B-sides

I spent years shooting rock music as a concert photographer, and even when I quit this gender, I kept the desire to capture rock music, not in its glorious glamour moments but the way it is in real life. I spent hours and hours on tour buses, wondering if there’s a way to explain what it is like to be a rock star to someone who can see it only from the other side of the barricade of a venue (so close but so far away).

The B-sides started only as a “be responsible, buy music” project, but as it sometimes happens, the material turned to be deeper than that (and I believe only this kind of projects make sense, the ones that make me discover something new about what’s on the other side of my lens). The two shots of before/after diptychs are separated just by an hour, but sometimes it feels like there’s a life lies between them. How this hour changed my subjects? What do they feel about it? What it’s like? And more important, was it worth it?

I believe there are some individual changes my subjects go through, but more importantly, there’s also something general. I have my hypothesis of what this general transition is, and with each shot, I find more proof of them. The common viewer (who had no years-long experience of experiencing rock music from "behind the scenes” point of view) will need more than just a few images to feel it, and I think about B-sides as a long and diverse project that will result in a photo book.

The B-sides is shot with an old school instant film camera that gives the project some rock n roll soul, connecting my photos and my subjects to the great history of rock music. The simplicity of the method gives the ability to look directly at the transactions happened, and be less prejudiced about them.

(c) 2015