July 22, 2021

Scenes, Vol. 1

First entry in an analog photography feature at Noise Floor.

If you’ve been following any of my photography work during the pandemic-mandated live music hiatus, you’ve probably noticed that not much of it has been digital. With the pace of life slowed to a crawl and the creative outlet I’d clung to for much of the past decade indefinitely on-hold, I rediscovered my love for film in 2020. I shot a lot of it – on point-and-shoots, SLRs, TLRs, broken rangefinders, antique Brownies, half-frame oddities, 3-D novelties and beyond. I published some of it in zines, shared some of it on Instagram and dumped a whole lot more into my alt- photo blog. I wrote about it a little bit here too. It really did help to maintain my sanity, and keep me in a creative place rather than tumbling into a crater of directionlessness, as I feared when everything shut down last year.

Now that the world is back (kind of [for the time being]), I got to thinking about how I wanted to integrate film into my concert work. I’m sticking with digital as my primary medium there for reasons logistical, technical and financial, but I did arrive at something with the help of a grant from the Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture Opportunity Fund (which is offsetting some of my film and developing costs for the summer). Essentially, I want to start an open-ended project that captures Boston’s live music scene on film in a looser sense than simply photographing bands on stage. I’ll be doing that, too, but I hope to use the unpredictability of film to document crowds, venues, bars, merch tables and other facets of the show-going life. Moreover, I plan on doing this with the sort of equipment that anyone could take into a typical venue at any point in the last several decades. Which is all to say, this work isn’t meant to be my most polished stuff, and my approach to it will undoubtedly evolve over time, but it’s something I hope to keep going here at Noise Floor for the foreseeable future.

I already published my thoughts and photos from The Sinclair’s big reopening earlier this month, but for the first entry here, I wanted to shoot that night with an eye pointed deliberately away from the stage. I loaded up a roll of (rather expired) Kodak T-Max 3200 in my Canonet QL17, and the world of grain above and below were the results. This stuff was past its sell-by date as of April 2002, and I probably should’ve compensated for that a little more consciously in my exposures, but I also find something appealing about the nature of these images blurring into abstraction. And that’s what I hope this feature will continue to do: allow me (and you) a different perspective on live music in Boston.

Scroll down to see more, and stay tuned for a roll of Portra 800 with a story and some third-dimension exploration of this weekend’s outdoor shows.

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and the City of Boston.