No items found.
Illustration by Dawn Aquarius
Loss is a game of subtraction. When someone leaves this Earth, we immediately think of how they filled it and the void created. We measure how big of a footprint they left and, sometimes, their shadow grows larger in their absence. In coping, we quantify, but some people’s contributions to our worlds can’t be measured in accomplishments. There is no metric for loss, nor is there a metric for who someone was.
Jennifer Finch was many things: a photographer, a musician, a creative, and most importantly, someone who carried the ethos of punk rock throughout her life. She often espoused a simple tenet in interviews, best evidenced by an appearance on Lee Freeman’s podcast in September of 2025: “If you desire to move forward, you need to teach what you know to the person behind you.”
The impact of Jennifer Finch’s art will be felt for decades—106 credits on Discogs, album sales, several iconic photographs, and other physical records of her drive to create, but the community work she did quietly cannot be measured. Sober since 1990, Finch espoused her “pay it forward” mentality by offering peer-to-peer work in Los Angeles with women transitioning from prison and getting clean. In her interview with Freeman she referred to this as “Keeping you alive so you don’t go do dead people stuff.”
She was born in 1965 and raised by adoptive parents in West Los Angeles. Despite her presence in the 90s as a focal point in the band L7, her thirst for playing music drew from the energy of making, rather than filling a stage with personality. Growing up in a home largely devoid of music, it wasn’t until 1979—when her childhood guitar teacher took her to see the Ramones at UCLA—that she found music that spoke to her. Finding a second vocation almost in tandem, Finch was encouraged by a friend to “impersonate” a member of the media six months later at a Ramones press event at the Whisky A Go-Go. With a broken camera in tow, she quickly learned about access and—eventually procuring a working device—began photographing several local and national acts, starting in 1979, including The Cramps, Black Flag, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Christian Death, and childhood friend Courtney Love.
In an interview from 2019 for Please Kill Me with Lucretia Tye Jasmine, Finch said: “I didn’t want to be a musician, I wanted the lifestyle of being a musician. I wanted to do drugs, I wanted the boys, I wanted to travel. Those were the three things that I wanted. The unfortunate part was I would have to learn how to play an instrument.” Comfortable on “stage” long before L7 became part of the cultural zeitgeist of the 90s, Finch often played in a guerrilla music duo named Uh, frequently performing illegally in parking garages throughout Los Angeles.
While she had a penchant for being quotable and certainly lived that dream, Finch’s work ethic was not driven by ego. As she told Drew Stone in a 2025 episode of The New York City Hardcore Chronicles podcast, “When you enter the scene, you’re just there to help.” Her “help” came in the form of documenting and doing. Along with her photography, she helped promote DIY shows in LA, and later embraced the business side of fame, understanding that capital was an instrument as much as the amps on stage.
Before joining L7, she relocated with Love to San Francisco to join the Pagan Babies, a group initially founded by Courtney Love and Kat Bjelland (later of Babes in Toyland) in 1985. While the band only produced a four-track demo, two of their songs were later reworked and appeared in Hole and Babes in Toyland’s catalogs. While neither the Pagan Babies nor Uh became household names in punk, shortly after Finch returned to Los Angeles to join L7 in 1986, the “right” vehicle for her talents took off. From 1988 to 1994, L7 released albums and EPs with several iconic and then-underground labels, including Epitaph, Slash, and Sub Pop. In the spirit of The Runaways, Girlschool, the Go-Gos, and more, L7 were pivotal in showcasing not only that women held real power in rock ‘n roll, but that the decadence of music—perhaps to a detriment—wasn’t a boys club. While the press ran with the “all-female grunge” angle and their profile rose, L7 remained a punk band and often fell victim to punk things: needing a day job, falling into addiction, and ultimately being undervalued. However, the band was able to use their platform to grow their ideals and community on a larger scale than many of those before them.
In 1991, they leveraged their fame and relationships through punk to create Rock For Choice, a pro-choice benefit concert that ran for ten years and included a diverse list of participants, including Fishbone, Melissa Etheridge, Foo Fighters, Radiohead, Iggy Pop, Nirvana, White Zombie, Screaming Trees, Fugazi, Salt-N-Pepa, Rage Against the Machine, and Hole.
While playing in L7, Finch also appeared in John Waters’ Serial Mom (1994). She continued to write, photograph, and design. In 1996, a combination of health, financial, and personal reasons led her to leave L7, the band she helped define. Two years later, she’d re-emerge with Other Star People, a more refined and experimental act than she was previously known for before returning to her frayed punk roots with The Shocker in 2002. L7 later reformed with Finch in 2014 and continued to be active, announcing a “farewell tour” in 2026, complicated by Finch’s diagnosis with an aggressive form of brain cancer that she eventually succumbed to on July 18, 2026.
Jennifer Finch left us with her art, and while she naturally filled a room with confrontation and aspiration, what she made wasn’t about ego. She was part of many groups; she canonized several of her peers on film; she shared; and Jennifer Finch lived the idea that “music can save lives.” She did this with wisdom—insight that comes from understanding and perspective.
“One consistent male figure is really important, and that was the difference,” she says. Her mother was schizophrenic, her upbringing unstable, but, she says, “My father told me I could do anything I wanted to do.” Plus, she separates the story from the feelings. “I have to be very diligent to make sure I’m not processing something from the past that’s not even mine anymore”—Jennifer Finch, as told to Lucretia Tye Jasmine for Please Kill Me in 2019.