What she saw at the birth of punk

They were just a bunch of photographic negatives in a ragged old box. Jill Ash never really thought about them too much; she merely lugged the box from house to house for 25 years, until her friend Chris Rohloff noticed it and asked if he could perhaps make prints from a few of them.

What Rohloff saw astonished him -- a visual trove of the early Los Angeles punk scene, hundreds of never-before-seen images of forerunners such as Darby Crash and the Germs, X, the Weirdos, the Middle Class and Rik L. Rik, among others.

Rohloff grabbed a few of the negatives and had Lucas DeSilva make prints at his Universal Art Gallery. DeSilva, too, was bowled over and suggested an exhibition at the Venice gallery. The result is “Caught in My Eye,” a display of Ash’s L.A. punk images, most of which are being shown for the first time. Also sharing the space in the exhibition are Joe O’Neill’s politically charged paintings.

Ash is this city’s accidental punk historian. Unlike some of the better-known photographers of the era, Ash is not a professional, unless you count her brief tenure as a horse show photographer in Palos Verdes years ago. Now 43, Ash is a winsome blond, a single mom with a 15-year-old son and a mortgage, whose professional resume includes a stint as a chocolate store owner in Brentwood with her sister Andy. She thought she had closed the door on her punk past when her good friend Darby Crash overdosed on heroin on Dec. 7, 1980, at age 22.

She hasn’t looked back, until now. “When Darby died, it was just too painful to look at the pictures I had taken,” Ash says. “A lot of these people aren’t with us anymore. But I think enough time has passed, enough healing, for me to revisit that period in my life.”

In 1977, Ash was a suburban misfit, a student at Pacific Palisades High School with a severe case of tract home ennui. The Hollywood clubs seemed to point a way out. That year Jill and her sister checked out the Jam’s first L.A. show at the Whisky, and it changed her life.

“I met Darby at the show, and the first thing he said to me was ‘I’m gonna die young,’ then he asked me for an article of clothing,” Ash says. It was an inauspicious start to a friendship that would draw Ash into the Germs’ inner circle and make her the band’s unofficial photographer for the next four years.

Using her Nikon camera, Ash trawled clubs such as the Masque, the Whisky and Club 88, pushing her way into the mosh pit to shoot Crash and the Germs at their nervy peak. Her pictures of Crash -- wild-eyed, dangerous, resplendent in scuffed leather -- are definitive.

But there’s social history to be seen, as well, in Ash’s rough-hewn photojournalism. Here’s John Doe ordering a beer at Club 88, Belinda Carlisle hanging out in the alley of the Masque in 1978, with white pumps and a paper fan. As a participant, Ash had unlimited access and clicked her shutter at will.

“No one ever bothered me,” she says. “I had a strobe attached to my camera, or used available light.” Things got rough only if she hung in the pit too long. “At one Germs show in San Francisco I got knocked down about four times,” she says. “You have no peripheral vision when you’re holding a camera to your eye.”

For Ash, Darby Crash was the conscience of the early L.A. punk scene, a charismatic ringleader with a knack for mobilizing people into party-starting action.

“He was full of enthusiasm, an instigator, and you wanted to be around that,” Ash says. “He wanted to share things with people, whether it was shows, books, whatever. He could be the center of attention in public, but one on one, he was very soft-spoken.”

As Ash drew closer to Crash, so the Germs’ leader was inexorably pulled into the photographer’s domestic orbit. “My mom just loved him,” she says. “She used to love to find exotic restaurants in L.A., and Darby used to eat dinner with us all the time.”

When Ash was attending UCLA and the Germs were recording their album “GI,” Crash would drive her to school in exchange for the use of her car. “You should have seen him pulling up to Ackerman Union in my little blue MG convertible, with his spiked hair. People on campus didn’t know what to think,” she recalls.

Crash’s death devastated Ash. She put away her camera and left many of her Germs exposures unprinted. Even now, Ash’s photo book is filled with negative sheets, ghostly images of her beloved punk companions, many of them deceased.

But the response to “Caught in My Eye” has convinced Ash that bringing her pictures to light was the right thing to do. “Darby’s mom was at the gallery on opening night, and she was so proud,” Ash says. “All these 16-year-old kids surrounded her and just grilled her about Darby. It made the whole project worth it.”

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‘Caught in My Eye’

What: Photographs by Jill Ash, paintings by Joe O’Neill

Where: Universal Art Gallery, 2001 Lincoln Blvd., Venice

When: 9 a.m.-7 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturdays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sundays. Ends July 31.

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 302-8909

Contact Marc Weingarten at weekend@latimes.com.