on the tarmac at O’Hare or a Carnival Cruise.
Still— some dudes have been through more shit than others.
Photographer Lance Mercer has tangled with some King Hell adversaries and emerged not only intact— but often stronger, wiser or more complete.
A native of Seattle, Mercer grew up BG when a young man could still ride a skateboard in the rain without feeling the weight of The Seattle Years upon him. The al dente hardcore raging grounds of the University District (for Seattleites the Ave) provided a fitting backdrop for the young Mercer’s maturation—an intoxicating combination of independence, JFA, and conventional intoxicants leading to an early exit from Seattle Public Schools.
Fuck it. Lance Mercer had a camera.
Thrown a life preserver by an intuitive instructor in the community college photography department, Mercer set to work familiarizing himself with the tools that would populate his professional belt: 35mmFuji film, sodium hydroxide and a Pentax K1000 given to him by his father.
Some guys arm themselves with guitars. Some women wield a mighty pen. Other folks always just seem to be holding. Lance Mercer’s path to the stage was that camera.
He’d become Lance the Photographer Dude in the humid basement shows of the Ave and by 1991 was freelancing with some success. The rest is certifiably documentable. It’s hard to flip through a record bin anywhere on Earth without seeing a Lance Mercer image— and downright impossible if the bincard reads SEATTLE. Timing of the PNW cultural explosion of the early 90s (don’t say it) couldn’t have been better for Mercer, and if he’d had a Flickr it would have been hit to death.
He didn’t. It was only 1992! But Pearl Jam was on the landline inviting him to be their official tour photographer and plus all the danged Lollapaloozas also. He’d survived the 80s on the Ave and now was going to be tested by The Road in the 90s, stealing the souls of some of the biggest names in rock and roll. But all-access to excess isn’t always the best thing, even if it does rhyme with success.
The signature of Lance Mercer’s most-recognizable works is that
factor that can’t be quantified by aperture, at least technically. Rather, it is the photographer’s immersion in the moment that resonates in his images. The administration of the holy sacrament that is a live rock and roll event is manifest so authentically in Mercer’s work because he was not only there, but indeed fully present. He was involved. He was drunk and stoned and sweaty and breathless just like the crowds and bands— fully engaged in a subject that he could not possibly have captured so eloquently otherwise. (His work with acts he was less invested in proves this.)
But it’s not 1994 anymore. Mercer’s professional coffee table is flush with sexy hardbound tomes of his eye’s yield, even if the movement he eavesdropped on no longer exists. A collaboration with colleague Charles Peterson from 1997 entitled Place/Date offers stunning depth, while 2007’s 5X1: Pearl Jam Through the Eye of Lance Mercer boasts some of the most-telling images of one of rock’s most-private bands during one of their most-formative periods.
But it sure as hell isn’t 1994 anymore, is it? The survivor of the Ave and Grunge (OK) has by now emerged from addiction and even cancer and is eyeing life post-plague just like the rest of us. In the summer of 2019, solo camping trips replaced World Tours and you are now more likely to find him meditating than tippling. But the empathy and connection that has made Lance Mercer such a revered visual interpreter for thirty years is evident in his current work in documentary film-making and in a series of photos of cancer survivors, captured during a roadtrip across this failing nation.
Survivors, after all. He ought know? .