No System © Vinca Petersen — *No System* © Vinca Petersen

Part grand-tour travelogue, part family photo-album, part subculture archive, Vinca Petersen’s No System is an immersive, sensual, energizing experience. Originally published in 1999 and recently re-released, Petersen’s grunge-punk-euro-rave photo-memoir finds itself on good footing for our times; tender and visceral in equal measure, it’s a zeitgeist-piece for nineties nostalgia, offering an aspirational escape from our restrictive, claustrophobic routines.

The time elapsed since its original publication and the circumstances of its dusting-off lend this compelling book an elegiac air, one belied, though, by the electric vitality of its subjects, captured smiling and sleeping, bruised and dirty, barefoot, done up in costumes and glittery makeup, eating, lounging, mugging for the camera, smoking, swimming, dancing.

No System put its money where its mouth is—there is, indeed, little method to its madness—but that doesn’t seem to trip it up too much. Petersen’s photos are fractured, blurred, saturated, frenetic—they show landscapes, streetscapes, friends and strangers, crowds and fields, naked, free-range children and groups of police responding to noise complaints.

Kierra running past burning cars, shortly to be grabbed by the police. London. No System © Vinca Petersen — *Kierra running past burning cars, shortly to be grabbed by the police.* London. *No System* © Vinca Petersen

Her photos exude frenzied intensity and seething excitement shot through with moments of intimate calm. One stop along Petersen’s six-year journey bleeds into the next. Going at times unseen but never unsaid is all the fevered, full-tilt, free-for-all energy that you would expect from a drug-fueled caravan of itinerant partiers loosed on Europe. The number of subjects shown slumped, asleep, on the ground in the morning certainly speaks to that reality. One shot of Petersen herself shows her curled up on a lush hillside with her head nestled in a frisbee, opposite a facsimile journal entry in a Portuguese weekly-planner. Petersen paints a sort of anarchist summer-camp on wheels, a commune of post-Thatcher Merry Pranksters putting on their traveling show.

No System is a manifesto and a keepsake. The loose, scrapbook vibe of its unstructured layout suits the casual, home-snapshot quality of many of the images, lending the collection a warmth, an immediacy, and an apparent unity of vision that might otherwise be lacking.

The only text in this book, besides the title page and index, are notes and letters, many contemporaneous, scrawled on bar coasters and calendar pages in blue ballpoint. In one of these smudged, cross-out filled sidebars, Petersen writes that, “A frequent comment when trying to take photos was that it was irrelevant to the moment. It unnerved people that I was thinking ahead by taking a photo of the future.”

Part of what is so striking about this collection is that it shows a scene that is often hidden, precisely because it doesn’t foster an impulse to document for posterity, as Petersen so diligently did. She approaches her subjects at once as an ethnographer and a wedding photographer. As she alludes to, though, the ends are the same: a vital time-capsule of a very particular time in a multitude of places.