By Dakota Parks for Inweekly
Punk isn’t just music; it’s a way of life, a DIY community and an incubator for radical creativity. Artist, photographer, professor and filmmaker Ivette Spradlin has spent much of her career documenting subcultures—from punks and skateboarders to Cuban exiles and female-identifying artists. Growing up immersed in Atlanta’s punk scene, she began capturing the creative zeitgeist around her.
Now, Spradlin revisits those formative years with her latest project, “Wild Wild West End,” a three-part film series that chronicles the lives of hundreds of punks, artists and dreamers who lived in Atlanta’s West End warehouses during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Thanks to a Florida Humanities Grant, the 309 Punk Project will host two public events examining punk culture, art and history. The first event, “Art and Counterculture: A Talk with Erica Lyle,” will take place on Friday, Dec. 13, followed by a screening of Spradlin’s first film in the series on Saturday, Dec. 14, accompanied by an exhibition of art and photographs tied to the documentary.
Ahead of her screening, Spradlin reflects on how the rebellious, tight-knit punk community that once thrived in Atlanta’s Candler-Smith Warehouses left an indelible mark on her life, igniting her passion for documenting DIY communities and curating the stories that shape them.
INWEEKLY: You started the @punkhouseatlanta Instagram after returning to Atlanta 15 years later, feeling a little nostalgic and eager to reconnect with old friends. How did it evolve into this digital archive of Southern DIY punk culture?
SPRADLIN: My good friend, Crystal Bradley, told me about @punkhouseaoakland and similar city pages. After I started @punkhouseatlanta, John Rash from the Southern Punk Archive at the University of Mississippi reached out. We talked about adding my photos to their archive and doing oral history interviews. In 2015, I was the videographer on an oral history project by Yvonne McBride about the Jazz Era and The Hill District in Pittsburgh. I would say Yvonne’s project was the inspiration, talking with John Rash and hearing about the Southern Punk Archive was the motivation, and the @punkhouseatlanta page made it a reality. Once I saw the interest in that page and how it helped reconnect people to old friends from that scene, it just took off.
INWEEKLY: You’ve spent a lot of time documenting the West End Warehouses through photography, an artist book, oral histories, the Instagram page and now a film. What inspired you to capture the lives and stories of the former tenants?
SPRADLIN: In ’99, I started photographing the punk scene at the warehouses—skaters, graffiti artists, tenants, men who went there to drink and unhoused people who slept there. That led to an artist book in 2000 about the warehouses. By that time, a lot of people started moving out of the warehouses, and I also moved away from Atlanta. I revisited those early projects with the oral history project on the warehouses in 2021 and now the film series. I was fascinated by these communal DIY spaces being built from nothing.
INWEEKLY: Your film is being shown at 309 Punk Project, another organization preserving punk history. Why is historical preservation and curating these stories so important to you?
SPRADLIN: I’ve known about 309 Punk House since 2000, mostly because of the band This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb. When I started ‘The Wild Wild West End Oral History’ in 2021, people actually asked if it was connected to 309’s book. That same year, I also learned about the Atlanta Punk Archive at Emory University and efforts by Henry Owings and Chad Radford to preserve Atlanta and Athens’ music scenes. It was exciting seeing all of these projects.
What connects my work to 309 Punk Project is our focus on DIY culture as a lifestyle beyond the music. I am aware that some think the preservation of this history feels antithetical to the idea of punk or punk ethics. But that world shaped so many of us, changing how we think and approach life and our work. It may be the very reason we became historians or artists or archivists. That DIY spirit drives us.
INWEEKLY: What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in documenting punk and DIY subculture?
SPRADLIN: One main critiques of this act of preservation is the idea of romanticizing the past or being too seduced by nostalgia that you ignore all the hurt, the wrongs or the horrible tragedies that inevitably came from clumsily trying to create something new within a community. It’s tricky. We have to acknowledge that there were racist skinheads in these spaces and people who got really hurt and even stabbed. There were people I was definitely afraid of. So, that’s why I have an open policy to remove or take down photos. I don’t want to showcase someone who was violent or an abuser, but we can’t forget those things happened. It’s why I say I’m more of a collector and curator than an archivist. I was always more interested in how photography could unite or reconnect communities.
INWEEKLY: In ‘The Biggest Dreams,’ we see tenants sharing how they built spaces out of cardboard, old carpeting and recycled materials, creating a community out of nothing in this warehouse district. What do you think is so compelling about this spirit of self-reliance and creative ingenuity, especially for contemporary audiences who may not have experienced that era firsthand?
SPRADLIN: It’s hard to imagine life pre-Internet or smartphones—even for me, though I lived through it. Understanding life before certain technologies is helpful to understanding the social and cultural evolution we are a part of, where we sit on the continuum.
What these former tenants created at the warehouses was unique and historically significant. It was the late 90s/early 2000s. There was maybe one computer per warehouse. Only one land line phone in each warehouse of eight to 15 roommates. The tenants constructed their own rooms, skate ramps and recording and artist studios. They ran their own plumbing and electrical lines. They hosted music festivals, a circus and many wild, large, theatrical parties. They screen-printed shirts and bags, wrote and distributed zines, sold records and had band practice—all with unlocked doors and people roaming freely in and out. The warehouses were carefree and fun, a little dangerous, and many friendships were formed that continue today.
INWEEKLY: You don’t shy away from showing the unglamorous side of these punk spaces. What was your experience like visiting and documenting them?
SPRADLIN: Even back then, I knew I didn’t want to live like that—I’ve always been very clean, maybe even neurotic about it and I value my sleep too much. I always went home early and didn’t stay for the big parties. But I was fascinated, sometimes envious of it. Like, I wish I could train hop, but I knew I’d be worrying about having to pee every hour. We all have our limitations. When I went on a tour in 2002 photographing punk houses across the U.S. and Canada, I carried a bottle of bleach with me, sometimes sneaking it in to scrub the showers before I could use them. I was always a part-timer, a visitor, a spectator. I couldn’t live that way, but I deeply respected their lifestyle.
INWEEKLY: This film is the first in a three-part series. What can people expect from the next two films?
SPRADLIN: There are three tragic events that shaped the series. The first part, ‘The Biggest Dreams,’ is about the building—the physical space and the community— then something horrible happens. Someone’s life is changed forever, physically, emotionally and socially. Dreams become precarious things. The next film focuses on the shows and parties that happened there, and the final film leads up to a mass eviction.
INWEEKLY: Looking ahead, what are your goals for Punkhouse Atlanta, the film series and your other projects?
SPRADLIN: I have big goals with the Punkhouse Atlanta website. I want it to be a curated and searchable version of the Instagram page, with collections of photos, videos, zines, old mixtapes, oral histories and recordings. I don’t really see it as an archive, maybe a stopping place before it goes on to a real archive. I see the website more as an art project about what it means to build community, to reconnect, to go back, to create and how we leave a legacy.
“THE BIGGEST DREAMS” SCREENING AT 309
What: A film screening, exhibition and discussion with Ivette Spradlin
When: 6 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 14
Where: 309 Punk Project, 309 N. Sixth Ave.
Cost: Free
Details: 309punkproject.org, punkhouseatlanta.com