The Warzone Collective came together in Belfast in 1984, when a small group of local punks decided to pool their resources and secure a room of their own. Its first premises, Giros, opened in 1986 with a vegetarian café, a practice space and screen-printing kit. In 1991 the collective moved to something larger and more ambitious, and it is that building — the Warzone Centre — where every photograph in this book was made. No alcohol licence. All ages. A space that answered to the people who used it.

Ricky Adam, born in 1974, photographed there between 1997 and 2003, working sporadically across those years rather than at the pace of a commission. What he recorded is a working room: bands from far outside Belfast, the crowd at close range, the ordinary labour of keeping a volunteer venue going. Over time the Centre accumulated a recording studio, a darkroom and a café alongside its gigs, and the programming was organised on a D.I.Y. ethic that left little trace in the usual channels.

Chris Magee and Petesy Burns contribute the book’s texts, which place the photographs in the history of the collective and of the wider Belfast scene. Damiani published the volume in 2017 as Ricky Adam: Belfast Punk: Warzone Centre 1997–2003, a hardcover of 176 pages in a format of roughly 22 by 30 centimetres — large enough for the pictures to hold a room.

The Centre closed at the end of 2003 and reopened in 2011 on the other side of town. That gap is part of the book’s subject. Venues like this one earned a European reputation for punk without much institutional memory to show for it, and Adam’s pictures, made from inside the crowd rather than from outside the door, are among the few sustained records of what the place was actually like.

For a photography collection, the argument is straightforward: a coherent body of work about a specific, self-organised music culture, with the venue’s own history written alongside the images rather than imposed on them.