There is also the need we have for such vivid symbols of outlawry. We are perpetually oppressed by Morality and the Law. We're there in spirit with artists who try to live beyond them. We hold in reverence the relics of those who died trying. So through Bob Gruen's Sex Pistols photographs older people can revisit themselves at an earlier stage.
Young people can find their present traumas echoed loudly, uncompromisingly.
All can identify with the ephemeral freedom they represent. The photographs themselves are visually potent, extending the great Romantic tradition of Western art.