I spent some time photographing R.E.M. this past weekend. No, not the guys in the band. I'm referring to pieces of the deep and varied R.E.M. collection of my co-author on a series of articles about the band, my friend Tom Demi. I spent a fair amount of time in his music room taking pictures, barely scratching the surface of what was available. These images will crop up again, sprinkled in as illustrations within the pertinent articles, but I wanted to share them in one place. If all you want to do is see the pretty pictures, you will find them directly below. If you want to read more about the experience, then scroll on down for more.
After deciding to republish our exhaustive series on the discography of R.E.M., I gradually discovered that (at my current embryonic skill level) the switch from a Wordpress site to Squarespace would make replicating the articles exactly prohibitive. Tom had taken the illustrative photos, as it was his collection, meaning he had immediate access. We had originally employed the pictures as small insets, but I can't find that option in the new format. I can only seem to plug in photos as full-column-width blocks, which makes them dominate more than they did previously. That puts more pressure on the images to be visually striking.
Now, there was nothing wrong with the photos Tom took for the original series (and some of them will indeed be reproduced here in their corresponding articles). He even artfully arranged his compositions for some additional flair. The thing is, I'm the photographer. I'm the photographer, and I've started a new blog site that is explicitly intended to showcase my photography. Plus, having written a new, overarching expository piece for the series, I wanted a full catalogue shot of album spines that he had never taken. (I have the CDs, but let's face it—LP spines will always look cooler than CD spines.) The more I thought about it, the more I wanted my own crack at shooting the material. I pitched the idea to Tom, and he agreed to it.
Understand: when I set out, I was still in the frame of mind that this was a journalistic endeavor. Tom lives a good hour's drive away from me, so it isn't like hopping over to the neighbor's on a whim. I was trying to create a mental list of the things I wanted to be sure to get, so I could grab them as efficiently as possible. The Squarespace formatting seems to suggest that two photos per article is about the right amount; for 15 albums, it would only take 30 photos to repopulate all the articles. How hard could that be? With focus, it felt manageable. I budgeted two hours for the session.
I stayed for three hours, and only snapped the shutter 55 times in total (which includes multiple takes of the same set-ups at different f-stop extremes—that is, different widths of the camera's aperture, which determines the depth of the image that is in sharp focus) to give myself some options. Tom kept pulling out new things, saying some variation of, "There's this, I don't know if that's the kind of thing you're looking for." And I'd think Damn, that's cool too. I could've stayed hours more, but, you know, we all have lives to live. In any case, while I did have the aspects of style and technique in mind, it was all from that journalistic approach, for some visuals to complement the text, that say "here, this is what that thing we're talking about looks like." It wasn't until I got home and started gravitating toward certain images that it occurred to me how I should've approached it.
Architecture. Architectural photography, with its focus on details and lines. Compositions that dazzle the eye while giving the flavor of the whole. The image I felt captured this the best is the 12" orange vinyl single for "Imitation Of Life." When he showed it to me, I instinctively thought, Well, that's a sunrise, isn't it? and I composed my shot accordingly. But I was still careful to include the track info on the center label—a journalistic consideration. Now, I'm thinking the more important thing would have been to get the disc to its outer edge, to underscore the radial pattern of the grooves, bolstering the the interpretation of the rising sun.
Photographing the paraphernalia of record collectors as if it is architecture, seeking not just to faithfully reproduce existing artwork, but to create new art by examining it in fetishized detail. Did I just invent a thing?
