THE THING ABOUT SHOOTING SHOWS

By DEVIN IVY

Shooting a musical performance carries with it loads of implications for the photographer, but here I’ll focus on a very fundamental question. My last concern is to geek out about how to deal with typical stage lighting, bouncing flashes around the room, and snagging that blogg-and-watermark-able action shot of Yaxl Rows’s flared left nostril. Before any of that can even come into play, let’s decide what we ought to be looking at when we enter a show with a camera.

This issue is as much an inquiry into the nature of musical performance as it is a question about photography, as we’re deciding what constitutes a worthwhile subject at a show. I’d like to preface this whole spiel with a caveat: I’m not one for absolutes-- there are bajillions of “worthwhile” places to point your camera. It’s just that I’ve noticed a strong, constant trend in this form of photography reminiscent of what you’d find in a Sports Illustrated: the pictures tend to (1) be action-based and (2) exclusively feature the musicians. What about the silent moments? Where is the audience? Is there not a give and take between spectator and spectacle?

Imagine if you asked me what it’s like to live in Portland, ME, and I handed you a binder containing a well-labeled map of the city with my house marked, a menu from one of my favorite restaurants, and a list of some recent events to which I allegedly went. Hopefully you would say something like, “Stop fucking around, Devin. What does it feel like to sit down at Congress Bar & Grill? [It’s bbq-dark and bbq-delicious.] Were there some good Portland-vibrations going on at Dominic Lavoie’s album release show? [The band played a beautiful, varied set and there were baked goods, so yes.]” That binder contained a bunch of information about what I related to in Portland, but not how I-- a representative of Portland folk-- related to those things. Which is, well… essential. It’s perhaps the most important part of the answer to your question.

It’s all about the folk. Just as a question about living in Portland has everything to do with how those who live there shape and interact with the city, viewfinders in venues should point at the performers, the audience, and crucially the distance between them-- how the two relate to one another. Every musical performance harkens to folk tradition. Not the folk genre, but rather the idea that the music belongs to a sort of tribe. It can be magical going to a show to physically join a crowd of a few, dozens, hundreds, or thousands of strangers (or better yet, friends) who all claim ownership-byidentification of the same music (“that is my song”). In musical performance, the artist and folk face each other and are in turn given the chance to play off of one another without theater’s fourth wall.

The interplay towards which the camera should point is where the folk’s ownership-by-identification (or at least the crowd’s ownership-as-critic) and the musicians’ ownership-as-performer meet each other. Sometimes they meet turbulently and other times with grace, but there’s no simple sliding scale between the two. The thing about shooting shows is that you necessarily become one of the folk.<

DEVIN IVY

Working night shifts at the olfactory Devin Ivy’s folly culled woahs, legend goes. But who nose?