People // David Garrison // Blog

I recognise that this post comes a little after the fact, but I've been busy absorbing SXSW for the past week. Matt and Dan covered a lot of the broader insights that we, as a team, drew from SXSW 2008, so I wanted to revisit a specific panel. I started this as a single piece, but it's turned into a real beast, so I'm going to post it as a series over the next couple days.

Music Photography
For those of you who know the Indabans, you're aware that several of us are enamoured of the visual image. Jesse, Gordon and I, for example, are partial to stills, while Chris goes in for the moving picture.

So, when we saw that there was a panel on music photography at SXSW featuring Paul Natkin, Thomas Weschler, Autumn de Wilde and Tom Wright, we were pretty stoked. While I don't have the glossy slide shows that made the panel inspiring, I thought you might appreciate a quick summary, if only because it'll get you thinking about what generates the best images of you as performers.

For the Aspiring Photographer: Consider the Long-Term
The panel's recurring theme seemed to be that photographers can make hay in the long-term, but that (with some exceptions) they get screwed in the short-term. As you work your way to being successful, here are two things to remember.

1. Irrespective of expectations of eventual greatness, you really need to like photography and the people you're around
   
2. In any type of art - including music and photography - there are two broad categories of artistic undertaking: commissioned art, undertaken with a commercial purpose in mind outside the art itself, and what I'll call greenfield art, which has an inherently artistic objective
   

One set of resulting questions is clear. Do you develop relationships with the artists and audiences who are the subject of your work, with the labels and marketers who pay for your output or both? Is there a necessary priority among those relationships? Is your emphasis on a commercial product or on an artistic one?

Tom Wright, for example, noted that his approach - taking photos that trace artists' personal growth and character development - hadn't always gone over well with organisations that might commission pieces, in part because his singular focus was on the musician. All his immediately lucrative work focused on the accepted, existing public image of the artist.

To illustrate, he showed a photo he'd taken of The Faces, shot in silouette. The label had hated it. Not showing the faces of The Faces, they said, seemed excessively ironic. Irony was a characteristic it didn't want associated with the band.

The point to take away is that labels, which exist to make money, are naturally concerned with the marketability of the artist. Generally speaking, this means finding ways to consistently communicate an album's theme or emphasise given strengths of an artist's character. In an effort to maximise commercial activity, they look for images that reflect the brand they've built around the artist.

Often, though, this is in contrast to the image that a photographer actually wants to capture. For a music photographer, the point is generally to express a progression of character, to capture a story in an image, to convey a belief or perspective on a relationship. The idea is to represent the artist the photographer gets a glimpse of, glowing halo, damned warts and inspired normalcy alike.

If you're looking to be a substantive photographer, the point is not that this is a choice about whether or not to sell out. It's that you should think about why you're taking the photos. For any number of reasons, images that fall into the greenfield category tend to have greater value later on in a musician's career. Given that, consider what your objective is, enjoy the moments you capture and, if your aim is to sell your images, make sure you think about what your client and their audience want to buy.

But, along the way, make sure you take some that you'll want to look back on later. Chances are, someone else will want to, too.

Key points

• Be patient
  
• Enjoy the music, the people and the moments you're capturing
  
• Take the photos you want to take and supplement them with some shots that will resonate with labels and fans 
  
• Take images early on and throughout a musician's career. The initial images as well as those showing progression will be the ones you'll care about later, since they'll give you insight into who the performer becomes
  
• Be prepared to not be respected and/or not make money until well after the bands you follow are famous