Illegal Freedom - Matt McKeown

This little zine is special to me, only because I bought it during the first big punk show we had at Cold Spring Hollow when I lived in Belchertown, back in 2015. Matt McKeown, the creator of this missive publication, was the singer in No Faith, the super group that more or less headlined the night. I had only been in the Pioneer Valley a month, was still unemployed and new in town, and knew nobody- many of the people at this show would become close friends to me over the next three years that I lived in our big spooky haunted manor. True to form for my time there I spent the evening utterly crossfaded and don’t remember my interaction purchasing this off the merch table in our smoking room, at the time I’d buy any zine.

Illegal Freedom consists of 26 photographs of Greenfield, taken over the course of an hour while skateboarding, on presumably a disposable camera, with each photograph annotated in the authors handwriting. At the time I thought this a lazy, sneering publication, probably because anyone repping edge made me feel self conscious about my substance use. Today I think it’s beautiful, and it makes me miss the time I spent bumming around in Greenfield. Its simplicity of one camera one hour is the basis of many an artist book, and while some of the captions might feel cringe I think this exercise of trying to explain and annotate every picture you took with your camera in a day is beyond a lot of peoples capabilities.

Matt’s genuine earnestness re: the city of Greenfield is admirable – it’s a cool city, I like to think of this zine as a demo version of Nick Meyer’s “The Local,” (https://www.mackbooks.us/products/the-local-br-nick-meyer )the only other photographic project I can think of about Franklin County. We get a prescient forecast on the sad demise of Wilson’s, the indigenous department store that held on in town like a glacial remnant of consumerism’s generations past, plenty of commentary on the dope affected street pop., and we get this truly remarkable image below of a Model 300 – surrounded on all sides by mill town blight.

“GO OUT AND CREATE.” -- https://www.are.na/block/43134701