Too Fast for Love
Heavy Metal Portraits
Photographs by David Yellen
Introduction by Chuck Klosterman

Exhibitions / Bios

Rocking on tour with America’s heavy metal superstars—Kiss, Poison, Iron Maiden, Slaughter, Ted Nugent, Dokken, and Cinderella—photographer David Yellen tailgated among the headbangers, metalheads, burnouts, and self-styled fanatics waiting for the show or hanging around backstage hoping to meet their idols. The results are a captivating record of Yellen’s trip to metal’s Shangri-la.

In 2000, Yellen drove more than 30,000 miles across America in his red Nissan 300 ZX—from Michigan to Miami, from Pennsylvania to Omaha—to relive a treasured part of his past, a time of innocence and rebellion when women had big hair and rock stars stood on stage as if they were Greek gods: he traveled back to the glory days of the “Hair Bands.” In Too Fast for Love, Yellen captured a moment frozen in hairspray chock-full of mullets, bleached perms, spandex cat suits, denim cutoffs, more pleather than you can imagine, leopard, tiger, and snake prints, ripped fishnets, bare breasts and hairy chests, studded belts and bracelets, G-strings and platforms, pierced nipples and tongues, raccoon eyes, press-on nails, and hyper lip liner. Bang your head to this!

exhibitions

The powerHouse Gallery, New York
September 10–October 16, 2004

about the authors

David Yellen was born in 1972 in Bayside, Queens. He graduated from SUNY Purchase, where he studied under John Cohen (There is No Eye, powerHouse Books, 2001) and Jed Devine. Yellen exhibited work from Too Fast for Love in 2001 at the Visionaire Gallery in New York City. His photographs have appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Time, Spin, Rolling Stone, XXL, ESPN, Dutch, Nylon, and V. He lives and works in New York.

Chuck Klosterman is the author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (Scribner, 2003) and Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth Daköta (Scribner, 2001). He is a senior writer for Spin, a columnist for Esquire, and has also written for GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post. Klosterman lives in New York