PYMCA, the Photographic Youth Music Culture Archive, is coming of age. 13 years old this year, it’s just launched PYMCA Cultural Research, a subscription service aimed at academic and commercial researchers which offers essays, videos and links as well as over 25,000 PYMCA images. PYMCA founder Jon Swinstead hopes it will help facilitate the research that has already been going on for some time.

“Two and a half years ago we did a survey into the website and who was using it, and found there were colleges were constructing whole course modules around it,” he says. “We thought ‘Hey, this is great!’ but at the same time, 90% of people coming to the site weren’t paying anything for it. We wanted to change that, but we knew we needed to add more value. In particular, we have been building the multimedia content.”

American writer, anthropologist and photographer Tod Polhemus has written articles for the site, for example, and dance music stalwarts Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster have contributed interviews with many of the genres’ biggest names. Yale University has already signed up for a subscription, and Swinstead is expecting many more.
In future he also hopes to boost PYMCA’s international collection, working with photographers and archives to create a single point of access for all research into youth culture. He plans to launch an amateur photography initiative too, encouraging people with relevant images to get them out of storage and submit them to PYMCA (a move similar to Autograph ABP’s ‘missing chapter’ project). “Our archive dates back to the 1940s, the first time that cameras were common,” he says. “We’re scared that those images will disappear as people get older or die and their houses are cleared out. We’re also interested in more contemporary images – many of us have images on our laptops that never see the light of day.”

In fact, he points out, some of PYMCA’s biggest series have come from amateurs. Gavin Watson, for example, took his huge back catalogue of 1980s rave culture shot before he became a professional photographer, documenting the scene because he was involved with it. “He wasn’t a professional but he was very into it,” says Swinstead. “All of our photographers are very involved in the scenes they’re photographing, which helps make the pictures more real.”