Henry Rollins - Photographer

By Chuck Sudo in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 17, 2011 6:40PM

Over the past three decades Henry Rollins has gone from fronting seminal punk rockers Black Flag to his own solo career, acting, writing, poetry and spoken word, attacking each with the zeal of a man living on borrowed time. "Sedentary" would not be a word used to describe Rollins.

Rollins also travels the world wherever an airplane and his passport can take him, looking for a worldview normally not found among the hundreds of television channels we can surf among. Those travels have led to some inspired monologues and essays in the past. Now, they've also produced Occupants (Chicago Review Press). Rollins has become something of an amateur photographer and, as he wrote in the forward to Occupants, "as my equipment improved, so did the images."

Those photographs in Occupants are as unvarnished as Rollins' writing. Through his camera lens, Rollins takes the reader to desolate places such as war-torn Afghanistan; a Kyrgyz ghost town; combat operations in Iraq; post-Katrina New Orleans; an Indonesian street vendor hawking bootleg Black Flag t-shirts.

Taken at face value Rollins' photos can seem like they simply traffic in the unrelenting weight of the desperation and poverty they capture. But they also shine a light on a hope that is universal. They remind us of what Charlie Chaplin wrote about his perception of beauty:

"I thought it was an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the poet feels--an expression of it can be a dustbin with a shaft of sunlight across it, or it can be a rose in the gutter."

Chaplin was always an optimist and so in Rollins. "The future of humans on the planet will be determined by the bottom line being realized and acted upon in a way that is beneficial to the species," he also wrote in the introduction to Occupants.

"I am hoping that innovation, science and decency will triumph over corporate interests, ignorance and cruelty.

"I am in it to win, of course."

Henry Rollins will sign Occupants 7 p.m. tomorrow night at the Oak Park Public Library (834 Lake St.)