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How did you get started 'shooting music' as a subject? Not long after I returned to Boston my camera was stolen. I only owned one camera in those days because I was just a student really. The day I got enough money together to get a new camera, I went looking for something to shoot. I was checking out the newspaper, and saw a listing for a benefit for a magazine called Skunk Piss magazine, a punk rock magazine. This was probably '77 in Boston, so this was pretty early years even in terms of the Boston punk scene, but a fanzine already existed. I just thought, "Well, there's going to be freaky-looking people there and I'll be able to take some interesting pictures." So I went to this benefit show and shot the crowd and the bands playing. I met the bass player for the band Human Sexual Response, Rolf. He invited me to a loft party the next night. So that first night wasn't so much about the bands, it was more about the event and the people. When I went to the loft party the next night, I think that's when I kind of got drawn more into the music itself.
What made you decide not to shoot bands while they were onstage?
Ohhh, but I did. [laughs] I was set up to photograph Robert Gordon the rockabilly singer. It was in Boston and he was staying at some nice hotel. It was during the day, so I took some photographs of him as he was seated by a window. So it was all window-lit. At the time, I also had a day job as a staff photographer for the Mayor of Boston, so I had a darkroom at City Hall. I remember taking the film of Robert Gordon back to my darkroom, and when the images came up in the developer it just hit me right then: this is what I want my pictures to look like. Available light, shot by a window. And those photographs were used on one of his album sleeves. In terms of controlling the light in a dressing room, that's when I started shooting with a studio light -- hot lights. In an effort to mimic the conditions of window light when there wasn't any available. Which is one of the things that make my pictures look different. Even people that were doing that kind of editorial portrait stuff with bands were working with flash. And I don't shoot with a flash. When I'm indoors I use hot lights. What I'd carry around with me would be this little setup that had a white umbrella and a stand and hot light -- tungsten light. So I did have control of the light. And it was much nicer light than you would normally get in a dressing room. I should add that I have done live performance shooting and can think of a dozen or so performance images of mine that I like a lot. Some of them were done during sound checks when there were no audience members to annoy.
Why have you tended to photograph rock musicians?
With the limited time you spend with an artist, would you try to build a rapport with them? Shooting with a band, a lot of the picture has to do with the band's relationship to each other -- the interactions that happen between them, physically and all the ways that you could capture something like that in a photograph. When people are being shot as a band, when they're interacting with each other, it distracts them from the photographer, which makes them more natural. That's presumably a good thing. But not always -- sometimes unnatural works well in a photograph too.
When there are so many people in a band, has the situation ever gotten out of your control?
Actually, in my experience, things can get more out of control when it's one-on-one. Then the situation is more about me and the subject -- it's about our relationship to each other. That can be really good for the photograph. There's a certain intimacy, I think, in my pictures which makes them unique. You have the impression in some ways when you're looking at my photographs that you're there, looking at that person. At least that's something, to some degree, I am aiming for. When I shoot the picture, the subject is interacting with me. When it becomes a photograph, then they seem to interact with the person who's viewing the photograph. You're seeing them as I saw them through the lens.
Who were the bigger bands you worked with?
When I shot U2, it was their first American tour. I went to the their sound check to photograph them. The publicist brought Bono over and introduced him to me, and he said, "Yeah, the band took pictures last week, and we didn't like them, so we're not going to do that anymore." [laughs] You've gotta remember, they were U2, but they weren't huge superstars. Still I knew they were hot and I was there to photograph them and you don't want to leave without the pictures. So when he said that -- which sounded so naive to me -- I said to him, "Well, what if instead of taking the whole band, I do the two and the two?" And he thought for a minute and he said, "Yeah, that would be okay." So that's how I ended up shooting them. I did Bono and Larry, and then the Edge and Adam separately.
This is a huge, important topic for me. I don't see this discussed by many photographers but I think it's very relevant. I'll just skim the surface here: My mother took me to see a lot of Marx Brothers movies and Fred Astaire Ginger Rodgers films when I was a little girl. This probably started to form my sense of B&W imagery early on. I attended a specialized art high school. We would cut class to go to gallery shows. I was surrounded by art, style, and rock music in my teen years living in the heart of where it was happening: New York City. In college I studied with a brilliant, influential American photographer, Garry Winogrand who encouraged me to leave UT and Austin, return back East and find things to shoot. When I began shooting bands I was looking for a way to break away from the standard approach: line them up against a wall/line them up against a chain link fence. I had started watching old B&W Perry Mason reruns on a local station. I noticed there could be four or five people in the frame playing out the story and they'd be standing around a living room or a desk... or a corpse. And I'd think "okay, here there are five individuals in the frame, and they're not standing against a brick wall." And that's when it dawned on me: there are other ways to photograph a group, aside from lining them up against a wall. You can have some depth and interest -- and that is all due to Perry Mason. And then he got me out of jail.
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