A sharp flash illuminates the room for a split second. New England-based hardcore band Broken Vow powers through their set inside a tightly packed church in the middle of Pittsfield, MA. Distorted guitars and messy drums fill the echoing room as floorboards shake beneath the mosh pit. A silhouette sporting a baseball hat darts in front of the band, illuminating them with another flash, and quickly slips back into the crowd on the other side of the stage.
At one point, he sets the camera down in a safe corner of the room and launches himself into the sweaty crowd, screaming the lyrics to “1.5” at the top of his lungs.
Cam Parnoff is a junior Sustainable Community Development major at UMass Amherst and is widely known as Amherst’s local photographer. Whether you’re at a local hardcore show or a UMass hockey game, he’s guaranteed to be there, camera in hand.
“It’s therapeutic to me, the process of taking photos. You know, having a reason to go out, it’s an excuse to do literally anything I want.”
This love for photography first emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. During lockdown, Parnoff got really into hiking. His family lives right on the edge of some woods in Hamden, Connecticut, making it easy to explore outdoors whenever he wanted. Along with the numerous state parks in Connecticut, there was no shortage of hiking trails.
“There was this one time where I hiked a little further than I usually did, just kind of exploring. I was hiking at West Rock Ridge State Park…there was this cliff and I was just wanting to sit and look at the view, drink a Gatorade or whatever, and there was a vulture sitting on the cliff,” Parnoff explained. He quickly took his phone out to get a video, but it wasn’t quite the same as seeing the vulture in person. “I was like wow- this looks like shit. I wish I had a better camera.”
Later that night, Parnoff remembered that his older sister had a camera that she left behind when she moved to college in Manhattan. A Canon EOS Rebel T5.
“She was like, ‘Yeah, just put it back when you’re done,’ and I just never did; I just took it. It fully became my camera.”
Parnoff started bringing the camera on all of his hikes, taking pictures of everything he saw: birds, trees, the occasional deer. Waterfalls were his favorite. “I slowly went from hiking and taking photos on my hikes to going on hikes to take photos,” he said.
“I used to have a little PC gaming setup in my room to play Fortnite, and I just used that as my editing setup,” he laughed. Once he bought the upgraded Lightroom Classic to edit his photos though, editing went from a hobby to an obsession. “It started to click, and I was able to edit photos the way I saw them…From then on, it just became an addiction.”
Parnoff’s photos are easily recognizable because of his unique editing style. While keeping the photos perfectly clear, he somehow manages to simultaneously emphasize movement but avoid motion blur. An explosion of color and emotions brings people to life, you can almost hear what they are screaming. Everything is purposeful.
“It’s weird because like, you’re capturing a still moment, but nothing can compare to you actually being there and seeing and hearing and smelling and feeling everything,” Parnoff added.
He enjoys being able to edit his photos, not in the sense of changing their content, but accentuating certain parts to emphasize what it felt like to be there. “Like, if there’s a light shining in my face, you know, making it a little brighter or something like that,” Parnoff said. “If somebody’s wearing a colorful shirt, it doesn’t show up on an iPhone photo, bumping the saturation.”
“I couldn’t take a photo and then just leave it or not do anything, because I would feel weird about it. Like, that’s not what I saw. So it just became like, me making everything the way I wanted it, like the way my brain saw it.”
With his skill of showing motion in his photos, Parnoff is particularly good at capturing concert photography, specifically local hardcore shows. The hardcore music scene in Western Massachusetts has come to mean a lot to him, although his love for hardcore began during the summer of 2021. On a whim, Parnoff and his friend decided to see a random hardcore show at the Space Ballroom in downtown Hamden. They had recently discovered the hardcore punk band Turnstile and were eager to find similar-sounding bands.
“We were sitting there, me and my buddy Josh. And we were like, Is that Mr. Laden?” The guitarist for Wreckage looked awfully similar to their eighth-grade English teacher.
“That’s definitely Mr. Laden!”
They were in disbelief watching their former teacher stomp around the stage, gripping his guitar with a passionate anger they had never seen in the classroom before. “I didn’t know he was chill like that,” Parnoff exclaimed. “I was like, this is awesome.”
They immediately followed Wreckage on Instagram, eager to see their former English teacher headbanging on stage again. Not too long after, Wreckage announced another show in Wallingford, Connecticut. Parnoff and his friend Josh were in the front row. And this time, Parnoff had his camera.
At UMass Amherst, Parnoff’s passion for photography has drawn him to take every opportunity he can get to take pictures. He helped to create the Photo Club with some friends during his freshman year. He is currently a photographer for UMass admissions, where he does things like taking headshots of tour guides. He also started working for the University Programming Council so he could be in the photo pit at the Spring Concerts. And when he fell in love with hockey after attending a few matches with his roommates, he started photographing the games for UMass Athletics.
“Because I shoot so many hardcore shows, I’m very good at getting crowd reactions,” Parnoff said with a smile. His boss quickly recognized this and encouraged him to sit in the stands at sports games to photograph the emotive crowd, a central part of UMass Athletics’ promotional photos.
Although Parnoff’s obsession with photography leads him to a wide range of events, what he loves photographing the most are hardcore shows.
April of 2023 brought the first show at the now-retired DIY space in Holyoke, MA, The Hoff. With his newfound love for hardcore, Parnoff decided to show up with the new Nikon camera he bought recently. Scanning the instrument-packed warehouse as he arrived, he realized there were a ton of the same people from the shows back in Connecticut.
“Being able to go on a Friday in the middle of April to like, nowhere in Holyoke, and see a whole bunch of familiar faces was just unbelievable,” he said.
In the tiny space packed to the brim with people, Parnoff was the only one there with a camera. He stood directly in front of one of the PA systems, dodging boots and fists while photographing every band. Paint actively peeled off the walls, sticky with sweat. By the end of the show, Parnoff’s ears were ringing, with the hearing in his right ear almost completely gone. He decided to post his pictures of straight edge hardcore band Nomad on Instagram because they came out “pretty good.” The rest of Western Massachusetts agreed, instantly blowing up his page and sharing the photos left and right. Parnoff gained about 200 followers the day he posted the photos.
“I just did it for fun, and people assumed that I was some hardcore photographer. They didn’t even look at my account, they just followed it.”
Nomad soon reached out to Parnoff, asking him to send them the photos. “I was like, of course, yeah. And one of the photos ended up being their Spotify cover photo. It’s still that way,” Parnoff said. “From that moment on I was like, damn, people like these photos a lot, and nobody else was here doing it so I felt propelled to shoot the next show, and the next show, and the next show.”
While photography seemingly comes naturally to Parnoff, perfectionism still haunts him. “There are bands that I’ve never posted, there are whole shows I’ve never posted, just because I got hesitant,” Parnoff admitted. The bar he sets for himself is incredibly high. “The documentarian side of me is like, that was a moment, and I’m the only one who has proof that that happened,” he said. “And I’m not putting it out because of what, my self-confidence?”
Despite his doubts, Parnoff’s work has carved out a deeply respected place in the Western Massachusetts music scene. It’s been life-changing. His confidence has continued to grow, and he’s even started to become more active in the mosh pit. “There’s a balance to being a photographer at a hardcore show. You can’t just stand by and document it without being a part of it, because then you don’t know what to document,” he said.
If you’ve seen Parnoff ever put down his camera at a show, there’s always a good reason. Recently, it was when Abstain played a cover of Not One Truth by Hatebreed. The second the opening riff played, he felt his adrenaline spike. “I put my camera down quicker than I’ve ever put my camera down,” he affirmed. “I shoved everybody out of the way and grabbed the mic. Connecticut hardcore classic right there.”
He’s also been perfecting his two-step. “My mom is a dance teacher, I danced for a couple of years growing up. So there’s some dancing genes in my Parnoff blood,” he laughs.
Photography has become Parnoff’s way of giving back to the local community at UMass and in Western Massachusetts. He never expects anything in return. “In whatever scene you’re in, whether it’s photo, video, making a band, making art, whatever- as long as you’re going out of your way to put more in than you take out…we’ll be in much a better place,” he said.
Currently, Parnoff is working on putting together a book of photos he’s taken at The Hoff.
“My goal is to print just enough of the books so that everybody who wants one or needs one can get it, and then never print them again,” he said. Hopefully, anyone who felt passionately about the venue can have this book on their bookshelf and be able to look back at these moments in time.
Parnoff is looking to have his photo book of shows at The Hoff finished sometime this summer. 100 copies, that’s it. No reprints, no second runs.
“I think my photos do it justice. But they never will. They never, ever will.”
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