4 decades of subterranean countercultural hijinks are recorded on black and white film. Beginning with early the 80s Texas skatepunk scene, the book is a sprawling visual journal of a life lived on the road and after dark. Punk shows high and low, crusty experimental cinemas, freight train adventures, Mission School graffiti, impossibly obscure house shows, and art exhibits in the shadowy margins— it’s a mash up of subcultural documentation, from San Francisco to Shreveport, from Texas to Braddock Pennsylvania, a flash-lit scrapbook of an invisible vanguard— all shot on Tri-X film.

Bill Daniel began making photographs in 1979 while attending punk shows in Austin, Texas. During the next few years, as both participant and observer, he documented the punk and skateboard scene in Texas. In 1987 he moved to San Francisco to pursue filmmaking. There he met filmmaker Craig Baldwin and began working as Baldwin’s cinematographer and editor while exploring the burgeoning art scene centered around Artists’ Television Access, a storefront gallery in the then-bohemian Mission District.

In 2005 Daniel completed a film on hobo culture, “Who is Bozo Texino?,” which has screened worldwide, including several hundred in-person shows on tour across North America. This project was first configured as a multi-channel video installation, “The Girl on the Train in the Moon”, which premiered at the “Widely Unknown” exhibition at Ditch Projects in 2001 and then toured to over 75 cities. In 2008 this work was followed by a book on railroad subculture, Mostly True, and was presented as an installation for the MOCA LA 2011 Art in the Streets exhibition. Other of Daniel’s projects have addressed environmental issues, urban redevelopment, water squatters, and have taken form as mobile installation works, including Sunset Scavenger the Sailvan project—a van-based video installation that toured between 2002 and 2010.

Daniel has received awards from Creative Capital, The Headlands Center for the Arts, Film Arts Foundation, and the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Daniel’s work has been exhibited at venues across the country, including The Museum of Modern Art, Sluggo’s, Space 1026, The Marfa Book Company, Beehive Collective, Walker Art Center, Space Gallery, Railroad Blues Alpine Texas, The Luggage Store, Ditch Projects, Autonomous Factory Rog Ljubljana, Adobe Books, ABC NO RIO, Visual Studies Workshop, AK Press warehouse, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Galapagos, Needles and Pens, Light Industry, Banff Media Centre, Cinecycle, The Elsewhere, Redcat, Secret Project Robot, Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art, Fargfabriken, The New Museum, Orcas Island Grange Hall, Maysles Cinema, Beerland Texas, and many others. Daniel continues to tour, searching for new audiences in unlikely places.