Last year I hosted my first exhibition of my soundcheck photography project, which I’ve been working on in fits and starts for the last 10 years or so. I live in London, but the exhibition was in a venue with the same name as this blog, the Zorki Photo Café in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The world can be a very small place.
If you find yourself in Paris before the end of March, you can see the second exhibition of this project at a bar called Au Chat Noir in the Parmentier district.
There’s 15 shots of bands including Manic Street Preachers, The National, Franz Ferdinand, The Maccabees and Lambchop. And the Au Chat Noir is just the kind of corner wine bar that brings hordes of tourists to the City of Light; fantastic wine for next to nothing, unpretentious surroundings, the buzz of French conversation. For a few weeks, some of my pics are gracing the walls.
These black and white shots were taken during soundchecks before shows in cities in the UK, Luxembourg, Russia and New Zealand. All of them are on black and white film push-processed so I could shoot without flash – often up to 6400, which adds to the grain and atmosphere.
These are part of a longlist taken from a decade’s shooting and thousands of frames of film, and whittling them down to a few dozen shots I think are strong enough to show.
Even film photographers see much of their work through a digital filter – we might shoot on film, but we share and look at our work on computers just as much as those who shoot digital. Seeing them as prints is a completely different experience. These were printed by Bayeux, one of the best photographic labs in London.
They include a few of my favourites from that first decade shooting bands; Lambchop’s William Tyler caught in an isolated moment before a show at London’s Barbican, John Stirratt of Wilco at a soundcheck for a one-off London show with Neil Finn and members of Radiohead, and a sunlit band practice in Napier, New Zealand with David Kilgour and the Heavy Eights (if you’ve never heard of them, rectify that immediately).
Below are a few more of the pics being shown. All of these shots are available for sale as limited-edition 16×12 handprints. Drop me a line at stephendowling@yahoo.com for more details.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
Congratulations on that exhibition from Cluj. Your Soundcheck Sessions are full of atmosphere.