What year is this?

Herein are the results of an experiment in resuscitating some old work, February-July 2012. 

If you’ve followed this site or my work for any length of time, you’ve probably picked up on the fact that I’m a person who likes to archive. The photo side of this website is comprehensive almost to a fault, but something that’s been nagging me the past year or so is that it’s not quite comprehensive enough.

I started going to shows with regularity when I started college in 2011 (which is somehow almost a decade ago…) and started shooting with some degree of seriousness the following summer, which is about where my online archive starts. But in between there is a weird interim period where I was taking a point-and-shoot with me to shows and artlessly (I thought) documenting while proclaiming myself Not A Photographer. Some of those images show up in the very early posts on this blog (do not look them up, I beg of you), but most of them never went anywhere, and that’s been quietly driving me crazy.

Thus, I’d been hoping to comb through these dusty digital negatives at some point and see what I might be able to make of them with the editing tools and skills that were definitely not at my disposal eight years ago. I’d done this for a few shows already, but I wanted to really get into the weeds with it, and as luck would have it, getting laid off in January cleared out some time for that to happen. Though tedious, the process was also actually quite a bit of fun.

All of these photos (with the exception of one Archers of Loaf shot on an iPhone 4) were taken on either my bright red compact point-and-shoot, the prosumer Nikon I had after that or my Canon T3i – all before I really learned anything about the basic mechanical processes of photography – so the baseline image quality is by and large…pretty bad. But what they pretty much all lack in technical precision, I think they kind of make up for in…heart? There are some cool moments in here from shows I’d nearly forgotten about, and in many cases, cranking the Lightroom adjustments past the point of typically sound judgement rendered the weird exposures and digital noise kind of compelling to my eye.

All in all a pretty navel-gazing exercise, I’ll admit, but I’m glad to have some of these memories (like the gloomy and rain-drenched 2012 Newport Folk Fest, Black Dice and Guerilla Toss playing at a community access TV station, my first Spiritualized show and the Beach Boys 50th anniversary tour) preserved with a little more clarity. So maybe you’ll get something out of them too. Below are my personal faves from the project, though more will be up on the other side of the site eventually too.