God Bless These Animals

America gets sold as repressed—all megachurches and family-values campaigns and abstinence pledges. Then you look at Miller Rodriguez’s photographs and the whole narrative falls apart.

Rodriguez shoots under the name Pretty Puke, documenting what actually happens in Los Angeles after dark: the apartments, the parties, the people for whom rules are someone else’s problem and fluorescent light is cover enough. He runs through it all with a camera and what comes back is something genuinely unsettling and alive—the kind of work that makes Berghain look like a church social. These are the new kids, the ones for whom transgression isn’t a pose but simply how Tuesday night goes. God bless America.