Some of Us Did Not Die

Some of Us Did Not Die is Tammy Rae Carland's 2015 artist's book. It gathers a diaristic archive of her twenties inside the queer punk underground, self-published with the Oakland imprint Land and Sea in an edition of 100.

The book assembles roadtrip photographs, mixtapes, notebooks, photo negatives, contact sheets, correspondence, and other ephemera from Carland's life in the 1990s. Images of a disco ball recur throughout, breaking the black-and-white pages into scattered points of light. Carland has described the project as an attempt to archive the impossible, the nebulous, the disappeared, and the intangible. The material sits against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic, Reaganomics, and what she calls the pre-mainstreaming of punk and queer culture.

Carland came up in the 1990s riot grrrl scene, producing fanzines such as I (heart) Amy Carter and contributing record art for Bikini Kill, The Fakes, and The Butchies. From 1997 to 2004 she ran Mr. Lady Records and Videos, a label and video distributor for feminist and queer culture. Her photographic series Lesbian Beds and her inclusion in the traveling exhibition Alien She placed her among the artists most closely associated with riot grrrl's visual legacy, and Some of Us Did Not Die extends that same archival, first-person approach into book form.