Being a punk in SoCal during the early 80’s was not an easy thing to do or be, but compared to other parts of the world, we had it pretty good! I’m just saying – yeah, some of us came from fucked up hoods with mad gangs, but places like Yugoslavia were communist and dealing with a police state that brutally oppressed its people. None of this could stop the power of punk, because from the photos of Jože Suhadolnik you can see they had a killer scene during the 80’s. He said he knew people that were actually jailed by the secret police for being apart of this sub culture…Peep what he said about his own encounters with the boys in blue – “I got a pretty huge police file that I found later in 1992 when police files were opened after Slovenian independence. My file contains some 400 plus pages just because I was photographing punks, concerts and hanging around with, at that time, dissident poets and writers.” When I look at his work from this era, it’s hard not to notice how fucking stylish these kids were – you can really see the influence of Robert Smith and Siouxsie. Jože collected all of his photos into a book called Balkan Pank, which was published by Akina Books but is now sold out. Check out these stellar portraits of Yugoslavian Punks below…
