Some context:
I have a wide range of interests in Photography, but my heart lies mostly in the documentary field. I'm also an amateur musician and music fan, so it was natural for me to bring together my love for music and photography and start shooting concerts.
Every concert is a challenge. The musicians are always moving, the lighting is constantly changing and people are jumping and dancing around you. Even when you can predict that moment when the musician will make the right pose or face, you always have to count on luck to get a good photo. I love it.
I started a blog, two years ago, where I used to post my concert photos along with small reviews (https://fotografistademusica.wordpress.com/ - in Portuguese). With time, I created another publication, this time in English, where I do the same, attempting to bring attention to some outstanding Brazilian musicians and bands (https://medium.com/brazilian-stages).
In 2015, (before creating the blogs) I was shooting the concert of the American thrash metal band Exodus in São Paulo. The audience was particularly wild and I was being shaken a lot, so my attention was drawn to them. By the end of the concert, when the band played the song "Strike of the beast", the audience performed the "wall of death", an event in which the crowd splits up into two columns and, after a countdown, the columns run at each other. It was amazing. From that time on, half of the pictures I shot on every metal concert I attended to was made facing the crowd instead of the stage. With time, it grew to a photo essay and then to a photobook.
There are other (but surprisingly not too many) photography projects about people that attend to rock concerts. My project has some singularities, though.
First, there's a dialogue between images and text. The photobook and the booklet are two separate bodies of work that stand by themselves but have a connection, each chapter of one corresponding to a section of the other. This conversation is more about mood than description.
Second, the photos explore the ambiguity inherent to the nature of Photography in which an image can be one thing or another entirely different, even opposed. This ambiguous nature leaves to the readers the translation of the sensations they get from each piece according to their own background.
As a reference, two similar works exploring the interconnection between Photography and words I could mention are House of Coates, by Brad Zelar and Alec Soth and Love on the Left Bank, by Ed Van Der Elsken.
Most pictures were made with a Nikon D610 with a Sigma 24-70mm 2.8 DG HSM, my go-to lens, but some were made with 24 and 35mm Nikon lenses on the same camera and with a Canon G-12. To get the wild and sometimes spooky looks of most of the photos, I used slow shutter speeds and the lowest ISO possible according to light conditions. It was tricky to get the right shutter speed due to the changing lights.
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