Rose aaron

los angeles subculture is still alive 

portrait by TODD COLE
interview by OLIVIER ZAHM
all images taken from Aaron Rose’s diary courtesy of the artist

OLIVIER ZAHM — Your name has always been associated with the counterculture or the underground. You come from California — from a skate, graffiti, fanzine subculture, in the late ’80s, beginning of the ’90s. How do you see subculture, or counterculture, today? Does it still exist? Is it still relevant as a concept, or as a context?

AARON ROSE — I wrote an essay for a book that we put out a few years ago [with Mandy Kahn], called Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century’s Identity Crisis. The title of my essay was “The Death of Subculture.” I used to think that the reason why subculture was able to exist was because it was able to gestate in private, without the eyes of the…