MY WAR ON WILSHIRE: Black Flag at the Wilshire Federal Building, July 1983, by Michael Pearson

COMING FALL 2025 

• ISBN 978-1-935950-78-3
• 90 pages hardcover
• Nearly 100 unseen color photos of Black Flag on July 4, 1983, at the Wilshire Federal Bldg, and July 23, 1983, at the Vex

On July 4, 1983, Los Angeles hardcore punk band Black Flag played an outdoor show on the terrace of the Federal Building on Wilshire Blvd. Young punk Michael Pearson brought his camera, and captured indelible color images of a band on the edge. From stage left, he amassed a collection of images of American rebellion, the band exploding against an open backdrop of blue California skies, palm trees, waving U.S. flags, and a Marlboro Man billboard. From the stage right perspective, the band is set against the imposing modernist concrete infinity of the Wilshire Federal Building, home to various agencies—including the F.B.I. that had briefly investigated Black Flag in 1981.

Later that month, Pearson again captured Black Flag, this time with suffocating intimacy at the infamous and legitimately dangerous punk hole-in-the-wall The Vex. Seen for the first time in My War on Wilshire, Pearson›s snapshots preserve a precarious but precious moment in Black Flack’s campaign of musical conflict at the breaking point.