Taste The Floor: A Living Document of A Dead Future
The cover of the book. All photos by Luciano Ratto. (Except this one, I shot the cover on my phone.)
In a coffee shop in Beacon Hill, Luciano Ratto sits in a brown woolen jacket, his thumbs jutting out of handmade rips in the sleeves. His dark hair cascades in lazy waves to his shoulders, and a silver ring is chained around his neck. Between long sips of an iced latte, he speaks honestly and chooses his words carefully.
“Scenes like this, they consume you, you know?” he says at one point. “This scene consumes you. You get tunnel vision.”
Each of us has a copy of his new photo book, Taste The Floor, tucked under our arms for quick reference. They come in handy when we start talking about one of the many bands he shot for the release. On page 54, Sam Frederick of Zookraught kneels back in skintight clothing, mic pressed to their lips. Rebecca Henry of Velvet Q takes up two pages; on one, she’s a corpse hung from the ceiling, and on the other, her ghost is psychically damaging the crowd from the rafters. Near the end of the book, Maya Marie and Nicolle Swims of Rainbow Coalition Death Cult are kinetic and gauzy, as if they were werewolves at the cusp of transformation.
Ratto, in true artist fashion, is ruthless in skewering his own work. He cringes slightly when I mention the print. “It’s hard because it's partially my fault and I completely understand why, but I'm not happy with the book by any means,” he admits, crestfallen as he cracks his copy open. “The printing is extremely dark. I lost so much of my shadows, I lost so much of my highlights.”
I’m not an acolyte of the art of photography, but I see what he means about the print quality. There’s a certain cloudiness to the depth of the black, which is important for a collection of photos that are colorized in black and white. Compare it to the photos you’re looking at here (also viewable via Ratto’s Instagram page) and you can see how that black threatens to swallow the corners. Yet what he considers compromise I view as a boon; that cloudiness gives each picture a synthesized vintage quality, as if its subjects were flash-frozen in the shutter. A copy of a copy, if you will.
He explains that the book, published by Girlie Press in a limited run of 115, was produced with an RGB color palette, a much cheaper alternative to the four-color process that would have allowed for the depth of black present in his proofs. Ratto could only afford to be cheap, given that he had gambled his rent money on the book making a profit. (And sell it did, as nearly every single issue had been pre-ordered before its release in late October.)
Though I’m not nearly as tied as others to the musical community it mythologizes, I’m fortunate enough to own one of those copies. The day I met Ratto, he was sitting at a table on the back deck of Animal House, selling his wares. I knew I needed the book the moment I laid eyes on the photos.
It helped that the show I was attending was living proof of the energy captured on its pages; moments before, RCDC had volleyed “lies, war, repeat” to a crowd that sent it back even louder, the sound ringing out in the late October air.
Rainbow Coalition Death Cult.
There are plenty of musical communities across Seattle; Taste The Floor merely showcases a specific one. What differentiates this particular scene is the feverish efforts of its members to capture its essence and spread it far and wide, amping in up the excitement in the process. Even more so than the bands, the scene is ostensibly defined by the people behind the curtain; its house venue organizers, its social media account holders, and its photographers.
“I had a conversation with Jimmy [Humphreys] and P-Dubs from Animal House the day of the [book’s] release,” he says about that night. “We don't run things, you know? We're not the government. The government would be the bands and Animal House and the venues and stuff; those are the ones making it happen. We're the people making the propaganda for it. We are the sellers for the people that are not here.”
An amateur photographer at 25, Ratto’s gifts for conveyance and curation are nonetheless undeniable. But then Instagram is riddled with innately talented photo takers -- several of whom, like Jimmy, Brendan Fuller, and Kevin O., are peers of Ratto and often shoot the same bands. It’s the act of holding the work in your hands that feels transcendent.
“Once you take it outside of Instagram, it feels a lot more important by nature. Print matters,” he affirms. “There’re a couple of photographers out there that are way more interested in making zines because, after this, they realized that people are interested in physical copies of their work.”
Though Ratto somewhat laments the final product, and though his standards are high for someone just starting a photography career, even he must recognize its potency. The book is astonishing. Its physicality silences the roar of the feed, allowing each image direct access to your brain. Its characters already feel like legends. Their eyes are alive and they stare directly back into yours.
Velvet Q.
Ratto's voice, as we talk, is cloaked in a mild Paulistano accent, a marker of his provenance. He’s a native of Brazil who moved to Florida as a 17-year-old after his brother joined the Marine Corps. “My mom couldn't deal with that shit,” he says. “She had to be a little closer.”
The first thing he bought as an American citizen? His first DSLR. “Before that, I was shooting with chip digital. I was 15 or 16 and in my Tumblr era, very Lana-Del-Rey-core. I was shooting Tumblr-ish stuff — sad boy stuff, angsty, whatever — just with my phone or a cheap camera.” Ratto had yet to finish high school, but because school in Brazil starts in January, he had to wait until September to start his senior year in America. He decided to spend his six months of free time shooting.
“I just went around, skated, and took photos. That's when I started to realize that maybe I had some talent here. Maybe I could do this.”
After high school, Ratto pursued an education in fashion and enrolled at the San Francisco Academy of Art University. His time at the college (one of many predatory “for-profit” institutions festering across the country) didn’t last long; he dropped out after being advised to do so by his professor, who quit shortly after. “I don’t recommend that school,” he summarizes darkly.
His interest in fashion did inspire him to start a small clothing brand, Under The Iceberg, under the umbrella of B-15 Studios. The true purpose of the brand was to allow Ratto to practice photography by shooting editorials, but he also harbored other ambitions for his budding multimedia studio. “I wanted to be more than just a little streetwear brand selling graphic t-shirts. I wanted to make other stuff, to be a proper studio.” (Fittingly, B-15 Studios is listed underneath his name on the first page of Taste The Floor.)
Ratto put the clothing brand on hold when, after scanning for cities notable for their “laid-back art vibe,” he decided to move to Seattle with his girlfriend at the time. According to him, the move was completely random, spurred mostly by the city’s cost of living compared to his first choice, New York. It was during the pandemic, and even though New York’s cost of living has fallen significantly, it was still outside of the pair’s budget. The winters would also be manageable for someone who grew up in Brazilian weather.
There was, perhaps, one other element factoring into Ratto’s decision. “Obviously there are super basic-ass-Seattle connections, like grunge and Twin Peaks,” he admits. “But I could take that, you know? I grew up on Twin Peaks. I grew up obsessed with Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Soundgarden.”
He, like many Seattle transplants, was unaware of how much the city’s music scenes had changed from (or even despite) its history. But that preexisting affinity meant something. If Ratto intended to photograph those scenes, he wanted to make sure he wasn’t corrupting the material with his warped perspective. It’s why he elected in his youth not to cover Florida’s music scene, which at the time was predominantly trap and Soundcloud rap.
“It’s not anything against that scene itself,” he says, “It’s that with my work, I gotta do stuff that feels true to me, because I know I'm representing other people, and representing other people is a very delicate thing. I'm never going to represent the true reality of things, since I’m going to have my perspectives subconsciously applied to my work. So the truer it is to me, the more I feel I can do a service — not a disservice — representing something. If I were going to shoot something like the trap scene, my perspective of it wouldn't be the same as someone who lives and breathes it. It would be fetishizing it or looking at it like it's super gruesome: completely misunderstanding it.”
Outside of the trap/rap scene, Florida also boasts a solid metal scene, but Ratto held reservations there as well. “Metal people are not my favorite because they tend to be pretty conservative without even realizing it,” he says. “And I’m very…not that. Let’s leave it at that.”
When Ratto arrived in Seattle, he first attempted to shoot the bar circuit: the bands popping from historic venue to historic venue in the hopes of drumming up fans from the beer-drinking crowd. He also acquired the opportunity to shoot a few bigger bands at places like the Crocodile.
After a few months, he found the whole prospect rigid and joyless. “I gotta be honest, concert photography is extremely boring to me,” he says. Concert venues typically have limitations on what can and can’t be used to shoot, and that annoyed Ratto to no end. Shooting for Machine Girl, for instance, meant a limit of three songs, restrictive barriers, and temperamental security guards. Elsewhere, at Madame Lou’s, he was forced to turn off his flash despite his knowledge that the band he was shooting was fine with it. ”To me, it’s not something that fits my creativity by any means,” he concludes.
Then, one day, he met Meg Hall, of the decade-old Bellingham-originated Beautiful Freaks. After letting them know he did band photography, they invited him to his first local punk show, underneath the 1st Avenue bridge in SODO.
The show was momentous for two reasons. For one, it was the day he encountered the swarm building around the Freaks, who at the time were transitioning into the aggressive, chaotic sound they’re now known for. For another, it was the day Ratto met Jimmy Humphreys, a fellow photographer who had spent the whole show capturing both the band and the crowd in bursts of flash.
“One thing that he did, completely indirectly and unintentionally, was showed me how comfortable he was,” he says about the day. “Jimmy’s super comfortable in those spaces. He was shooting the crowd. Back then I wasn't shooting the crowd because I honestly thought people would be a little uncomfortable with that. I thought, ‘Wait, people are chill with that?’ So that's when I realized I could shoot the subculture, not just the people in the bands. That’s when it clicked.”
That July all-ages show underneath the bridge immediately threw into contrast what Ratto was missing. The shows he previously shot had no movement, no sense of adventure, a miasma of self-consciousness plaguing the air. Bands would play, and the onlookers would stand, drink, and keep their hands pocketed. Watching the bridge crowd slam into each other — their outfits carefully curated and yet vulnerable to the fracas — while the musicians conducted the chaos had indelibly sparked Ratto’s creativity.
“With my photography, I work very project-based,” he says. And this was a project.
Taste The Floor is a document of a very specific pocket of Seattle’s DIY scene during a very specific period: the summer of 2022 to the summer of 2023. That pocket has produced one of the most exciting local movements in recent memory, which is not surprising; that’s what tends to happen during a changing of the guard.
The movement stems from a meeting point between various sociological phenomena. There’s the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effective moratorium on live music, after which bands chomped at the bit to play shows and young crowds were just as fervent to attend them. There’s the lasting cultural upheaval of that time, where our necessitated migration online forced us to interface with the mechanics of systemic injustice and incited us to action. There’s the residual corrosiveness from being so online and living in digital landscapes that siphon meaning and suck the pleasure out of existence. And there’s the fact that the people most affected by all of this are the youngest adults among us (now primarily Generation Z), who also live in an area that historically finds its young crowds contemptible.
“We don't run things, you know? We're not the government…we're the people making the propaganda for it. We are the sellers for the people that are not here.”
In the middle of 2022, Seattle’s all-ages punk crowd started rallying around a group of disparate bands connected by the thinnest of sonic throughlines. The attempts to label it are jocular, unserious; there’s “digital hardcore” or “moneycore” embodied in bands like Give Me The Money and Flesh Produce; others call it “gunk” or “gunk pop,” a clear reference to Black Ends’ Nicolle Swims and their signature guitar sound. Regardless, that throughline exists if you look closely enough; it’s experimental and genreless but anchored by the energy and politics of hardcore, and it is overwhelmingly femme- and queer-centric.
The mortar between these bands is a series of house venues, organizers, and documentarians deadset on fostering a community around the music, and the principles its players stand for. Arguably chief among them is Animal House, an organization kickstarted in 2021 that has since attracted a devoted crowd. Others, like Evil House, Oracle Lounge, and Niimodo, offer a similar respite for enthusiastic crowdgoers of all ages, many of whom are age-gated out of bars and 21+ areas.
Anyone who has been to an all-ages punk show understands the thrill of such a locale; fewer rules and a less inhibited environment engenders performances that feel wilder and more dangerous, even when the ultimate priority is safety. Ratto fondly recalls one show, a Beautiful Freaks set at a massively-packed Evil House, that turned into mayhem after the police were called and everyone fled. “I just stayed in the back, I was on top of a ladder the whole time just enjoying the madness of it,” he says, grinning. “Evil House gets pretty rowdy.”
Participating in such an environment can be a daunting task for anyone, much less a painfully shy person like Ratto. He openly confesses his initial struggle to attend the shows. “My social battery is very limited. When I moved here, I didn't know anyone in the city, not a soul. It was pretty uncomfortable going to most of these shows. It took a lot of work mentally for me to commit to shooting two, three shows a week at least.”
Those shows would not have been tenable, he claims, were it not for the camera in his hands. It became not only his purpose for being there but his security blanket. Whenever Ratto felt too uncomfortable in those social settings — standing alone, anxious of judgmental eyes — he’d simply move up to the front of the crowd and shoot blank photos that he wasn’t intending on keeping. The project became a trial by fire where Ratto felt compelled to exit his comfort zone at all times.
That's why, to him, Taste The Floor is as much a story of one man's courage as it is a subjective portrayal of punk youth in a post-pandemic Seattle.
No matter the setting or the person portrayed, Ratto’s work in Taste The Floor is consistently breathtaking. You might get the impression that he directed at least some of the shots, but he insists every one of its photos is impromptu. He simply showed up with his camera at the right time. A strategy of his involved waiting until the end of each band’s set and routing a circle along on which he’d keep his eyes peeled. (“I strictly subscribe to ‘Ask forgiveness, not permission,’” he insists.) The result is a series of raw, organic snapshots of the scene’s culture, presented in a manner that’s both thrillingly current and timeless.
If you’re aware of Seattle’s musical history, it’s impossible not to look at Ratto’s stark B&W shots and not think of Charles Peterson, whose stark crowd shots defined the city’s grunge scene in the late 1980s. Ratto knows that he can’t get away from the comparisons.
But Peterson shot in analog, a format that, while originally a necessity, imbued his work with a visceral grain that complemented his viewpoint. Ratto yearns to shoot his bands in analog — he loves the process of slowly developing photos in a dark room — but the price of film has skyrocketed since. “For a project like this, you have to overshoot to capture the total environment. So it’s simply an unaffordable film,” he laments.
Otherwise, the actual subjects of Peterson’s and Ratto’s photos are distinctly different. True to the period’s punk culture, Peterson almost exclusively captured the male form. The bands were mostly men and so were the crowds; Peterson's subjects tend to be shirtless dudes with bare chests, wiry muscles, and long locks in perpetual motion.
Ratto, true to this period’s culture, captures the opposite. “A lot of times I tried to shoot the guys, and they're just not interesting at all,” he says. “That's something I was honestly bothered by a little bit. In the book, the more interesting photos — with people really putting their personality in their outfits and in being different — they’re most always femme-centered.”
Once you take it outside of Instagram, it feels a lot more important by nature. Print matters.”
That lines up, he says, with the nature of the bands leading that pack. Many of them — including Beautiful Freaks, Cyra Wirth, Mold Mom, and Black Ends — are led by cis femme, trans femme or non-binary people. These are not just voices that the crowd intends to platform. They’re writing and performing genuinely interesting music while organically informing each others’ works. They would be front and center regardless of who they were. As Ratto writes in the intro to his book, “For once, the cis white man is finally in the backseat instead of at the wheel.”
The same goes for his audiences. Some wear the typical punk visages; winged eyeliner, dark lipstick, piercings, revelrous hairdos, spiky bracelets and chains. Others bear the trends of the moment. You might notice a connecting thread of clown makeup - white grease paint graced with black dots, stripes, and stars, smeared across the face from sweat and body contact. (There’s a lot to dive into there, much of which I’ll explore in a later post, but it’s important to note the genderqueer history of clowning, and that by donning the makeup you help obfuscate the lines between the binary.)
Though the music is consistently violent, it’s not overbearingly masculine violence, the kind whose ordained supremacy begets an onanistic self-destruction. When Flesh Produce’s Myla Profitt puts her entire being into the phrase “You can’t make me fuck,” it's clear who she’s directing her ire at. Stephanie Jones belts out “I can’t think my own thoughts anymore” on “No Corner,” and the claustrophobia rings true for anyone ensnared by the internet’s dopamine trap. Beautiful Freaks launch into “CYNIC” at the end of their sets and summon whatever primal deity is pulling their strings on the chorus, where they cry out to the void, “Is there anyone out there?”
It is a universal grievance directed to a group of people who have been given more ways than ever to express themselves, and yet come face to face with the reality that they have been given the illusion of self-expression. They have been handed a world sucked dry of nuance and newness and are told to keep chewing on it; they are left with a freezer full of microwavable trends that they have no choice but to reheat; they’ve been given a closet of second-hand clothes and forced to wear those trends of yesteryear so they can dance for the nostalgic fancy of the Millennials and Gen Xers who are unwilling to abdicate any of their cultural territory (which is, of course, all most of them have as well).
They were once just as confused and anxious as their successors, but whether they knew it or not, they at least had something real to anchor them, some driftwood to cling onto. Now there is nothing but content for content’s sake: digitized, monetized colors and shapes meaning less and less until meaningless. And the memory rises into the air and dissipates like steam in the cold winter sky — fog on a stage, breath from a scream — as if it weren’t even there to begin with.
As mentioned, very quickly after Ratto released Taste The Floor to the public he sold out of every single copy. Until he issues another reprinting — and judging from his feelings about the final product, that seems unlikely — experiencing its power is going to be difficult. If you don’t already have a copy, you’re going to have to find someone who does.
Not to worry though; Ratto has plenty of shots left in him. These days, he’s still going to shows, camera clutched in his hand. He’s got to practice, after all. “I don't think this is a good work yet,” he muses. “I think my photography is gonna be good in 20 years.”
The difference is that more and more people are starting to recognize him in the crowd. Recently, at Humphreys’ 31st birthday party at Lucky Dime in Everett, he found himself beset on all sides by appreciators of his craft. While he’s always grateful for the positive affirmation, it’s still an enervating ordeal.
“It means a lot to me when someone approaches me to say, ‘Hey, I just want to say I like your photos and stuff.” That truly means a lot,” he confesses. “But it's tough for me to deal with my social batteries in that term. Even if it's an extremely positive interaction, it wears me down. It's not about having negative interactions, it’s about having interactions.” (The next time I see him at a show, we exchange peace signs and fist bump, and I leave him to it.)
Yet while he still feels immense social anxiety at the moment of shooting, Ratto at least feels confident presenting his work after the fact.
“I had a little anxiety at the very, very beginning when I started to post,” he says about his Instagram presence. “But on my third post of part 3, it’s only portraits. That was when it changed. I learned people were completely fine with it. They wanted it. I remember posting the “Sonic The Hedgehog” girl, and her friend group got so stoked. They all reposted it like, ‘Holy shit, she got a whole set?!’ They really enjoy being posted by me, Jimmy, Kevin, or anyone.”
“They feel seen. And those people, they go their whole life without being seen, you know?”
Follow Luciano Ratto on Instagram.