Family Values

In the ‘90s, when the phrase “family values” was conservative ammunition, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were notorious for representing the opposite: they were heroin-using rock stars raising a baby. Seeking to reframe their notoriety, Kurt and Courtney consented to a rare photoshoot with Guzman, fashion photography couple, for Spin magazine. Only 5 images ever appeared in the issue; the rest of the photoshoot is seen here for the first time.

With an ineffable ability to connect with people through his music, Kurt Cobain was charismatic and full of pathos, something of a lost boy poet struggling against his personal demons while holding the world in thrall. And yet in the midst of his struggles with success, fame, fortune, drugs, and the wounds of a traumatic childhood, he managed in his brief adulthood to get married to Courtney Love—who of course had her own accomplishments as an electrifying and unrestrained lead singer and lyricist. The couple had already emerged as a cultural touchstone when their baby, Frances Bean, was born in 1992. Photographers Guzman captured, amidst toys and pajamas, the sweetness, humor, irony and the simple happiness of a new mom and dad at home with their baby girl.

Family Values is a photography book presenting approximately 90 images featuring Kurt, Courtney, and their baby Frances, one morning in their modest Hollywood home selected from a photoshoot that Guzman did for Spin magazine in 1992. Only five photographs from the shoot were published in the magazine at the time, including the cover. Another appeared in Rolling Stone at the time of Kurt Cobain’s death. In Spin, the photos originally accompanied an interview by Jonathan Poneman, which Guzman plans to license to reprint in the book. The book will also include a memoir of the photo shoot written by Guzman and an introduction by curator and music journalist Michael Azerrad.

Family Values is a photographic assignment that revealed two famous rock stars who during one brief moment transcended the magnifying glass of fame and were revealed, amidst all the chaos, as being just a mom and dad