God Listens To Slayer

God Listens to Slayer is Sanna Charles’s photobook of Slayer fans, made around Europe over more than a decade.

Ditto Press published it in 2015 as a 72-page hardback first edition of 750 copies. The photographs catch fans asleep on a festival tent’s tarpaulin, eating an almond Magnum, and carving the band’s name into a forearm. Passages written by Slayer fans are set between the pictures on fluorescent paper with corrugated edges. Louise Brown, editor of Iron Fist Magazine, wrote the foreword, comparing heavy metal to a religion. The book was launched with an exhibition at Ditto Project Space in London in April 2015.

Charles studied photography at the University of Brighton, graduating in 2001. Her CV lists this book and sha•man (2013), also from Ditto Press, as her publications alongside a self-published zine, When Death Comes Only Good Deeds Count. She is from London and now lives in rural Norway, where she teaches English and photography at a Steiner school.