VISUAL VISIONARIES OF HIP-HOP Jonas Lindstroem talks about photo aesthetics & working with Top Dawg Entertainment. p.34
Nabil Elderkin
discusses his creative process & becoming Hip-Hop's go-to video director. p.40
Video Director Issue
Spring 2018
USA $19.99 / CAN $20.99 Display Until June 4, 2018
2 UNDER_GROUND
Table of Contents Romain Gavras
breakdowns his new film, The World Is Yours, scored by Jamie XX and SebastiAn.
Dave free
goes behind-the-scenes with his new video in collaboration with Kendrick Lamar.
Colin Tilley
talks going from being a college drop-out to directing Future's "Mask Off " music video
Dave Meyers
speaks more on his Grammy and MTV Video Music Award winning video, "HUMBLE".
Jonas Lindstroem
talks about photo aesthetics & working with Top Dawg Entertainment.
Nabil Elderkin
discusses his creative process & becoming Hip-Hop's go-to video director.
Cover photo by Creative Mornings LA
3
JON
AS L
38 UNDER_GROUND
IND
STR
OEM
THE
SEXINESS
OF
INTELLIGENT
CONTENT Words by
María Muñoz Photos by
Christoph Mack
F
acing his professional career just after finishing his studies in Berlin, the young photographer and filmmaker Jonas Lindstroem already started with the camera while growing up in southwest Germany. Nowadays he’s based between Berlin and
London, and being not yet thirty years old he has already accumulated a portfolio with big names including Hermès, Calvin Klein, Kenzo, Uniqlo and Adidas, to name a few. Lindstroem’s aesthetics, often conceptual and minimal, flood all his works, which have broadened from fashion shoots to other fields like music videos and films.
Q&A with Jonas Lindstroem ↘ 39
I have read that you were part of the skateboarding culture, which is kind of DIY: they do the films, take pictures, make their own logos, decorate their boards, etc. How has this period of your life influenced your actual work? I was skateboarding for all of my teenage years and I just documented what we were doing. Skateboarding back then was a small scene, you’d head down to the local shop to watch the newest videos on VHS imported from the United States. It carried out that spirit of expressing yourself through your style on the board, films, graphic design or photography. And I was very drawn to and inspired by that – this certain fuck-you-attitude, in terms of ‘we do what we want’, jumping between disciplines, having a creative vision and applying it to different media. I think up until today that still reflects my mode of working very well. And how did you start with fashion photography? I’ve always been interested in photographing human beings, and back when I started out it felt like fashion, in the broadest sense of the word, offered a lot of possibilities to explore that. I assisted a fashion photographer after graduating high school for one year, and that was essentially how I came to Berlin, where I then started to study at University of the Arts. I was experimenting a lot back then – graphic design, posters, photography, film, etc. –, but it was after a year in London that I really put my focus on photography and filmmaking. Do you find inspiration in other media like literature, popular culture, and even everyday life? And which are your references when facing a photographic work? Of course, I have people whose work I admire, artists from all fields that inspire me. References are interesting as soon as I have to translate them. I think it’s irrelevant to just copy another fashion photograph. It’s about looking at a sculpture, a film, a performance or any document or happening and put it together in a new way that is relevant to the present. Related to the method of working, how much freedom do you have when working for big commercial brands like Hermès, Kenzo, Uniqlo or Adidas, for example? There is usually a framework. For me it is more about picking the right projects where my vision and what the project demands align the most. Fashion shootings are generally speaking very pre-set up – location, models, stylists, etc. –, but photography, fashion or not, is about freezing an instant, isn’t it? It is about beautiful mistakes. Using photography as a medium, what is for you the meaning of ‘representation’? It is expandable, stretch, and bendable. Photography is more poetry than fact.
40 UNDER_GROUND
PHOTOGRAPHY IS MORE POETRY THAN FACT.
Back to your own photography, have you ever been interested in landscapes or architecture? I am asking this because I think this is important for filmmaking. I try not to think in categories too much. I photograph what I’m interested in, and that can be anything as long as it is somehow relevant to what I try to do. How do you explain your startling success during and immediately after art school? A lot of it was due to my friends – the ones I share this studio with. We basically grew up together since we moved to Berlin, and we were always pushing each other to do our own thing. We were working and trying to get our stuff out. We had no idea what we were doing, but we tried anyway. Also having that safe harbor of our university was very important for that. It was always something we were embedded in. Then we started getting approached by people and publishing our first things. It was very small in the beginning, but it grew bigger over the years. So by the time we were graduating we could pretty much switch directly. Nowadays, I’m based between Berlin and London.
How difficult is it for young photographers to keep their vision in face of monetary offers and accolades? I think it is a problem. In fact, I held some workshops at a school in London a while ago, and I was surprised that their questions were so commercially driven. It was all, “So how do I get this published? How do I get into this magazine?” While I was thinking, “Focus on your own work. You haven’t even finished a straight set of images, which is completely fine, but don’t try to bring them out.” The problem is that if you show your work to a commercial audience too early, you are pinned to it. It’s much harder to fight for your right to do what you really want to do, because they will push you around. But if you develop your work to a certain extent, and only then get into these publishing relationships, it’s on eye level.
41
photo by Jonas Lindstroem via True Photo Journal
How would you like to look back on your body of work in the future? Filmmaking has become more and more important to me over the years. I directed my first music video last year, and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. During the process I realized that my role is in directing, with someone else handling the technical side. All this doesn’t mean I want to abandon photography, I really like the play between the disciplines, and I want to keep that up. But now I feel that the film projects I’m interested in are starting to detach me from the fashion aspect. I’m more interested in a proper approach to film in terms of narrative. At some point maybe I’ll even work on a feature film.
42 UNDER_GROUND
What kind of narratives are you interested in? I think the things I’ve done so far have been very character driven – and driven by a limited number of people and their interactions. It’s something so basic, but also so vast. There is constantly something to say without it feeling old. Relationships are connected to things around you, and change because of that. It’s not necessarily the only thing I want to make films about, but I think it is interesting – to use relationships between people in order to display the realities around them. I think it’s everybody’s quest to figure out relationships.
At Berlin Film Festival – you presented the video installation Truth or Dare – 21 performances. It seems like you are moving little by little to film, which is not only moving images but also including sound and dramaturgy. Do you like to tell stories? I wouldn’t say I’m moving completely towards filmmaking, it’s more that I love the tension between my photographic work on the one side and my filmmaking on the other. But it is true that I’m very interested in filmmaking and in moving away from fashion to try to explore different, broader concepts. About Truth or Dare – 21 performances, you said that it is a portrait of a global generation. Are you referring to your generation, the so-called ‘millennial’? Can you elaborate a bit of that? It is meant to be a subjective portrait of the times we live in. Imagine an elevated version of the content found on mobile phones around the world, condensed into single, cinematic frames. It’s about creating a certain feeling through these vastly different images and emotions coming together, forming a new whole.
Now that we are being bombarded with information, we live an accelerated life, an online life where the Internet is the dominant medium. Communication is very important in the way we understand politics. Are you interested in politics? Yes, definitely! It’s very important to have a well-informed political stance, especially nowadays. Do you think artworks can be aesthetic and poetic and at the same time have a political meaning and implication? Absolutely. Something visually stimulating opens doors and helps transport a message. Intelligent content is always sexy. And to finish, how do you see yourself in the future? Continuing, developing what I do. Delving into broader fields of filmmaking and image making.
Want more of Jonas Lindstroem? Check out his work on jlindstroem.com
The film was presented in an art gallery, why? It works as a spatial piece, not as a narrative film. It is about immersing into these singular frames in a continuous loop, the images taking over the whole room, more like modern day paintings.
photo by Jonas Lindstroem via Kendrick Lamar's ELEMENT music video
43
44 UNDER_GROUND
45
THE
MUSIC VIDEO VISIONARY Words by
Claire Lobenfeld
A
fter cutting his teeth shooting his surfer friends in Australia, he relocated to Chicago where he started photographing bands and DJs, and rose to prominence after getting a shot – no pun intended – to meet with Kanye West. Interested
in West’s music almost from the rapper’s genesis, Elderkin – who is better known just as Nabil – sat on the kanyewest.com domain until agreeing to give up the URL in exchange for a photograph.
Q&A with Nabil Elderkin ↘ 46
UNDER_GROUND
47
People are losing touch with their own creative outlook and looking for other people to validate them. Did you know you were a visual person at a young age? Not really, not at all. It took a while. I was probably 16 when I started filming surfers and stuff. I guess 16 is getting pretty old. But I just wanted to surf when I was a kid. Even when I was filming, I thought of it more as a job – I was standing on the beach taking pictures of people surfing. And then I started shooting underwater stuff and I got a little more abstract. I started to enjoy weird angles and seeing things in a different [way]. But I didn’t think it was going to be my career. When you said you were working, was it your afterschool job? Yeah, I was shooting pictures of surfers who were friends of mine and going on to be pro and selling them to their sponsors. I was making jackshit, but as a kid, it was enough to buy a new video camera or lens. I managed to fail photography for my HSC, which is like the SATs. My teacher failed me, she was the worst. Not that my photos were that good, they probably weren’t. They were interesting, they were different, and I think because they were so different from what she was trying to teach, she was just so standard and I wanted to do weird, different things. She wasn’t feeling it and she didn’t like me. She literally failed me. It’s the biggest dick move you can do to a young kid in an art class. That’s so fucked up. You shouldn’t ever fail a kid in art unless they don’t make anything. And I did it! I didn’t really care, actually. My parents cared. There was another teacher who was really nice and he let me borrow a camera. I wasn’t even in his class, but I’d do rolls of black and white and slide film. I really, really liked it and I think that was the moment when I [knew]. Then my parents were like, “You have to go to America to live with your mom.” So I went and lived with my mom in Chicago. There wasn’t surfing, so I started shooting bands and DJs.
48
UNDER_GROUND
Where did you interest in music come from? Being a human being. I love music. I’ve always loved music. It was nice to be able to shoot people who were inspiring. If you think about it, it’s really funny that people love to see photos of musicians. If you close your eyes and you think about it, you’re just looking at another person’s face, which is fine, I love people’s faces and I love shooting people. Yes, they have a powerful gift that is probably one of the most powerful gifts in the world. It has the potential to reach people without any boundaries. But you’re staring at a photo of someone – what’s the significance? Sure, they might have an interesting face which is a beautiful thing, but shooting musicians is just kind of funny. Why aren’t people just listening to music instead of looking at photos of musicians? I wonder if it’s a comfort in a way. There are so many different contexts where you can see those photos. I’m sitting in my apartment right now, I have two photos, one of Tom Waits, one of Mary J. Blige, and I was given them as gifts because people know they make art that’s really important to me. A-ha! I see what you’re saying, but wouldn’t you rather have an actual piece of art that one of these people have created? Wouldn’t you rather just play their music in the background? I’ve noticed throughout my life, I’ve never hung a poster of anybody except for a portrait of someone that was interesting. Why don’t we just put up art? I mean, I have other stuff, too… [Cackles] Not even you, per se. I have a picture of Nelson Mandela and I should just be reading his work. Why am I putting a picture of him up in my house?
Do you think we use imagery that we feel is an extension of ourselves? That’s why people have Pinterest boards and why people use Tumblr to reblog gifs and images and photos. They use that in a way to visually express themselves. I don’t get Tumblr. I actually think Tumblr is sad, in a way. If it’s their own art, I get it. Sharing your art in a space [is one thing], but reblogging other people’s stuff ? I mean, I get it to an extent, but start drawing! Have your own expression. I feel like a dick saying that, but I see kids all day reblogging things and looking up things on Tumblr. Shouldn’t they be out there smelling the trees or drawing on a wall? Draw on the back of your old school book! People are losing touch with their own creative outlook and looking for other people to validate them. And it’s not even their own art! Most people it isn’t. Some people put their poetry or drawings on Tumblr, which is cool. But a lot of people are taking pictures from the internet, putting a faded filter on it so it feels nostalgic and reblogging it. Maybe that’s art in its own way.
How did you come about making music videos? Did you fall in love with them when you were growing up? I fell in love with a lot of music videos. Anything Chris Cunningham did or Chris Milk did early in the days. He’s in his VR world now, but he used to make really cool music videos. I had the fortunate ability to be on some sets with Kanye and John Legend and the Black Eyed Peas, so I saw guys like Francis Lawrence, Chris Milk. Seeing what they created from the juxtaposition of being on set to what the final product was, I was like, “This is magic.” [You’re] creating emotion. I’ve been able to travel the world and experience so many different cultures and things with my photo documentary work, but seeing that they were able to create these emotions with the music, I was like, “Shit, I would love to be able to take my experiences and make something with this amazing music when I close my eyes and come up with images.” That’s how I come up with music videos. I drive around, put the song on repeat and do whatever comes to my mind. And it might come from one lyric and it might comes from the bassline in the song or a preconceived idea I had about the musician and try to transform it in a larger format. I try to keep it as minimal as possible. It’s too easy to go in a million different directions. It’s always in my head. I write a treatment with a list of the shots I need. If there are a lot of special effects or post[-production] effects, which I don’t usually do too much, then I storyboard for post people. I like to be free-flowing and have a general point, but I like to see what works best where we are.
photo by Stevie Murrell
49
photo by Nabil Elderkin via ELLE magazine
You mentioned that Chris Milk does a lot of work with VR. I was wondering what you thought about that. Do you see virtual reality as the future of how we consume music videos? I have a VR company and I’m working on some concepts right now with Travis Scott and some other musicians. The company is called United Realities and we have a music platform that we’re doing, which is just music-related projects in the VR space. If you know how to shoot it and use the full virtual reality space, not just put a camera in a place and call it VR because you can look around in every direction, but if you actually shoot something with a concept that gives the viewer the 360 control, that can be something amazing. At the same time, it’s going to be a little while until it reaches the level that people believe it’s at. It will. But I’m not gonna watch a movie in VR. I want to make short-form concepts in VR space and make more artistic, abstract expressions – less narrative, more of a journey, [like] a live show with heightened moments or taking people on a virtual tour of an artist’s space. [I want to] create Art Basel in the VR space so you don’t even have to be there and let the artist create the parameters.
50 UNDER_GROUND
Do you think people will allow for VR to get to the place it needs to be before it gets utilized, or do you think people with money are going to fuck it up? With everything, you’ll have people making art and people making commerce. I’m going for art and commerce. I’m trying to get paid in the shade. I’m trying to get so paid that I can just make my own art. I’m not trying to sound wack, but if I can just live the same lifestyle I live now and be able to travel and live in my house and eat good food, I’m happy. The money gives me the ability to make the art that I want and not have to worry about pitching and selling my soul just to make a $3 million film, which is art. I’m just trying to make things that inspire people and think. Are you trying to do more feature-length stuff? That’s all I want to do. I have three movies in the work right now. I want to do music videos in the interim, but I really want to make movies. My first movie Gully is in casting right now. That’s what I’m primarily working on.
What kind of stories are you interested in telling? You already have a documentary under your bet, so how will that influence your narrative work? Anything with a humanistic, worldly touch I’m into. Movies like City of God, A Prophet. My movie Gully is like if A Clockwork Orange and Kids made a baby in South Central LA. This author Marcus Gilroy wrote it and I worked with him on the latest draft. It’s something that he wrote that connected with me more than anything I’ve ever read. It’s very parallel to what I make and what I want to make – it’s violent and aggressive, but with purpose. It takes you on a thrilling ride along the way. Regarding other long-form things are being explored, I’d love to know what you thought about Lemonade, or just making an entire visual project around an album, in general. I give [Beyoncé] props. I think so many artists want to make this long-form thing for their project. Everyone talks about it, but very few people do it. Kanye did it a couple times. Michael Jackson and Prince have done it. I applaud the fact that she did a full hour-long film that was an extension of her album. I skimmed through it. There were beautiful elements, but it’s not for me. I watched parts of it and in what I saw, it was beautiful. But I’m not gonna spend an hour. I don’t watch movies too much, no disrespect but I’m not gonna lay in bed for an hour and watch an extended music video. She got some heavy-hitters in there doing some things, but it’s a different aesthetic than what resonates with me.
Do you think this could also be a way of the future? People don’t really have that much money, I guess. You don’t need that much money! It doesn’t have to be shot all around America with the best [directors of photography] and the biggest cameras. You can shoot something that’s simple but so poignant, too. Music is powerful enough. If you can shoot something simply that can complement the music, then you’ve succeeded, if the music is good and you have a vision. I would watch Kendrick Lamar with a video camera filming where he’s from and what he knows, I would watch that for 60 minutes to go along with the album if he was filming it. It could be every artist, but some just have to think within the box they have and make the best they can within that box. But you can make something on an iPhone and it can be amazing. My Instagram is all shot with my iPhone and people like them, but they’re shot while I’m driving most of the time.
Want more of Nabil Elderkin? You can follow him on instagram or twitter @nabildo
photo by Stevie Murrell
51