Remembering Brian Garrity, a fiercely independent Twin Cities music photographer
by Reed Fischer
December 19, 2025
Brian D. Garrity was a multidisciplinary artist with remarkable abilities behind a camera. During the 1980s and 1990s, he documented and enhanced many musical subcultures in the Twin Cities.
In 2023, he released a photography book titled Pushed Beyond All Reasonable Limits (DiWulf Publishing), which highlights the rise of alternative rock in the Midwest, with a tight focus on Minneapolis. Often in rich black and white, the book’s photos display intimate portraits and wild, live concert documentation of an unparalleled era — all on film. In addition to the music, Garrity’s carefully documented body of work recalls the times before photography became synonymous with memory cards, iPhones, and Instagram.
“A photographer of that era needed to incorporate the skills of an artist, alchemist, carpenter, scientist, producer, philosopher, mathematician, and (when dealing with talent) therapist. There was much calculation and a hell of a lot of intuition,” Garrity wrote in Pushed.
Black and white was necessary in the beginning, when he received his first assignment in the mid-’80s for Your Flesh, a fanzine run by his housemate, Peter Davis. “It just snowballed from there,” Garrity told Michaelangelo Matos in a 2023 interview with The Current. “I don’t like to be intrusive. I love musicians. I usually like to just let them be themselves. They get comfortable with me in the room, and I just take what I take.”
In the years that followed, Garrity captured countless onstage and backstage moments that appeared in Rolling Stone, Spin, Alternative Press, Interview, City Pages, Twin Cities Reader, and other influential print publications. He photographed Nirvana onstage at First Avenue in 1991, the first Lollapalooza on Harriet Island, Babes in Toyland on the Hennepin Avenue Bridge, and Garbage’s Shirley Manson performing at 7th St. Entry — their very first live show. He also published fiction and created short films. Along the way, he supported his DIY creative pursuits with fashion and product photography.
On Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025, Garrity’s body was found by a landscaper under the Third Avenue Bridge near St. Anthony Main in Minneapolis. Garrity was evicted from his apartment at A-Mill Artist Lofts in September — his home for the past decade — and had been sleeping under the Third Avenue Bridge nearby, according to an update on his Facebook page and reports from friends and family. Overnight temperatures had just fallen into the mid-20s earlier that week, making for uninhabitable conditions.
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed Garrity’s date of death was Nov. 11, but many details of his final days remain unknown. A representative from A-Mill Artist Lofts said in an email, “Due to privacy concerns, we do not provide information about current or previous residents of our community.” Garrity was 62.
Brian Dart Garrity was born on Oct. 9, 1963, in Madison, Wisconsin. He was the oldest of four children, and grew up in an artistically minded household in the western Wisconsin town of Onalaska near La Crosse. His mother, Barbara Ames, recalls Brian’s artistic pursuits taking hold from an early age, even chewing a piece of toast into the shape of a gun similar to what his father, James Dart Garrity, took hunting. “He was very passionate about whatever he did,” Ames says. “It had to be perfect, and he did it right.”
The younger Garrity has said he began taking photos at age 6. Childhood friend and neighbor Bob Mickschl and Garrity were a couple of “river rats” — camping, boating, and getting bit by mosquitoes — and they were in the same high school photography classes. At 16, Garrity created a claymation TV ad for the Minnesota Orchestra, according to his mother. His years growing up next to the Mississippi River eventually became the inspiration for Still Waters Run Deep, a novel he self-published in 2010.
After high school, Garrity moved to the Twin Cities to study at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 1982 to 1985. During those years, he lived at the “Last House on the Left,” which had a basement practice space used by Loud Fast Rules (who later became Soul Asylum) and Hüsker Dü.
John Vieno, now a studio painter and graphic designer in Minneapolis, met Garrity in 1982. They were housemates and bandmates who went to punk-rock shows together and lived a rowdy, creative lifestyle. One night, Vieno remembers Garrity, on bass, sitting in with Hüsker Dü drummer Grant Hart.
“After we were living in Minneapolis as roommates for a while, we were hardcore punks, Hüsker Dü,” Mickschl recalls. “We came back to visit La Crosse in the mid-’80s. We put on our best Johnny Rotten punk-rock outfits and went downtown to a couple of bars with three or four other friends. The first bar we went into, within three minutes, we were getting punched in the face. We had to leave. It's like, ‘OK, La Crosse isn't ready for this.’”
Garrity started landing work from Rolling Stone and other music magazines, which meant he’d be out on tour for weeks at a time and return with a huge body of work.
By the late ‘80s, he was also finding work as a darkroom technician and photo assistant who built sets on fashion shoots for local department stores. “I loved working with him,” recalls Dayton’s staff fashion photographer Michael McCaffrey. “He was a popular person and often got pulled away for other assignments because he was so easy to be around and super creative.”
In those years, Garrity also established Radar Studio, and worked out of several locations around Minneapolis, including the California Building, Ivy Building for the Arts, and the Spice Building. “Brian was fiercely independent,” says Mark Notermann, a former roommate who Garrity later worked with to develop his photography book. “He worked mostly alone as a photographer in the early days, and built his own darkroom to process and print the photos.”
In 2005, Garrity self-published the socio-political novella, Ready-Made Dreams, and his dystopian short story “Godless” appeared in Onyx Neon Press’ 2010 sci-fi anthology, Cifiscape Vol., The Twin Cities.
Consolidation at Dayton’s/Marshall Field’s/Macy’s, and later Target, was a hit to Garrity and others in the creative industries close to the local retail chains. In 2008, he created a short film depicting this dark atmosphere as the Great Recession took hold.
Post-pandemic, Garrity began to put together what became Pushed Beyond All Reasonable Limits, a detailed retrospective of his music photography paired with witty and thoughtful written vignettes. “When the COVID thing happened, I lost my job, my career, lost everything,” he said in 2023. “I didn’t really have much to do, so for the first time in 30 years, I actually took stock of what I have.”
Garrity and Mark Notermann worked together meticulously for months to organize the photos and sections. The goal was to bring the reader directly into Garrity’s point of view.
In the book’s intro, Peter Davis writes: “Brian’s captured lightning in a bottle too many times over these many years for his art to rot away in some file cabinet never to be seen. His work deserves to be viewed, adored, cherished, chewed over, discussed, and above all else, celebrated. Put simply, work of this caliber to go unnoticed and not shared with a broader audience would be criminal.”
In the fall of 2023, Pushed Beyond All Reasonable Limits was published, and the Mpls Photo Center hosted an exhibition of Garrity’s photos for six weeks following its release.
Every page in the book is a new revelation. The images of concert audiences are as powerful as the striking scenes of Radiohead, Luscious Jackson, Beck, or Linkin Park. Seeing now-closed Twin Cities landmarks — such as Garage D’or Records, Uptown Bar, and Glam Slam — is electricity with a hard-cover binding.
What was Garrity planning to do next? Vieno says he wanted to put out a book titled Minneapolis Friends. “It's all the characters in Minneapolis, in Saint Paul,” Vieno explains. “He was there. He captured the scene for many, many years, and was so generous in his approach.” Vieno says Garrity entrusted him with his negatives and personal archives of digital and analog photography. A memorial service is also in planning stages.
“He just was always like, ‘What am I going to leave behind?’” Vieno recalls. “He was thinking about legacy issues before any of us were even considering any of that. He died tragically, but he lived out the way that he wanted to live. And he really immortalized that rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, which tends to take people young. He sacrificed his body, his mind, his soul, his spirit, for art.”
Brian Garrity leaves behind his mother, Barbara Ames, and sisters Tracy Purcell, Sarah Ames-Wickham, and Maggie Ames. His father, James Dart Garrity, died in 2008.
For more information about Pushed Beyond All Reasonable Limits: The Music Photography of Brian D. Garrity, check out DiWulf Publishing’s website.
