Photographer Goes Viral Trying to Find Random Kid Who Posed With Metallica
A former photographer has gone viral this week after he shared his 1996 photo of a random kid posing with James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich from Metallica, asking if anyone knows who the young person is.
“I scanned the photo about seven or eight years ago and I was like, ah, I forgot about this picture,” Vincent Pugliese tells PetaPixel.
After digitizing the film photo, Pugliese shared it on his social media and it didn’t gain much traction. But a week or so ago he tried again, explaining that, “About once every four or five years, I try to find the kid in this photo.”
He tells PetaPixel, “I noticed that it got more traction… And all of a sudden, I was talking to my wife and I get a notification. I’m like, you mind if I change the topic real quick? Metallica just shared my post.”
The official Metallica Facebook page — that is followed by 36 million people — had reposted Pugliese’s picture with the message, “C’mon everyone… let’s help Vincent finally get this pic to the young man in this photo! (…and we’re not talking about us!)”
Unsurprisingly, Pugliese’s original post then blew up. “Metallica is one of my favorite bands since I was 14,” he says. “So to have them share it, and then all of a sudden I watched it go from 100 shares to 1,800 shares in 12 hours.”
The Story of the 1996 Metallica Kid Photo
In 1996, Pugliese was working for Bruce Bennett Studios, which provided team photography for the New York Rangers.
“I was young and green, so I would always stay around as long as I could,” Pugliese explains. “Most people went home. I just kind of hung around after the game, kind of trying to get some behind-the-scenes images, and that’s when this happened.”
He says the band’s singer and drummer, Hetfield and Ulrich, just appeared alongside him backstage in Madison Square Garden.
“So I struck up a conversation with the two of them. I learned that they were there to hang out with Jaromir Jagr — a star player for the Pittsburgh Penguins and a huge music fan,” says Pugliese.
“I then asked if I could shoot a picture of them… Lars told me that for promotional reasons, it couldn’t just be the members of Metallica in the picture. The kid in this photo was nearby, so we asked him if he wanted to be in the picture.
“I don’t think the kid had any clue who they were.”
The photo — that Pugliese thinks was shot on Fujifilm 800 and pushed a few stops — was never published and essentially forgotten about until he scanned it years later.
Now, as his mission to find the random kid intensifies, Pugliese is receiving lots of messages from people claiming to be the kid or that they know the kid — an Instagram page titled ‘kidfrommetallicaconcert1996’ was even set up.
Someone even joked, “Find the bowl and scissors used for that haircut and you’ll find the kid.” But despite all the attention, Pugliese is no closer to finding the young man posing with Metallica.
Vincent Pugliese can be found on Facebook and Instagram.
Image credits: Photographs by Vincent Pugliese.
