Updated: January 2003

"Like Jamel Shabazz's hip-hop monograph Back in the Days, this book recovers a lost yet vital period in American youth culture. Punk's influence resonates as loudly now as it did in the late '70s. These images capture the cusp of greatness, before the inevitable sell out that follows when something is too cool to stay forever." —Flaunt

"...takes an unguided tour through the two-flights down punk scene in L.A. and San Francisco.... the bulk of the book offers page after page of posed portraits of the famous, the near famous and the struggling never to be famous, wuth subjects shot with a hot flash against iron grates, graffiti, and a variety of other do-it-yourself backdrops." —Los Angeles Times

"Almost all of the subjects of Jim Jocoy's snapshots—a collection of photos, all without captions, of scenesters during punk rock's first West Coast bloom—stare directly into the camera. Some smile. Some leer. But they all engage. Captured in the dank spaces of the West Coast's primoridal punk world, the characters he portrays in this book are as insistent as punk itself. There are some stars here—Iggy Pop, Lydia Lunch, Sid Vicious—but it's the scenesters who stand out: enthusiastic and disinterested, tattered and natty, but never understated." —Jon Caramanica for Rolling Stone, Four Star Review !!

"Buildings crumble; social signifiers fissure and evaporate. This much is forever; art students simultaneously discovering perceived oppression and thrift-store shoppong. Maybe that's what We're Desperate packs such timeless reverb. As a student living in San Francisco in the late '70s, Jocoy reported from the front line of the burgeoning punk scene by training his eye on the fans. Using a camera purchased at a garage sale, Jocoy photographed scenesters posed against club walls, capturing their ripped nylons, pegged jeans, leather jackets, and vinyl anything. Bookended by an introduction by Marc Jacobs, who has repeatedly referenced the era's Converse-and-logo-tee aesthetic, and a tender elegy by Exene Cervenka, of L.A. punk band X fame. These are DIY Star Search episodes played to one hand clapping, lasting shots from a short runway." —V Magazine

"...the longer you look...the more you begin to see what it took to remake yourself as a freak, as a social idiot, as someone you weren't meant to be.... soon enough, you're seeing real people everywhere." —Greil Marcus' Real Life Rock Top 10, Salon.com

"Jim Jocoy's portriats of punk rockers from Los Angeles and San Francisco scenes from the late '70s are a modest, beautiful testament to the vorcious outfits and characters of the period. Although it's as much a book about history as about fashion, We're Desperate is nonetheless a great reminder that the fashion photograph can be both simpler and heftier than the quasi-candid, moody visual erotica that fills the pages of almost every current magazine with a circulation greater than five figures. The young models/designers in his pictures—a few of them still recognizable (Darby Crash, John Doe, Iggy Pop, Lux Interior), all of them unidentified and shot with minimal preperaton in hallyways, bathrooms, and parking lots in and around defunct clubs like the Masque in LA and Mabuhay Gardens in SF—display the outfits they happen to have devised for that particular evening filtered through a range of punk rock attitudes.... The long-lost punks in Jocoy's sweet and inspiring photographs remind us of a fact that most contemporary Americans seem to have successfully wished away: that clothes are just clothes unless they're so uniform that they function as a statement of personal dedication or their wearers are confident and creative enough to outshine them." —Dennis Cooper for Bookforum

"...for pure showmanship, the West Coast punk scene was unrivaled—especially if said showmanship was taking place on the hood of a vintage car.... With it's garish full-body shots and lurid close-ups, We're Desperate is populated by a cast of wastoids, new-wavers, skinny-tied proto-Strokes, and slick rockabilly cats and kittens; in true punk spirit, 'stars' like the Cramps, Darby Crash, and the Avengers are indistinguishable from the nobodies." —Spin

"...great for style biting. Androgynous girl rocking the bullet belt is really fly....Lots of color risks here, but that's good." —Vice

"Now, 20 years later, as the radio embraces a new breed of punk-influenced musicians, Jim Jocoy releases his photographs of the characters of the original San Francisco/LA punk scene, capturing the edginess and sex appeal of everyone from Iggy Pop to Lydia Lunch.... Jocoy's photographs capture the wild, wicked ways of a radical time in the annals of rock-and-roll music." —Gotham

"Jim Jocoy's images are as raw and aggressively unpretty as the late 1970s punk scene he documents—all lurid colors and theatric attitude.... Buy it for: the graying golfer you used to dance with at the Hot Klub or the kid who's just discovering skinny ties, neon vinyl, and fingerless gloves." —Dallas Morning News

"This little tome saves the essays for the end, and forgoes identifying captions; it's like finding a shoebox full of some scenester's 20-year-old snapshots, every image capturing a new kid full of mock menace and nerdy pose. Stars...are side-by-side with the folks who paid to see their shows, or at least loiter dangerously outside them.... the scene is captured with pierced-nostril precision." —Austin American Statesman

"Some of the portraits are of artists—like the one of less-than-sober Sid Vicious holding two tall boys of Budweiser, shot at a Haight-Asbury party immediately after the Sex Pistols' disastrous final show. But most are of scenesters who were shot in some of San Francisco's punk haunts like The Deaf Club, so named because 'a quarter of the patrons there were these elderly deaf people, signing to each other at the bar, oblivious to this punk rock thing happening around them.... Hardcore." —Surface

"...highly entertaining and charmingly unfussy stash of photos, grimy with clashing colors.... Strikingly, the mad scramble of leather, cowboy boots, and trench coats would look right at home at any retro-cool gig by the Hives or Interpol..." —Blender, 4-Star Review

"...a rougher glimpse into a stylin' scene.... [with] raw, sometimes seedy images of punk idols like Darby Crash, Iggy Pop, Lydia Lunch, Sid Vicious..." —Paper

"It all happened 20 years ago, but all you have to do is look at these images to see the lasting impression West Coast punk has had on America's subculture of freaks, rebels, and fashion radicals.... Jocoy captured the decay and decadence in clubs like L.A.'s The Masque and Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. But more important, he caught the personalities." —Nylon

"...a visual mosh pit of fishnets, kohl eyeliner, black leather, and sneers. You might recognize some of the characters here: Iggy Pop, Exene Cervenka, and Poison Ivy (from the Cramps), but it's the snapshots of anyonymous clib-crawlers that make this book a treasure. Look at the photos for inspiration before you get dressed in the morning." —Elle Girl

"So Now: Punk Rock Fashion. With the recent death of Joe Strummer of The Clash and a new level of political turmoil, many people are looking back to the anrachic '70s styles. Tatttoos are once again a must-have for the in crowd, and a new book celebrating punk new wave style, We're Desperate: The Punk Rock Photography of Jim Jocoy SF/LA 78-80, is providing a new fashion guide." —Edmonton Journal

"Marc Jacobs hit it big with his 1993 Grunge collection, but as a teenager, it was the punks who seduced him. 'Not at first the sound, but the visual noise that came from it,' says the designer in We're Desperate." —Elle

"A photographic document of punk-rock style." —Harper's Bazaar

"...there's a great Polaroid of a snarling Sid Vicious toting tall boy Buds in each hand, shirt off and chest marked up by razors. And the Polaroids of Iggy Pop in action are quite arresting." —Entertainment Today

"...if you can remember the Cramps, Germas, and Avengers waving their flags proudly, if all too briefly, then you're bound as bondage pants to appreciate We're Desperate..." —New York Waste

"...a glossy little book that packs a punk—the punk photography, that is, of Jim Jocoy, from 1978-80." —Hint Magazine